About

Stacie Babb is Head of Customer Contact at Hollywood Bowl. A contact centre and customer service professional with over 20 years of experience, Stacie worked for a leading UK bank for 10 years before joining Hollywood Bowl in 2013. She currently leads Hollywood Bowl’s contact centre operation and is responsible for achieving all the centre’s KPI goals. Her role also includes leadership of the company’s workforce planning function.

Hollywood Bowl is a leader in the leisure and entertainment industry, with an expanding footprint across the UK and Canada. Its 71 UK centres and growing presence in Canada, now at 9 and counting, offer a premium bowling experience with a minimum of 14 lanes each, a licensed bar, their signature Hollywood Diner, and a variety of amusements. Hollywood Bowl’s tagline is At Hollywood Bowl we have a passion for bringing families and friends together for affordable fun and healthy competition, giving everyone who visits our centres that feel-good factor.

Hollywood Bowl has been named one of the Best Companies to Work For on multiple occasions and has a well-deserved reputation for putting its employees front and centre in everything that it does.

Challenges before injixo

Prior to adopting injixo, Hollywood Bowl used spreadsheets for workforce planning. This caused a number of frustrations.

Excel provided usable forecasts, but frequently the actual numbers were significantly above or below the forecast. Since forecasting is the cornerstone of planning, this had a domino effect on the rest of the planning process. Not only were the forecasts inaccurate, they were not sufficiently granular. Partly because of limitations in the call routing platform, it wasn’t practical to produce forecasts for intervals of less than 60 minutes, which led to inefficient scheduling. For example,  if workload was light at 09:00 and gradually became heavier by 10:00, Hollywood Bowl had to schedule for the total volume in the hour, leading to being over teamed at the beginning of the hour and under-teamed at the end.

The scheduling of breaks and lunches was manual and not optimised. Agents had no certainty about the timing of their breaks and could not make plans for lunchtime and socialisation. Hollywood Bowl has top-notch equipment in the relaxation areas, including pool tables, table tennis tables, and a kitchen area, but agents couldn’t make the best use of the facilities. Because the scheduling process was labour-intensive, it was impractical to take into account preferences and special treatment for different groups, for example, extra break time for employees under 18 years old. Spreadsheets do not offer possibilities to engage agents in the planning process. All of these frustrations had an impact on team member turnover.

Stacie and her team knew that adherence was lower than desired, but without the necessary tools, it was hard to measure. The planning process was time-consuming and ineffective. Lots of real-time management fire-fighting was required and there was little capacity for strategic planning. 

In the highly competitive leisure market, there is a clear correlation between speed of answer and revenue. Hollywood Bowl aims for a very high service level and low waiting times. The target is 90% in 20 seconds. Prior to injixo, this was rarely achieved.

Stacie was already familiar with workforce management systems and the benefits that they can bring. She started the selection process for a workforce management system.

Introducing injixo

Stacie began by conducting extensive research. She had a very clear set of requirements:

• Forecasting and planning for multiple channels
• Accurate and granular forecasting and team member calculations
• Optimised scheduling of a multi-skilled workforce
• Strong real-time management functionality, including real-time adherence
• Agent self-service portal for viewing schedules, booking time off, swapping shifts, etc.
• Integration with the contact routing platform
• Integration with payroll
• A product that is easy to navigate and use
• Training and support from local experts
• Pay-per-use pricing option to support the seasonal nature of the business

Using her personal network, she organised site visits to several contact centres and saw a wide range of workforce management tools in action. These visits revealed that injixo was highly rated by its users. Stacie had a detailed demo of the system from another user and was satisfied that it did everything she needed, before even speaking to the injixo team.

The injixo journey

Once Hollywood Bowl signed up for injixo, progress was rapid. From kickoff to go-live took six weeks, including setup, integration, and training. That was quicker than Stacie was expecting. Implementation of injixo went without a hitch, and Stacie puts that down to a number of factors. injixo is a cloud application, so there is no client or server software of any kind to install and it can be accessed with any browser. IT involvement was therefore minimal. The online training was extremely effective and went into all the necessary detail, so the team could ‘get it right the first time’. The Hollywood Bowl team appreciated having training and advice from injixo consultants who are themselves experienced planners. They also appreciated being given the opportunity to preview and influence upcoming injixo functionality, for example, around time off.

“The WFM knowledge in the injixo consulting team is second to none. They are very responsive, even outside normal hours. We work as a partnership and the injixo team has never left us to struggle”– Stacie Babb

Value and achievements

Using injixo has enabled Hollywood Bowl to make impressive improvements to outcomes for customers, employees, and the planning team, as well as the business bottom line.

Customer Benefits

Before injixo, the service level goal of 90% in 10 seconds was often not achieved. With injixo, service level is consistently at or above 90%. And that is with increased contact volumes and no additional team members.

