Successful Agent Self-Scheduling with Precious Bucher from Zappos
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Dave Hoekstra: [00:00:00] Welcome to Working Smarter, presented by Calabrio where we discuss contact center industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. We're glad you're joining us to learn and grow together in order to provide world-class customer service to each and every one of our clients.
My name is Dave Ttra and I'm the product evangelist here at Calabrio. And my. Yes, today. I'm very excited to have Precious Bucher. She is the director of operations and customer experience engagement for Zappos. Maybe you've heard of Zappos. Zappos is a brand that really cuts the forefront of the customer experience edge.
And we're very excited to have Precious here to join us today. And. What I'm particularly interested to start off, Precious, is can you give us a little bit of a taste of how you got here, right? We [00:01:00] always like to ask our guests where you come from and, it's funny how we hear this, the, we hear a lot of common themes and how people get into the workforce management, contact center management piece.
Regale us with the tale of how Precious arrived at where she is today.
Precious Bucher: Of course. Thanks for having me on, Dave. I'm so excited to be here. I probably took one of the most unconventional paths to get here. I've always naturally been really good at science and math. So my mom obviously wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer.
And I decided to go to school for communications to become a radio DJ. So that's where I started. And then I bartended on the side to make some extra money while I was deejaying, but then I quickly realized that there was no job security in being a radio DJ and went back to my roots of math and went to school for accounting.
And then when I started at Zappos specifically, I actually had the goal of going to our corporate finance team. But [00:02:00] I stumbled into our workforce management team a few months after starting at Zappos and worked my way up on that team over the next. Goodness, I've been here almost 12 years. So I've done everything from scheduling to workforce planning to forecasting to the data analytics, everything that you could possibly think of under workforce management I've done through Zappos and I've been pretty homegrown at Zappos.
But fortunately for me the numbers and the data come pretty easily. They make me excited but I still love the people piece and figuring out how To break the trends of workforce management and not have as much control on the workforce management team or the leaders, but how to share that responsibility with our team members and get their buy in to be as tied as closely as possible to the accomplishments of the call center and that they have a piece of that pie of understanding what their contributions are and what they do matters because it really is the most important job not only at Zappos, but for every call center, being on the front line and talking to [00:03:00] customers all day, every day is.
is hard. It's exhausting, but it's also rewarding, right? When you get to help that customer doing whatever they needed, or maybe even what they didn't know they needed. But making sure that we can put as many tools and flexibility to our team members as possible is super important. And that's how I approach our workforce management mindset.
And I'm super excited to be able to do that. It's
Dave Hoekstra: it's funny because I might be the exact opposite of you. I hated math in School like just was like I was the kid that never even turned in his homework. He hated math so much I don't know how I made it from grade to be honest because I just flat out refused to do my math homework.
I hated it so much. I liked the people aspect of kind of workforce management and actually ended up enjoying some of the math parts, but thankfully Excel did all the math work for me that I was terrible at. Now I'm actually interested, I want to dig a little deeper. When you say you started in the finance team and you [00:04:00] stumbled across workforce management, how, what did that look like?
Precious Bucher: I didn't actually, I started in the call center. My goal was to make it to the finance team. That was my dream goal was to go be an accountant at Zappos. As most
Dave Hoekstra: kids grow up dreaming of being.
Precious Bucher: Once I decided to grow up and get a real job that's not fair. Radio DJ is also a very hard job.
It's a lot of fun. I miss it. It was a great, it was a great time. But once I decided to get into a corporate career, that was, my goal was to get into Zappos, I fell in love with Tony and delivering happiness and everything that they stood for. And I didn't care what I did. But once I got in, my, my long term goal was to get into finance using my accounting degree and all of those things.
But honestly, like I said, I fell in love with the people and the call center itself, and I thought that I could make bigger of a difference there and being able to get the opportunity on our workforce management team was priceless and being able to work my way up there [00:05:00] and learn from there. And the bright side is I get to work with my finance team on a regular basis.
So it's the best of both worlds. There you go.
Dave Hoekstra: You, you made it right. You did exactly what you set out to do. Now what did that, what did the team look like? This is, going on, like you said, 12, 11, 12 years ago. What did the team and the process look like back then? Like when you first came into it, reflecting back on it, what did the workforce management, the scheduling pieces look like back then?
How were things done?
Precious Bucher: Great question. Our team was split into two teams. We had one area focused on our we call it the stat team. They were focused on the metrics and forecasting and building out reporting. And then we had our planning and scheduling team, which is what I had started out on. So we did real time management, looking at the cues in real time, making sure that we had our resources where they needed to be moved them where necessary.
Scheduling all meetings, team meetings, one on ones, activities. scheduling those into our workforce management tool that we used at the time. But [00:06:00] overall, it was very manual. We didn't have a lot of resources. It was all mostly done in Excel. It was a lot of trial and error. And we didn't necessarily have all of the historical metrics or data that we now use.
So it was definitely a growth in leaning on data and being able to figure out how to use the historicals to be able to predict the future, even more so than just, Forecasting for call volume, right? But what does it do when we close for an all hands? Like we close our entire company down. So what's that impact for the next days that come in from that where that's not seasonality, but people might still need to call in.
So then that brings up extra volume for the following days. It's not something that we had historically. Men so good at predicting 12 years ago, but now I would say that we've done much better at doing that. Yeah,
Dave Hoekstra: It's actually really funny to hear because most of the great WFM leaders of today All have that part in their story of [00:07:00] oh my god.
It was the worst. We struggled we Everything was gut instinct and we were just, we were making it up as we went along. And, but I think that's all you can do, right? Anybody who comes in and has every button automatically push and every day that you don't learn the instincts and the things that make good leaders out of a WFM team.
