About

Damien Ellam is Workforce Manager at DDC Outsourcing Solutions. He started his career in the contact center industry in 2012 and he has specialized in resource planning for the last eight years. He has extensive experience of planning in a business process outsourcing (BPO or outsourcing) environment and he has used multiple workforce management (WFM) applications. In addition to his planning skills, Damien’s expertise includes business information (BI) and the tools that enable it.

At DDC OS, Damien has planned for a diverse range of clients including retailers, utilities, and, telcos. These vary tremendously by size and complexity, with some clients operating across multiple time zones, in up to 10 languages, with some blending in-house and outsourced operations.

DDC Outsourcing Solutions (DDC OS) is a global BPO and Customer Support service provider. Established in 1989, DDC OS has 35 years of experience delivering outcome-based services from a range of global locations. Trusted by international brands, DDC’s award-winning, customer-centric solutions provide efficiency, flexibility, scale, and transformation.
 
Building a name as a reliable data capture specialist, DDC’s story was one of rapid diversification. Their data services expanded into back-office processing, and from here, DDC recognized an opportunity to better understand the voice of their client's customers and use that information to enhance their overall service. The skill sets of each - increasing productivity, utilizing technology, focusing on effective human input – have perfectly complemented one another. From that point, DDC never looked back as a customer service provider. Today, DDC OS is a leading player in the business process outsourcing sector, with operations across the UK and on multiple sites world-wide.
 
What sets DDC OS apart is its people-focused ethos. They are approachable and personable, treating situations with a human touch rather than through a corporate lens. With DDC OS, clients can expect a partner that prioritizes relationships, understands their evolving needs, and delivers tailored, effective solutions. It’s this approach that has led to multiple industry accolades, from Best Multilingual Customer Service to Best BPO Partnership and Retail Project of the Year.

Challenges before injixo

Before upgrading to inijxo, DDC OS was using another workforce management (WFM) system. This was already a significant improvement over using spreadsheets for planning, but Damien and his team nevertheless faced several frustrations and challenges.

On several campaigns, there was a mismatch between the required headcount and provided headcount, caused by sub-optimal scheduling. For example, there was often understaffing in the morning followed by overstaffing in the afternoon. This led to inconsistent occupancy levels for agents, leading to burnout. It also made it difficult for DDC OS to comply with the terms of its client contracts.

On some campaigns, the levels of shrinkage were too high. Shrinkage can never be reduced to zero, but lacking clear visibility of agent activity history made it difficult to manage and optimize shrinkage levels.

Schedule adherence was another recurring issue. Most DDC OS contracts involved DDC OS agents logging into the client's routing platform. Each client has a different platform and not all of them offered a real-time adherence (RTA) data feed. The effort involved in setting up 20+ RTA integrations was also not practical. DDC OS lacked clear visibility of schedule adherence, but a figure of 60% was estimated.

There was limited visibility of other key performance indicators (KPIs). Outsourcer client contracts always include a reporting clause, and reporting to 20+ clients on hours planned, hours worked, schedule adherence, together with any client-specific metrics was very time-consuming and error-prone.

Introducing injixo

DDC OS had very clear goals and challenges in the area of planning, so the selection criteria were easy to compile:

• DDC OS provides services in 30 languages, including all European languages. It supports all communication channels - voice, email, chat, social media as well as back office. The WFM application needed to support this complex multi-channel, multi-skill environment.
• DDC OS wanted to engage its employees in the planning process, so a comprehensive agent smartphone app or portal was a must.
• A large proportion of DDC OS employees are home-based. The WFM application would need to support this out-of-the-box and include functionality to support adherence monitoring for home workers.
• It was vital that the WFM application offered integration with multiple contact routing platforms and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, and that setting up the integration was a simple matter that didn’t need specialist technical skills or support from the platform vendor.
• The WFM system needed to be easy to navigate and quick to set up. It needed to be truly cloud-based and accessible via any web browser. Good online reference material, training videos and training & support by consultants who themselves were former planners was also highly desirable.
• A critical selection criterion was the availability of scalable, pay-per-use monthly pricing. As an outsourcer, DDC OS has a volatile headcount. As new clients sign up, DDC OS needs to scale up quickly and not waste time purchasing software licenses that might not be needed on a permanent basis. When contracts come to an end, headcount potentially goes down and DDC OS wanted to avoid paying for WFM capacity that was not being used. Several of DDC OS’s clients are in the retail sector and headcount scales up each November and December. Pay-per-use pricing is a must for seasonal businesses.

Uniquely among the WFM vendors evaluated by DDC OS, injixo complied with all of the requirements and more.

