About

Tructyre specializes in tire sales and maintenance services for commercial vehicles: trucks, trailers, buses, and coaches. Its value proposition is “de-risking Britain’s fleets”, saving haulage firms money, increasing vehicle uptime, and optimizing tire mileage and fuel consumption. Based in Gateshead in the North East of England, Tructyre’s Customer Experience Center handles calls, emails, and job tickets. There is also a back office operation, processing documents such as invoices. Tructyre is a 24/7/365 operation.

Jonathan O’Connor is the Resource Planning Manager at Tructyre. He is a seasoned workforce planner and planning leader with experience in the energy, telecommunications, leisure, transportation and finance sectors.

Challenges before injixo

The Customer Experience Center expanded to match the impressive growth of the company since its relocation to Gateshead in2019. Despite having skilled and motivated employees, by late 2021 the Customer Experience Center was facing a number of challenges.

Service level achievement was inconsistent. Customers frequently experienced long waits and agents were often burned out. This was caused by a combination of factors. Forecasts of upcoming demand were inaccurate and often out-of-date. Agents worked fixed rotations which didn’t always match the peaks and valleys in customer demand. Breaks and time off were managed by team leaders without taking into account the impact on coverage of demand. There was little visibility of schedule adherence within the front or back office and staff were unable to request shift changes because they didn’t have a sense of ownership or engagement.

The need to level up the planning process became apparent to the leadership at Tructyre. Jonathan was hired as resource planning manager and he immediately began work on improvements to planning processes and technology. His goal was clear: to improve efficiency and drive performance while maintaining agent morale and increasing their engagement and empowerment. As Jonathan explains “It was clear to me that the goal was only achievable by implementing a workforce management (WFM) application. But the question was: which one?”.

Introducing injixo

Tructyre selected injixo because it offers comprehensive WFM functionality backed up by a proven onboarding process that ensures that it starts delivering value very quickly. Jonathan was also impressed by injixo’s continuous improvement program and the reputation of the injixo team for knowledge of both their system and industry best practices. Another factor in favor of injixo is its support for front and back-office planning. This includes a time recording feature to track the activities of employees who are not logged into the ACD.

Setup and training were completed in a few weeks, thanks to injixo’s onboarding program. A key component of the program is the Success Plan, a project blueprint agreed upon between the customer and the dedicated injixo consultant. The plan is tailored around the customer’s needs, skill levels, and desired go-live date. It includes a timetable showing training steps, links to supporting resources at each stage, and check-in milestones. Most important of all, the Success Plan documents the outcomes that the customer wants to achieve. This helped the injixo team to focus on what really mattered to Tructyre. And it provides a basis for measuring return on investment.

The injixo journey

The first thing that Jonathan needed to tackle was forecasting, to get a clear and accurate prediction of workload in the coming days and weeks. Then he implemented new shift patterns to better match demand from customers with the supply of employees with the right skills. To take the agents with him on this journey, he took into consideration the availability of individual staff members. Now fixed shifts were replaced with shifts optimized around demand while respecting the employees’ preferences as far as possible. Instead of taking place at random, breaks were now scheduled in advance at the optimum time to minimize the impact on service level. New starter ‘Stepping Up’ employees are now scheduled, taking into account their lower productivity levels during onboarding and training.

Jonathan reports “injixo has more than lived up to our expectations in the front office Customer Experience Center. For the back office, it has enabled a whole new way of working. Instead of being planned in silos, front and back office employees are now scheduled at the same time, with multi-skilled agents being scheduled to optimize coverage of demand across both areas. injixo has enabled us to introduce the same WFM disciplines in the back office that we apply in the front office”.

Value and achievements

With injixo, Jonathan was able to make significant, measurable improvements to performance in a remarkably short time. Here are some highlights:

• Percentage of calls answered (PCA) improved by 26% within 5 weeks
• Service level (SL) improved by 32% over the same period
• Schedule adherence improved by 14% over the same period
• PCA, SL and adherence were brought in line with targets and this has remained the case since
• The backlog in the invoicing section was reduced by 20% within 2 months
• As a result of greater schedule efficiency, the FTE count was reduced by 2% and a further 2% saving is anticipated

These achievements are mainly the result of the accurate forecasting and more efficient scheduling that inijxo makes possible. injixo has also streamlined and automated processes that were previously manual and prone to error. This has freed up time for business improvement and transformation. Tructyre has introduced an agent complaint handling process and a team leader development course. And as the resource planning manager, Jonathan has moved from being reactive to being proactive. He is able to spend less time on the mechanics of planning and more time on process development and continuous improvement.

injixo is a win for Tructyre’s employees and team leaders as much as it is for the planning function and the business. Employees appreciate the fact that they now have certainty about their shifts - including break times - weeks in advance. They love the option to request time off and swap shifts anytime, anywhere with their smartphones. injixo automates admin work for team leaders, freeing them up to coach their teams. Team leaders can even schedule 1:1s and coaching sessions for their entire teams with a couple of clicks. The injixo Meetings feature automatically schedules meetings, training, and 1:1s in time slots that have minimum impact on service level.

We’re honored to have Jonathan and Tructyre as injixo customers and look forward to many more years of collaboration.

Jonathan has kindly offered to be contacted in case you have any questions about his injixo journey or if you’d simply like to exchange experiences. You can reach him via LinkedIn.

And if you’d like to book a demo and see how the magic happened, click here.