So I think that's great, and I have yet to find anyone who is working in a leadership role in a workforce management. Position that has said, yeah, the day I got there, all I did was click this forecast button and it all just worked. It's all right. There's always a lot of struggle and a lot of Excel involved in it.
Build your own forecasting model. Okay, sure. Whatever that takes. And so continuing on like compare and contrast the way we do things today versus then, what are some things about the way we do things [00:08:00] today that are significantly better and then maybe even something that might be significantly worse than the way we used to do things.
Precious Bucher: I think for us leaning into a culture of data has made it so much easier to be able to do things that we haven't been able to do where let me give you an example of knowing what's important to team members. For example, for scheduling, right? Like we're very customer centric and employee centric first.
But if we're working on Oh, everybody wants 410s because they'd love an extra day off, right? That sounds like a great idea. But if we actually rolled that out without trying to get some buy in and some data from our employees, we might accidentally create very burnt out and very tired employees who don't want to work super long days because it does it's not worth it to them to have this third day off, right?
Because now I have to recover for all of those days. 410s is Not for the faint of heart, right? Especially as a frontline
Dave Hoekstra: employee. [00:09:00] I will never forget when I switched to 410s. And you see those three days off and you just think, Oh, this is going to be great. And then those first few days that your body gets to that seven and a half, eight hour mark.
And you look and you're like, Oh my gosh, I still have two hours left to go. It was a real like eye opening experience. Like, all right this maybe is not built for
Precious Bucher: everyone. Yeah, but if we, mathematically, right? Oh, it's easy to do that. I could make a case operationally why four tens is the right way to go and be a great employee experience and all of those things.
But is it without trying to get to the what do employees want? What is their satisfaction of working four tens versus not? So making sure that they have choices is super important, but being able to have access to that data and knowing that it's okay to ask your employees what their sentiment is and have them know that it matters is super important.
So I think that's one thing that we [00:10:00] do. I don't even want to say differently. Cause I do think that we've always valued that input, but I do think that we're using it in ways better than we ever have before. Which is super exciting. I would say what's more complicated. Is the call center hasn't gotten any less complicated in 12 years and that's across the board, right?
Like before it was chat and email and phones and now we have SMS and we have social and there's all these ways to reach out to a business at all. So adding in Yeah. Organically and unintentionally, in some ways, all these ways for our customers to contact us just adds extra layers of staffing and training.
And that I think over complicates not only our team members processes, but definitely the workforce management processes and figuring out how to balance all of those. Things that you didn't have to 12 years ago.
Dave Hoekstra: I imagine it's probably even especially more difficult for [00:11:00] you because, Zappos is seen as an organization that should be very tech on the forefront, right?
And, I can imagine people saying, what do you mean I can't contact Zappos via WhatsApp? Why would, why can't they do that? And so I imagine you guys probably have to spend a little bit more time and attention into what channels you do have available than most other organizations simply because of who you are.
Precious Bucher: Yeah, we do. We are very purposeful. It's exciting because we do really have so many ways for customers to reach out to us like we do have SMS. We still have chat. We still have email. We still have phones. We're still open 24 7. All of those things are super important to us. But When we broached going into SMS, we did it very diligently and making sure that we didn't lose our Zappos voice by going and going into that [00:12:00] type of contact channel.
So that's been our most recent type of contact channel and it's been almost the most exciting because chat or texting with somebody is just so much more informal in some ways. So we get to showcase our Zappos personality even more in SMS which is pretty exciting, but it's also that instant.
gratification for a customer that they can meet us when they want to meet with us, where an email, you can go back and forth a million times before you get a resolution. And that might happen in a text message, but it doesn't feel like you did 20 emails to get to a resolution. It was one conversation, right?
So being able to deliver an even better version of customer service, SMS is a huge win in my opinion. And as a millennial I would rather. Text in with a company than chat or call or email. So I'm super excited that we have SMS as a functionality for our contact channel.
Dave Hoekstra: As a Gen Xer myself, it makes me sweat a little bit.
I still like a good solid phone conversation, but that's [00:13:00] probably because I'm an extrovert and I just want to, I'll talk to people until their ears fall off. And so I like to be the one that kind of freaks them out about. Knowing how contact centers work. I'm the guy that's so what scheduling program do you use?
And they're like, what, I don't even know who you are. So that's but I do agree with you. My, my wife loves the different communication channels and it's funny you talked about the Zappos voice just recently in a few contacts that I've had with with one, one brand over the last few weeks.
They've mentioned how we've got your back. It's showing up in their script. Like we've got your back or I've got your back. And it's funny how, you see the way. Organizations are trying to retain that friendly voice, that, that conversational discussion. And yeah, I've definitely noticed that.
So it's good to hear that Zappos is able to retain that as well. Although I'm [00:14:00] all about a good, solid LOL. In a conversation with a customer service agent. So
Precious Bucher: yes, you'll definitely have to try texting with us next time that you need any service. You'll get some quite some good emojis and quite the conversation.
I
Dave Hoekstra: love it. Nothing like a good cry laughing emoji to really set the tone for for what we're discussing. Do me a favor for those who might be a little curious, give us a little bit of an overview of how what the setup for you guys looks
Precious Bucher: We have a few hundred employees in the U S that handle our phones and SMS contacts.
And we still offer chat and email. Although those are currently outsourced.
Dave Hoekstra: The agents that you guys employ, Zappos has always been seen as a real customer experience centric organization, but you're also starting to get a reputation as an employee centric one, right? And so what kind of decisions have led to you guys focusing a [00:15:00] lot on your employee experience and.
How to retain good talent.