“injixo has all the functionality you need and more. And the pay-per-use pricing is a perfect fit with the outsourcing business model” – Damien Ellam

The injixo journey

Once DDC OS decided to proceed with injixo, progress was rapid. Setup for the initial 130 agents took two weeks from kickoff to go live. That included integration, data migration, user training, testing, and configuration. DDC OS’s agents found the injixo Me agent portal intuitive to use, both on their desktop computers and their smartphones, so agent training on the new WFM system was minimal.

DDC OS puts the rapid onboarding of injixo down to several factors. injixo is a cloud application that can be accessed with any browser, so IT effort was minimal. Integration with the contact routing platform is an end-user task that can be completed with a few clicks. injixo’s consultants are themselves experienced planners, which made training extremely effective. Damien didn’t need to explain his use cases for injixo at length because the consultants were already familiar with them. The consultants were able to show exactly how to achieve Damien’s desired outcomes without having to start from first principles. The online training materials and how-to videos were extremely useful resources during the onboarding process as well.

“During training, I didn’t need to explain what I wanted to get out of injixo. The injixo consultants had walked in my shoes and we spoke the same language”
– Damien Ellam”

Value and achievements

DDC OS got value from injixo in several ways: customer benefits, employee benefits, and business benefits.

Customer benefits

Performance monitoring and tracking are hot topics for every outsourcer. A big win for DDC OS is the visibility and accessibility of KPIs. Damien has used the injixo API (application programming interface) to extract hours planned, hours worked, adherence, etc. into PowerBI, where it is reconciled with data with other platforms such as Zendesk to produce a single self-service reporting dashboard for each client. The ability to automatically handle multiple clients with varying contractual commitments and reporting requirements is a boon for Damien and his team. And clients love the self-service dashboard capability offered by DDC OS.  Previously, DDC OS held weekly meetings with clients to review performance. The dashboards have removed the need for this, saving hours for DDC OS and clients alike. Performance meetings are now the exception rather than the norm.

Employee benefits

DDC OS’s agents love getting involved in the planning process via injixo Me, the injixo agent portal. For obvious reasons, booking time off anytime, anywhere on their smartphones is very welcome. DDC OS has trialed self-service shift swaps for agents working on one campaign. It was very well received by the agents, and DDC OS is considering rolling it out. And injixo is very easy for employees to use. As a responsive website, injixo Me gives a user experience indistinguishable from an app. And it is so intuitive that new starters need almost no training on how to use it.

Before injixo, sub-optimal shift patterns often resulted in periods of overstaffing or under-staffing. The shift patterns also involved more weekend work than many agents liked. injixo has enabled schedules that are optimized around demand while reducing instances of Saturday or Sunday working. Shift lengths have been extended slightly, but the number of weekend working days per agent has been reduced.

The injixo Meetings function helps team managers quickly schedule 1:1s with agents at a time that will have minimum impact on coverage and customer experience. As a consequence, 1:1s are rarely skipped and neither the agent nor the team manager feel pressurized into ending the meeting prematurely to address long call queues.

Business benefits

Before injixo, schedule adherence could not accurately be measured or managed. Now, real-time and historic schedule adherence metrics are visible across all clients, despite the diverse set of routing platforms in use. For campaigns where a real-time adherence data feed is available, this is used. For the remaining campaigns, agents use the Time Recorder function of injixo Me to record their status. This has dramatically improved schedule adherence. The adherence goal is 95%. Actual adherence has gone from an estimated 60% to 90% plus, across the business. This has a corresponding impact on staffing coverage and efficiency. It has also reduced agent burnout.

“Actual adherence has gone from an estimated 60% to a confirmed 90% plus, across the business” – Damien Ellam

Greater visibility of hours worked vs. contracted hours and tracking activities and exceptions has unlocked much better management of shrinkage. DDC OS also exports worked hours from injixo to Payroll. What used to take 2 hours for each payroll run now takes 2 minutes. Another time saving that injixo has delivered for DDC OS is bulk updates, e.g. on change of team manager or introducing new shifts.

In short, injixo has dramatically increased the productivity of the planning team.

"We’re planning for a workforce of 2,000 employees with a team of four people. That’s very efficient, and thanks to the automation, it’s completely sustainable” – Damien Ellam.

The future

DDC OS has grown exponentially in the last five years and there is no sign of this growth slowing down. DDC OS adopted injixo when its business was 1/10 of its current size and injixo has grown with it, adapting to the ever-changing business requirements and increased scale. Over this time, Damien and his team have been impressed with the steadily expanding functionality of injixo. Damien also notes that despite the added features, ease-of-use has actually improved over the years thanks to constant refinements in the injixo user interface. And all the improvements are delivered in the cloud without Damien or his IT team needing to lift a finger.

“I can’t see a slowdown in the DDC OS business anytime soon, and each new client brings new challenges and opportunities. But armed with injixo, I say ‘bring it on’” – Damien Ellam.

We’re honored to have DDC OS as a loyal injixo customer and look forward to many more years of collaboration.