First-contact resolution has increased. Today, it is typically above 90%, whereas prior to injixo, it was below 80%. Upskilling and more effective scheduling of multi-skilled agents have reduced the number of calls that need to be referred to team leaders.

Employee Benefits

More accurate forecasting and optimised scheduling have reduced employee burnout. Because supply and demand are more closely aligned, periods of over-occupancy are avoided. Shifts are now better aligned with agents’ desired working patterns, so their work/life balance has improved. Stacie has received great feedback from agents about injixo’s self-service features: the ability to sync the injixo calendar with smartphone calendars and make holiday requests, shift swaps, etc. anytime, anywhere. Agents also appreciate the better vacation management that injixo enables; for example, decisions about time off requests are now based on capacity, with more days off being possible in summer.

As a result, team member turnover (excluding disciplinaries) has reduced from 10% per month to 5% per year. Hollywood Bowl estimates that training and mentoring alone costs between £1600 and £2000 per new employee, so this represents a major cost saving. What’s more, Hollywood Bowl is now a top performer in Best Companies to Work For.

"team member turnover has reduced from 10% per month to 5% per year” – Stacie Babb

Business Benefits

Employee schedule adherence has improved dramatically since injixo was implemented. Once it could be measured, it could be managed. Hollywood Bowl initially launched real-time adherence monitoring as a pilot, without informing the agents. Overall adherence was found to be 72%. Within 6 weeks of formally introducing real-time adherence monitoring, it had improved to 95% and it remains consistently at that level. The fact that adherence is being tracked has driven positive behaviour. The injixo adherence report is great for appraisals, especially when team leaders point out the cost of out-of-adherence time.

“Within 6 weeks of  introducing injixo real-time adherence monitoring, adherence improved from 72% to 95%” – Stacie Babb

injixo is deeply integrated with Puzzel (contact routing) and Fourth (HR/Payroll). The Fourth integration alone saves 30 minutes of team leader time per day.

Before introducing injixo, Hollywood Bowl expanded its contact center headcount to match the increased size of the business. Efficiency gains from injixo mean that this is no longer the case; in fact, injixo has enabled headcount reductions. Having the right people at the right time for more of the time has enabled the streamlining of shift patterns and minimised the number of intervals that are over-teamed. Headcount has reduced by 20% during peak season, even with increased volumes.

Planning team benefits

The main motivation for implementing a WFM system was to move away from spreadsheets. All of the goals that Stacie set for injixo have been achieved.  Now, forecasts provide the required granularity and are consistently accurate. Optimised schedules can be generated with a few clicks. Employee schedule preferences are taken into account much better than before. Adherence is now under control and there is much less need for real-time fire-fighting. The service level goal is nearly always achieved.

By any measure, the performance of the workforce planning team is at a very high level. Forecast accuracy has improved immeasurably. injixo’s AI-driven forecast of volume and AHT is now usually within a few percentage points at interval level. Daily, weekly, and seasonal trends are accurately predicted. The greater granularity has further helped with schedule optimization since shifts and breaks can start and end in 15-minute increments. Previously, teams were scheduled in one-hour blocks. This alone has reduced payroll expenses significantly.

Creating shifts used to be time-consuming. Now schedules covering several weeks can be set up with very little effort and published to employees via the employee portal, injixo Me. This gives employees predictable working patterns and frees up the planning team to spend time on planning rather than number-crunching. Previously, planning was labour-intensive. Now, the planning team has time for long-range planning and collaborating with other teams; they have a Strategy Day once per quarter. They also have more time to create individual training plans and they are better able to plan training for quieter periods.

Time off management is much easier and quicker with injixo. Quota-based time off rules are a welcome feature, and the team appreciates the fact that quotas can be modified around peak times.

Scheduling breaks and lunches used to be a very manual process. Break times were not optimised, and gave no certainty to employees. Now, breaks and lunches are planned at the optimum time, so employees can make plans for lunch. All this happens without impact on service level.

The Future

The Hollywood Bowl business is set to grow by approximately 20% in the coming year. The UK operation of 71 bowling centres will grow to 73 and the 9 centres in Canada will be joined by another 10. Hollywood Bowl’s UK contact centre supports its new Canadian sites, ensuring seamless, consistent customer service, globally. Due to the efficiency that injixo has unlocked, Hollywood Bowl doesn’t plan to make a corresponding increase in contact centre headcount.

Hollywood Bowl has been an inijxo customer since 2016 and has witnessed multiple innovations in the product over that time. Stacie and her team decided to move from the Basic to the Advanced price plan. That increased the cost of injixo slightly, but the benefits still greatly outweigh the costs, so they find that injixo is still great value for money.

“injixo has been Hollywood Bowl’s WFM partner for a long time, and I can see no reason why the partnership shouldn’t last at least another 8 years!” – Stacie Babb

We’re honoured to have Hollywood Bowl as an injixo customer.

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