Precious Bucher: Honestly, that employee centric mindset is what brought me to Zappos to start with. We believe that if you take care of your employees, they take care of your customers, right? So having that be the forefront of all of our decisions is something that excites me every day and why I'm still at Zappos after all of these years.
I love being able to be a people first mindset and figuring out that balance because there's still a job to be done at the end of the day, right? What's that balance of having the right head count and scheduled at the right places and making sure that we have the right people doing that. And how do you balance that all together by making happy employees?
And from a workforce management piece, I think that's really challenging. It's been. a super passion project for me for quite a few years around, how do I get employees to be able to work whenever they want to, right? And at a call center, that's not completely possible, right? In a project based work, it is, you can work when there is work, you can make your own schedule.[00:16:00]
But when, The hours that you need to work or the work that you're doing is time, right? When are customers calling us? And that's when you need to be there and present. How do we give that autonomy to employees to be able to work when is best for them, right? So that has been something that's been super important to our workforce management team for, Probably eight of the 12 years that I have worked here, and one of the reasons that we actually chose to go with Collabrio was that there, there was some flexibility options and scheduling that we hadn't been able to see in other workforce management tools.
At one point, we tried to build our own which was super awesome, and it did work, but it's a lot of maintenance to be able to do that so we chose to try to find a tool that already existed to be able to build that in and even, Looking forward, like into the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic and into the great resignation, I did a lot of research personally to find out what made employees happy, right?
And almost all [00:17:00] surveys that you could see what Why people work, obviously for a paycheck, they want compensated fairly. I can't really control that. Or my team can't really control that at a workforce management. But the other piece that they were super passionate about invested in is their schedule.
If they had the schedule that they wanted and they got to have the work life balance that they wanted, or they got to do all the things that they needed to do, but have that schedule that made their life be what they wanted it to be. They actually didn't care if they made a little less. Now I'm not advocating to pay people less.
That is not at all what I'm saying. But, as a workforce management team, that is directly in our control. We can figure out ways to give different scheduling options To our employees. And honestly, it's better for the operation anyways, if you're trying to fit the same size Lego pieces to build out a call center model, you're going to have lots of extra staffing where you don't need it.
You're going to be understaffed and other intervals where you shouldn't be because you're trying to make all of these one size pieces fit [00:18:00] into building this perfect Lego model. And that doesn't work when they're all the same. Pieces, right? You need different sized Legos to build this amazing sculpture or whatever it is that you want to build.
Sorry, I have lots of Legos all over my desk. So that's the analogy that
Dave Hoekstra: I have. You cannot build the Lego Millennium Falcon with a bunch of big blocks of pieces, right? It requires lots of little tiny pieces. How, and
Precious Bucher: traditionally, like you get five eights or four tens, and even that gives you some flexibility and that gives you some different Lego pieces.
But really, how do I solve for Are people going back to school or ones who have other part time jobs, right? Like that they want to still work where they're at, but they want some flexibility around their schedule. But there's also, we talked earlier about how there's this different demographic of customers, right?
As a millennial, I'd rather text in than call in and you'd rather call in than text in, but we. Not only have so many different demographics and ages and preferences of customers, we also have that for our employees, right? So there's so many people who are [00:19:00] like, I just want to know when I'm working every day.
I want the same schedule. I never want it to change. And they want the five eights or the four tens and they never want their schedule to change. But then there's also this group of people who are like, I don't care what I'm working next week. I just want to know that if I get the concert tickets, I can go and I don't have to worry about calling off.
Or find somebody else to cover for me or whatever that case may be. And it gives us so many options operationally for a call center if we can build that in because we can let people pick their schedule where we have a need. And I, that is, I think the key piece of flexible scheduling is the employee needs to have availability and the company needs to have availability.
It doesn't work if an employee is working whenever they want to work, but there isn't a customer need. And it doesn't work if the employee is not working when there's a customer need, because you're still short staffed. So building in specific parameters and allowing people to work. I know we'll go into more detail.
So that was a high level of where
Dave Hoekstra: we're at. No let's keep going. [00:20:00] Let's keep going in that because, whereas my brain is sitting here going you got four tens and you got five eights, why not 10, three and a half, right? But that's that, but even that is a. It's putting people into a box.
And so what have you guys done that removes the edges of the box? I'm really interested in if I were a Zappos employee and I came in, what are the things you have available for them to be able to do these types of things? Choice,
right? So we, we do bids every. Couple of months.
Precious Bucher: But we let our employees choose what they're bidding into. So they could bid in we broken it up into three different boxes so they can have a full schedule scheduled. So that could be the four eighths or five to five eighths or four tenths. Or they can still participate in the bid and get one of those shifts.
And, but we then cut off 20 or 10 hours. We call it a core shift. One of the lessons [00:21:00] we learned is knowing what their course shift or putting in some guardrails to what their course shift was. So when we started, we said you got to choose whatever hours you wanted to drop which didn't necessarily build the best employee or customer experience because we had extra shortages.
People either dropped their weekend day. They're like, Oh, if I get a weekend day, I'll just drop that weekend and then I'll pick up during the week. But that didn't help get our weekend coverage. So we put in parameters that they can't drop whole days and they have to be more on the bookends. If they have a bookend hour, they can't drop the early or the late.
They'd have to drop in the middle of the day. As Almost always, you have the biggest amount of extra flexibility in the middle of your day when all those schedules overlap, right? Knowing that a little bit better on what the behaviors happened once we did open up that Pandora's box of letting them drop whatever they wanted for those core hours, putting in guardrails and correcting that was super important, so that was definitely a miss that we had to begin with.
