Background

Atkins is the largest multi-disciplinary consultancy in Europe and the world’s eleventh largest international design firm employing approximately 16,000 employees globally. Atkins delivers a range of professional property asset management services* to thousands of properties across the UK and manages the demand / supply interface via a customer focused helpdesk of 100 operators, based in Leeds.

The helpdesk manages demand by locking in Atkins client’s processes and business rules to deliver targets. Further cost control is delivered by ensuring that data they collate through their bespoke IS system – Atkins Intelligence (Ai) is transferred into knowledge to help their customers manage their costs in relation to asset management and space / estate decisions.

Solution

Last year Atkins reached critical mass of 100 full time employees (FTEs). Handling over 1 million inbound calls and ¼ million outbound calls per year, across various private and public sector customers with differing service level agreements (SLAs), schedules were becoming increasingly complex to manage with holidays and absences cumbersome to report on using just Excel spreadsheets. Following a full cost benefit analysis, the NICE Perform® call recording and IEX TotalView® Workforce Management (WFM) solution was recommended and implemented.

Expert technology suppliers in this area, Business Systems UK Ltd, identified that significant helpdesk efficiencies could be realised through more effective resourcing and scheduling and were chosen for their cost-effective solutions, responsiveness and understanding of Atkins' requirements. Particularly, suurronding the 'Smartsync' feature which ensured the call recording and WFM system could be interlinked, providing invaluable reporting tools and a more holistic view of the business. 

Call recording was instrumental in ensuring the helpdesk team could adopt a ‘smarter working’ approach by focussing team leaders on managing their teams through performance, whilst improving call quality. The call recording solution enables team leaders to randomly select, listen, evaluate and score calls, entering results onto the system which then generates performance reports.

*In 2011 Sodexo acquired the UK Asset Management business of Atkins.

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