About

Nick has more than 13 years of leadership and management experience within customer service at various companies in The Netherlands. Since 2017, he has managed the contact center of ATAG Benelux, a leading supplier of kitchen appliances and other white goods like washing machines and dryers. The company currently has about 500 employees and is part of the Hisense Group, a Chinese multinational company with more than 80,000 employees that is represented in more than 130 countries. As operational manager of the ATAG service department, Nick is responsible for managing service teams that cover multiple channels, as well as for close liaison with the field service technician organization.

Challenges before injixo

Before starting with injixo in early 2018, ATAG had planning processes in place that were dominated by manual work. To make this more efficient, they wanted to find a professional workforce management (WFM) tool that saves the planner a significant amount of time by automating these processes as far as possible.

“Every adjustment took a lot of time and we needed a lot of resources to keep track of all the changes. It wasn’t very efficient.”

In addition to that, they aimed for more efficient deployment of their resources, which in turn would result in a much better customer experience. To improve service levels, it was vital to get a clear understanding of the staffing requirements for each activity.

“We were keen on ramping up our answer rates but we could not even evaluate the quality of the schedules that we’d created, and if these fitted the actual requirements.”

The injixo journey

ATAG conducted a thorough procurement process for WFM. An important step in the process was to visit customers who already used the WFM tools. For ATAG, it was crucial to see the features and functionality in a real working environment and to learn from the experiences that other customers had with injixo.

“We did reference visits to other companies who demoed to us the package that they were using. I was most impressed by the logical and simple user interface that they showed us in injixo.”

Nick and his colleagues were not just convinced about injixo’s ease-to-use. They were impressed with the comprehensive functionality that covers the entire WFM process: from fully automated forecasting, optimized and rule-compliant scheduling, a mobile agent self-service portal and an always up-to-date intraday management, to real-time monitoring of all important KPIs. Besides that, they were finally confident of having found the right solution while looking at the pricing and the terms of contract: injixo comes in three different user packages with a proven onboarding programme, based on a monthly subscription.

"One of the main reasons for choosing injixo was that you have the utmost flexibility with the monthly subscription plan. That is really different from most of the competitors in the WFM area and is a boon for most companies.”

Value and achievements

The whole resource planning process at ATAG is on a completely different level today. It turned out that employee involvement in the scheduling process via the mobile agent portal injixo Me is a massive win for the entire contact center of about 100 employees.

“Our agents can now collaborate in the planning process from their smartphone. They are also able to access their schedules when they are out of the office, for example, when working from home. Agents’ ability to log their holiday requests or shift swaps whenever and wherever they are is really a big benefit for all of us.”

Last but not least, the management team of ATAG’s service department has now always the full overview of all relevant key performance variables, such as over- and understaffing, staffing levels, or forecast variance.

“We also gained a lot of deep insights into how we can use our capacity in the best way.”

With injixo, ATAG has implemented a professional planning and staffing solution that helps the service organization to strive for the best possible use of their resources. injixo also supports management in upshifting the quality of their customer service.

We’re honoured to have Nick and his company ATAG Benelux as a loyal injixo customer and look forward to many more years as ATAG’s WFM partner.

Nick has volunteered to be contacted if you have any questions about his injixo journey or if you’d simply like to exchange experiences. Check out his LinkedIn profile and get connected.