But having that data to be able to explain [00:22:00] to our employees that this is why we made that change is super helpful. So it was a mistake worth making. And then the final box is complete self scheduling. So they don't know their schedule until two weeks in advance is when we open up those hours and then they can pick up whatever hours they want up to the 40 hours.
They can pick it up. Same day. They don't have to pick it up two weeks in advance. That's just when it opens and same for the core folks. They pick up their self scheduled hours within two weeks in advance, but they could pick it up. I think it's actually down to the minute beforehand. So as long as they sign up beforehand Which is great for folks who have doctor's appointments, right?
Or they don't know when they're going to have doctor's appointments. Or if they feel okay to work that day, right? If they, it actually saves them some sick time and vacation time because they're not signing up for hours that they have to go and then knock off for whatever
Dave Hoekstra: reason. So you're talking about their editing kind of their start times and their stop times all almost in [00:23:00] real time is what it boils down to.
Now, do you see a trend where the agents Take more. How often are they fulfilling their full 40
Precious Bucher: always? Because we have put in the correct guardrails, right? So if they don't work their 40 hours, that does impact their attendance policy and their hours in that way. But they have up until the last minute of that week to be able to complete those 40 hours.
They know in advance where they're at, they have the, in Collaboreal, they can see exactly how many hours they're at so that it's easy for them to manage. But they, we have not, I don't, I do not believe that we have lost any employee to not working their full 40 hours.
Dave Hoekstra: Okay. My brain actually goes what if you don't need them?
But it sounds like you always need them. Is that,
Precious Bucher: We do have unpaid time off options for lower volume weeks so that people, any, [00:24:00] but that applies to anyone. So if they're the full schedule, the self scheduled or the core scheduled they would be able to utilize unpaid time off as available anyways.
But that would be something that for folks in full scheduling, if we don't would not need to work a full 40 hours. Okay.
Dave Hoekstra: And what about Intra shift, right? Are they utilizing the brakes and lunch move capability as well?
Precious Bucher: Yes. Yes, they are. And they honestly, they love that. That's actually one of their favorite features of Collabrio is being able to move their breaks and lunches.
So They can still use that in the full self scheduling as well, if they're scheduled enough hours to require a break. Huh.
Dave Hoekstra: Okay. Now here's the 64, 000 question, which is an old school throwback. It, million dollar question now? I don't know. 64, 000 isn't that much money anymore.
It used to be. But the you said you did a lot of research on, employees and what they want out of their relationship with their employer and [00:25:00] what keeps people engaged and retained and happy. Is this working is really the question that, that we're seeing, what kind of feedback have you seen and what kind of what kind of anecdotal information can you share about this policy and the way it's working for you guys?
Precious Bucher: For sure, we've definitely seen a massive decrease in having schedules be cited for exit leave leavings when our employees are leaving on their own. We also have more people each shift bid sign up for the core shift or the self scheduling which is pretty fascinating because people are like, Oh, it works.
I like, I see My team members doing this and it works for their life because there's a lot of people who are like, wait, I don't have a set schedule. I don't know when I'm working. That seems scary to me, but as they're seeing other people do it and they're having no problems with it and they're loving it because they have that flexibility added to their life.
We have more people each shift bid sign up, which is pretty exciting. We do allow people to switch their schedule model each month if they [00:26:00] chose to yeah. But we don't have a lot of people who change in the middle of a shift bid, which is also pretty cool. But we wanted people to feel safe to try it and not be like, Oh my God, I have to commit for the next six months of this schedule that I don't know if I like, I've never done anything like this before, right?
So we wanted to make sure that there were some guardrails and a safety net for our employees so that they weren't just trapped into something that didn't work for them.
Dave Hoekstra: Because I'm not always just about the rah super positive, I'll ask the other direction of, are there detractors?
Are there people that don't like this? And if there are, like, what are the reasons they're citing why this might not be optimal for them?
Precious Bucher: For some, I would say people who don't get a bid that they wanted in the shift bid. So maybe they got that Saturday, right? That they don't want to work. They're like, Oh, I'll just sign up for full self scheduling so that I can work.
whatever hours I want Monday through Friday. And in high volume times, that's a great solution [00:27:00] for them because there's almost always availability, right? But when there's lower volumes and the seasonality that comes with call centers, it's very eye opening to them when they're like, Oh crap, there isn't enough hours that I want to work.
And now I have no control about when I do work and all of those things. So walking employees to this isn't the model for you. without taking away their feeling of control has been, I'd say one of our biggest challenges, but we, I think we've done a really good job of painting and showcasing like this, you could either have a set schedule and you know what you're doing each week or you don't, right?
And here's what that risk is and what that cost is. If you can never work on a Monday night, Then this schedule maybe might not be for you because there might be Monday nights that's the only time that there's available for you to pick up. So picking the shift that best fits their needs.
So we do have some folks who, as I said earlier, [00:28:00] we let the schedules open two weeks in advance that they stay up till midnight so that they can pick their schedules and they have first dibs. And we get overwhelming feedback about, Hey, I have to stay up till midnight to pick your schedule. If you are staying up till midnight to pick your schedule, then this isn't a schedule for you.
This isn't a model that is actually good for you. And in reality is having a set model or four eights or five, 10. I keep saying that backwards five days or four tens might be a better fit. Or even we can still do a unique schedules. You mentioned like the, we could do. Three twelves. And then the rest, like we could still have other set schedules that would still work for them and the business.
So we do have some options there, but when it comes to the bids, we do traditional and then we get more unique as people have requests.
Dave Hoekstra: That's awesome. And you're like, yeah, I think about waiting in line for concert tickets back when I was younger. It's yeah, I gotta, okay.
My last question about this. And I promise we'll talk about something [00:29:00] else, but the, one of the things that I, when talking to. People who are thinking about doing these self scheduling types of models is trust in the system, being able to make that decision for them, relinquishing control to basically an algorithm, right?
How has that process worked for you guys? Did it take a while to build trust in the system and then understand exactly how it's going to work? Or was it? Right from the beginning, it worked.
Precious Bucher: I think once we switched to Collaborate, we didn't have as much hesitancy because we had been trying something like this for quite a while albeit manually and in our own processes.
But I, thinking back to when we started rolling out like full self scheduling and you get to decide when you're working, as, oh my god, I was terrified. Like how do you know people are going to show up when you need them to show up? And all of these things. I think... The proper [00:30:00] guardrails and expectations, not only for your employees, but for your own self is what makes that successful.
So what are you willing to accept? What are you not willing to accept? Having how I mentioned earlier that we had to rein back a little bit of, no, you can't just drop your Saturday. Cause if you got a Saturday, that means that we needed you here on that Saturday. You can drop some of your hours on Saturday, but you can't drop the whole thing because that doesn't actually solve what we need.
Cause again, it needs to be a perfect fit of. The customers have a need and the employees also have a need or a desire to work during those times. But if there aren't customers calling at the time that you want to work, then you don't get to work. Cause there's not a need for you there. But building in those proper expectations and guardrails from all fronts and showcasing.
Even just sharing what the volume looks like, right? Some people on the frontline employees have never seen a forecast of this is where all the contacts come in and just showing that with your team [00:31:00] members to be like, this is where we decide and how we need you and letting them have a peek behind the curtain of how those decisions are made.
Help them make the right decisions. Guardrails and a transparency.
Dave Hoekstra: It's funny you've mentioned it a couple times, and actually this was going to be my next point, and you led straight into it, was how many times throughout our conversation today, you've mentioned explaining things to the agents, and this is less of a question and more of me getting up on a soapbox for everyone who's listening.
This stuff works, you guys. It works when people understand why you make the decisions that you make, right? When we're making these decisions in a vacuum they seem arbitrary to people, but when you show them like, guys, this is the forecast. This is it. Look, it says right here, exactly how many people I need to be successful.
And if all of you want that day off, I will not be successful. So you can see my conundrum here. And I think it's great. I was wondering, do you guys have a [00:32:00] systematic approach to showing them this information or is this a kind of whenever as needed?
Precious Bucher: I'd say more whenever as needed. I'd love to be in a place that I'm more systematic.
And at some point we'll get there. But it's definitely more as needed. We do what we call ops open houses. We have a slack channel that's open all the time. So when people have questions that they can come in and ask whenever are needed, we do round tables. We do a quarterly sentiment surveys, but that's not just for the operation that's across for the entire department.
So all of our training, Leaders all everything is fair game when it comes to the sentiment survey. So we go out looking for feedback and we do our best to implement that as much as possible. And what our ongoing strategy is, right? Obviously not all ideas can take flight. We've definitely have had people like you should never have an attendance policy.
I'd love to be in a world where we don't need an attendance policy, right? We've actually tried that. It didn't [00:33:00] work. But we do have a very lax. Attendance policy and it's no fault and people get to use it how they deem fit and that came partly from feedback from our employees to make sure that we were getting what they needed.
And even before we rolled out our self scheduling, we spent quite a few weeks meeting with every team and saying what is when we asked them what they wanted. They're like, we want flexibility and we want stability. And I'm like, those are it. Opposites.
Dave Hoekstra: We want black and we want white,
Precious Bucher: Yeah. So what does that mean to you, right?
And that's, it just proved the case even more that it's not a one size fits all. So how do we be able to bucket those? We can't have unlimited options cause it still has to be manageable, which is why we have three sets of buckets that folks can choose essentially. But getting that feedback and having them be a participant in the conversation is super important to that buy in.
But it helps build that trust. It helps them understand what [00:34:00] their responsibility is. And it's actually really cool to just be talking with the folks that your decisions are impacting on the daily basis to truly understand what that impact is. Sorry. I guess I'd correct myself. We do have processes in place, but it also is as necessary.
Dave Hoekstra: Sure. No, absolutely. That's, there's never a, there's no absolutes when it comes to this kind of thing. And, I'm just super happy that we're to a point in not just contact centers, but employer employee relationships where this is a thing, right? When I first started back in the day, I'm sure there were there are organizations that did that, but contact centers were very much sit down, shut up.
Take calls and you have a job, which I was right. I was super thrilled. I, and looking at the way things are now, we we, we managed and we survived the great resignation and the great reshuffling. And now the tool is more about, all right, how can we really make [00:35:00] this to where we are retaining these people for a long time, who are very good at what they do.
And it's great to see what you guys are doing with that. So I am just absolutely. gobsmacked with how awesome you guys are handling this. And it's really great to see not only the way you're doing it, but the way Collaborio can help along with that with that journey as well. So I will definitely say Precious has been wonderful having you as of the podcast.
And I'm super excited to see the continuation of that whole story and how you guys are continuing to work. And, I'm sure that we'll have many more conversations as the time goes on. But I do say typically as part of the podcast I like to give the guests our final word.
Espouse some wisdom, let us know what's going on or anything you'd like to say out there to maybe someone who is thinking of considering workforce management as a career or something you'd like to say. So the floor is yours. Give us the final word.
Precious Bucher: [00:36:00] Awesome. Definitely. I think I touched on it mostly here.
The whole time anyways, but your employees voice matters, right? Rather you're a supervisor and a leader in, in, in what they're doing, or you're a part of the workforce management team, or you're a C suite, whatever you are, your employees voice matters. And. Ask for it regularly because it's going to make you better.
It's going to make them better. And it's going to make your whole company better on an ongoing basis. So that would be my parting wisdom for everyone in business.
Dave Hoekstra: Amen. And I'm right there with you. Thank you precious for joining us here on the working smarter podcast. It's been a fantastic pleasure having you here with us.
For those of you out there that listen, we always appreciate. Time you spend with us as always, if you would want to be a guest on the Colabrio podcast, or would like to suggest a topic, please let us know. Just send us an email marketing at Colabrio. com. And we'll be glad to put that idea into consideration.
So huge. Thank you to precious. Thank you for joining us today. Precious. [00:37:00]
Precious Bucher: Thank you for having me, Dave. This has been fun for the
Dave Hoekstra: rest. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode of working smarter, as always have a great rest of your day, a great rest of your week. And we'll talk to you soon on the next episode of working smarter from Colabrio.
Thanks everybody.
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Dave Hoekstra: [00:00:00] Welcome to Working Smarter, presented by Calabrio where we discuss contact center industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. We're glad you're joining us to learn and grow together in order to provide world-class customer service to each and every one of our clients.
My name is Dave Ttra and I'm the product evangelist here at Calabrio. And my. Yes, today. I'm very excited to have Precious Bucher. She is the director of operations and customer experience engagement for Zappos. Maybe you've heard of Zappos. Zappos is a brand that really cuts the forefront of the customer experience edge.
And we're very excited to have Precious here to join us today. And. What I'm particularly interested to start off, Precious, is can you give us a little bit of a taste of how you got here, right? We [00:01:00] always like to ask our guests where you come from and, it's funny how we hear this, the, we hear a lot of common themes and how people get into the workforce management, contact center management piece.
Regale us with the tale of how Precious arrived at where she is today.
Precious Bucher: Of course. Thanks for having me on, Dave. I'm so excited to be here. I probably took one of the most unconventional paths to get here. I've always naturally been really good at science and math. So my mom obviously wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer.
And I decided to go to school for communications to become a radio DJ. So that's where I started. And then I bartended on the side to make some extra money while I was deejaying, but then I quickly realized that there was no job security in being a radio DJ and went back to my roots of math and went to school for accounting.
And then when I started at Zappos specifically, I actually had the goal of going to our corporate finance team. But [00:02:00] I stumbled into our workforce management team a few months after starting at Zappos and worked my way up on that team over the next. Goodness, I've been here almost 12 years. So I've done everything from scheduling to workforce planning to forecasting to the data analytics, everything that you could possibly think of under workforce management I've done through Zappos and I've been pretty homegrown at Zappos.
But fortunately for me the numbers and the data come pretty easily. They make me excited but I still love the people piece and figuring out how To break the trends of workforce management and not have as much control on the workforce management team or the leaders, but how to share that responsibility with our team members and get their buy in to be as tied as closely as possible to the accomplishments of the call center and that they have a piece of that pie of understanding what their contributions are and what they do matters because it really is the most important job not only at Zappos, but for every call center, being on the front line and talking to [00:03:00] customers all day, every day is.
is hard. It's exhausting, but it's also rewarding, right? When you get to help that customer doing whatever they needed, or maybe even what they didn't know they needed. But making sure that we can put as many tools and flexibility to our team members as possible is super important. And that's how I approach our workforce management mindset.
And I'm super excited to be able to do that. It's
Dave Hoekstra: it's funny because I might be the exact opposite of you. I hated math in School like just was like I was the kid that never even turned in his homework. He hated math so much I don't know how I made it from grade to be honest because I just flat out refused to do my math homework.
I hated it so much. I liked the people aspect of kind of workforce management and actually ended up enjoying some of the math parts, but thankfully Excel did all the math work for me that I was terrible at. Now I'm actually interested, I want to dig a little deeper. When you say you started in the finance team and you [00:04:00] stumbled across workforce management, how, what did that look like?
Precious Bucher: I didn't actually, I started in the call center. My goal was to make it to the finance team. That was my dream goal was to go be an accountant at Zappos. As most
Dave Hoekstra: kids grow up dreaming of being.
Precious Bucher: Once I decided to grow up and get a real job that's not fair. Radio DJ is also a very hard job.
It's a lot of fun. I miss it. It was a great, it was a great time. But once I decided to get into a corporate career, that was, my goal was to get into Zappos, I fell in love with Tony and delivering happiness and everything that they stood for. And I didn't care what I did. But once I got in, my, my long term goal was to get into finance using my accounting degree and all of those things.
But honestly, like I said, I fell in love with the people and the call center itself, and I thought that I could make bigger of a difference there and being able to get the opportunity on our workforce management team was priceless and being able to work my way up there [00:05:00] and learn from there. And the bright side is I get to work with my finance team on a regular basis.
So it's the best of both worlds. There you go.
Dave Hoekstra: You, you made it right. You did exactly what you set out to do. Now what did that, what did the team look like? This is, going on, like you said, 12, 11, 12 years ago. What did the team and the process look like back then? Like when you first came into it, reflecting back on it, what did the workforce management, the scheduling pieces look like back then?
How were things done?
Precious Bucher: Great question. Our team was split into two teams. We had one area focused on our we call it the stat team. They were focused on the metrics and forecasting and building out reporting. And then we had our planning and scheduling team, which is what I had started out on. So we did real time management, looking at the cues in real time, making sure that we had our resources where they needed to be moved them where necessary.
Scheduling all meetings, team meetings, one on ones, activities. scheduling those into our workforce management tool that we used at the time. But [00:06:00] overall, it was very manual. We didn't have a lot of resources. It was all mostly done in Excel. It was a lot of trial and error. And we didn't necessarily have all of the historical metrics or data that we now use.
So it was definitely a growth in leaning on data and being able to figure out how to use the historicals to be able to predict the future, even more so than just, Forecasting for call volume, right? But what does it do when we close for an all hands? Like we close our entire company down. So what's that impact for the next days that come in from that where that's not seasonality, but people might still need to call in.
So then that brings up extra volume for the following days. It's not something that we had historically. Men so good at predicting 12 years ago, but now I would say that we've done much better at doing that. Yeah,
Dave Hoekstra: It's actually really funny to hear because most of the great WFM leaders of today All have that part in their story of [00:07:00] oh my god.
It was the worst. We struggled we Everything was gut instinct and we were just, we were making it up as we went along. And, but I think that's all you can do, right? Anybody who comes in and has every button automatically push and every day that you don't learn the instincts and the things that make good leaders out of a WFM team.
So I think that's great, and I have yet to find anyone who is working in a leadership role in a workforce management. Position that has said, yeah, the day I got there, all I did was click this forecast button and it all just worked. It's all right. There's always a lot of struggle and a lot of Excel involved in it.
Build your own forecasting model. Okay, sure. Whatever that takes. And so continuing on like compare and contrast the way we do things today versus then, what are some things about the way we do things [00:08:00] today that are significantly better and then maybe even something that might be significantly worse than the way we used to do things.
Precious Bucher: I think for us leaning into a culture of data has made it so much easier to be able to do things that we haven't been able to do where let me give you an example of knowing what's important to team members. For example, for scheduling, right? Like we're very customer centric and employee centric first.
But if we're working on Oh, everybody wants 410s because they'd love an extra day off, right? That sounds like a great idea. But if we actually rolled that out without trying to get some buy in and some data from our employees, we might accidentally create very burnt out and very tired employees who don't want to work super long days because it does it's not worth it to them to have this third day off, right?
Because now I have to recover for all of those days. 410s is Not for the faint of heart, right? Especially as a frontline
Dave Hoekstra: employee. [00:09:00] I will never forget when I switched to 410s. And you see those three days off and you just think, Oh, this is going to be great. And then those first few days that your body gets to that seven and a half, eight hour mark.
And you look and you're like, Oh my gosh, I still have two hours left to go. It was a real like eye opening experience. Like, all right this maybe is not built for
Precious Bucher: everyone. Yeah, but if we, mathematically, right? Oh, it's easy to do that. I could make a case operationally why four tens is the right way to go and be a great employee experience and all of those things.
But is it without trying to get to the what do employees want? What is their satisfaction of working four tens versus not? So making sure that they have choices is super important, but being able to have access to that data and knowing that it's okay to ask your employees what their sentiment is and have them know that it matters is super important.
So I think that's one thing that we [00:10:00] do. I don't even want to say differently. Cause I do think that we've always valued that input, but I do think that we're using it in ways better than we ever have before. Which is super exciting. I would say what's more complicated. Is the call center hasn't gotten any less complicated in 12 years and that's across the board, right?
Like before it was chat and email and phones and now we have SMS and we have social and there's all these ways to reach out to a business at all. So adding in Yeah. Organically and unintentionally, in some ways, all these ways for our customers to contact us just adds extra layers of staffing and training.
And that I think over complicates not only our team members processes, but definitely the workforce management processes and figuring out how to balance all of those. Things that you didn't have to 12 years ago.
Dave Hoekstra: I imagine it's probably even especially more difficult for [00:11:00] you because, Zappos is seen as an organization that should be very tech on the forefront, right?
And, I can imagine people saying, what do you mean I can't contact Zappos via WhatsApp? Why would, why can't they do that? And so I imagine you guys probably have to spend a little bit more time and attention into what channels you do have available than most other organizations simply because of who you are.
Precious Bucher: Yeah, we do. We are very purposeful. It's exciting because we do really have so many ways for customers to reach out to us like we do have SMS. We still have chat. We still have email. We still have phones. We're still open 24 7. All of those things are super important to us. But When we broached going into SMS, we did it very diligently and making sure that we didn't lose our Zappos voice by going and going into that [00:12:00] type of contact channel.
So that's been our most recent type of contact channel and it's been almost the most exciting because chat or texting with somebody is just so much more informal in some ways. So we get to showcase our Zappos personality even more in SMS which is pretty exciting, but it's also that instant.
gratification for a customer that they can meet us when they want to meet with us, where an email, you can go back and forth a million times before you get a resolution. And that might happen in a text message, but it doesn't feel like you did 20 emails to get to a resolution. It was one conversation, right?
So being able to deliver an even better version of customer service, SMS is a huge win in my opinion. And as a millennial I would rather. Text in with a company than chat or call or email. So I'm super excited that we have SMS as a functionality for our contact channel.
Dave Hoekstra: As a Gen Xer myself, it makes me sweat a little bit.
I still like a good solid phone conversation, but that's [00:13:00] probably because I'm an extrovert and I just want to, I'll talk to people until their ears fall off. And so I like to be the one that kind of freaks them out about. Knowing how contact centers work. I'm the guy that's so what scheduling program do you use?
And they're like, what, I don't even know who you are. So that's but I do agree with you. My, my wife loves the different communication channels and it's funny you talked about the Zappos voice just recently in a few contacts that I've had with with one, one brand over the last few weeks.
They've mentioned how we've got your back. It's showing up in their script. Like we've got your back or I've got your back. And it's funny how, you see the way. Organizations are trying to retain that friendly voice, that, that conversational discussion. And yeah, I've definitely noticed that.
So it's good to hear that Zappos is able to retain that as well. Although I'm [00:14:00] all about a good, solid LOL. In a conversation with a customer service agent. So
Precious Bucher: yes, you'll definitely have to try texting with us next time that you need any service. You'll get some quite some good emojis and quite the conversation.
I
Dave Hoekstra: love it. Nothing like a good cry laughing emoji to really set the tone for for what we're discussing. Do me a favor for those who might be a little curious, give us a little bit of an overview of how what the setup for you guys looks
Precious Bucher: We have a few hundred employees in the U S that handle our phones and SMS contacts.
And we still offer chat and email. Although those are currently outsourced.
Dave Hoekstra: The agents that you guys employ, Zappos has always been seen as a real customer experience centric organization, but you're also starting to get a reputation as an employee centric one, right? And so what kind of decisions have led to you guys focusing a [00:15:00] lot on your employee experience and.
How to retain good talent.
Precious Bucher: Honestly, that employee centric mindset is what brought me to Zappos to start with. We believe that if you take care of your employees, they take care of your customers, right? So having that be the forefront of all of our decisions is something that excites me every day and why I'm still at Zappos after all of these years.
I love being able to be a people first mindset and figuring out that balance because there's still a job to be done at the end of the day, right? What's that balance of having the right head count and scheduled at the right places and making sure that we have the right people doing that. And how do you balance that all together by making happy employees?
And from a workforce management piece, I think that's really challenging. It's been. a super passion project for me for quite a few years around, how do I get employees to be able to work whenever they want to, right? And at a call center, that's not completely possible, right? In a project based work, it is, you can work when there is work, you can make your own schedule.[00:16:00]
But when, The hours that you need to work or the work that you're doing is time, right? When are customers calling us? And that's when you need to be there and present. How do we give that autonomy to employees to be able to work when is best for them, right? So that has been something that's been super important to our workforce management team for, Probably eight of the 12 years that I have worked here, and one of the reasons that we actually chose to go with Collabrio was that there, there was some flexibility options and scheduling that we hadn't been able to see in other workforce management tools.
At one point, we tried to build our own which was super awesome, and it did work, but it's a lot of maintenance to be able to do that so we chose to try to find a tool that already existed to be able to build that in and even, Looking forward, like into the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic and into the great resignation, I did a lot of research personally to find out what made employees happy, right?
And almost all [00:17:00] surveys that you could see what Why people work, obviously for a paycheck, they want compensated fairly. I can't really control that. Or my team can't really control that at a workforce management. But the other piece that they were super passionate about invested in is their schedule.
If they had the schedule that they wanted and they got to have the work life balance that they wanted, or they got to do all the things that they needed to do, but have that schedule that made their life be what they wanted it to be. They actually didn't care if they made a little less. Now I'm not advocating to pay people less.
That is not at all what I'm saying. But, as a workforce management team, that is directly in our control. We can figure out ways to give different scheduling options To our employees. And honestly, it's better for the operation anyways, if you're trying to fit the same size Lego pieces to build out a call center model, you're going to have lots of extra staffing where you don't need it.
You're going to be understaffed and other intervals where you shouldn't be because you're trying to make all of these one size pieces fit [00:18:00] into building this perfect Lego model. And that doesn't work when they're all the same. Pieces, right? You need different sized Legos to build this amazing sculpture or whatever it is that you want to build.
Sorry, I have lots of Legos all over my desk. So that's the analogy that
Dave Hoekstra: I have. You cannot build the Lego Millennium Falcon with a bunch of big blocks of pieces, right? It requires lots of little tiny pieces. How, and
Precious Bucher: traditionally, like you get five eights or four tens, and even that gives you some flexibility and that gives you some different Lego pieces.
But really, how do I solve for Are people going back to school or ones who have other part time jobs, right? Like that they want to still work where they're at, but they want some flexibility around their schedule. But there's also, we talked earlier about how there's this different demographic of customers, right?
As a millennial, I'd rather text in than call in and you'd rather call in than text in, but we. Not only have so many different demographics and ages and preferences of customers, we also have that for our employees, right? So there's so many people who are [00:19:00] like, I just want to know when I'm working every day.
I want the same schedule. I never want it to change. And they want the five eights or the four tens and they never want their schedule to change. But then there's also this group of people who are like, I don't care what I'm working next week. I just want to know that if I get the concert tickets, I can go and I don't have to worry about calling off.
Or find somebody else to cover for me or whatever that case may be. And it gives us so many options operationally for a call center if we can build that in because we can let people pick their schedule where we have a need. And I, that is, I think the key piece of flexible scheduling is the employee needs to have availability and the company needs to have availability.
It doesn't work if an employee is working whenever they want to work, but there isn't a customer need. And it doesn't work if the employee is not working when there's a customer need, because you're still short staffed. So building in specific parameters and allowing people to work. I know we'll go into more detail.
So that was a high level of where
Dave Hoekstra: we're at. No let's keep going. [00:20:00] Let's keep going in that because, whereas my brain is sitting here going you got four tens and you got five eights, why not 10, three and a half, right? But that's that, but even that is a. It's putting people into a box.
And so what have you guys done that removes the edges of the box? I'm really interested in if I were a Zappos employee and I came in, what are the things you have available for them to be able to do these types of things? Choice,
right? So we, we do bids every. Couple of months.
Precious Bucher: But we let our employees choose what they're bidding into. So they could bid in we broken it up into three different boxes so they can have a full schedule scheduled. So that could be the four eighths or five to five eighths or four tenths. Or they can still participate in the bid and get one of those shifts.
And, but we then cut off 20 or 10 hours. We call it a core shift. One of the lessons [00:21:00] we learned is knowing what their course shift or putting in some guardrails to what their course shift was. So when we started, we said you got to choose whatever hours you wanted to drop which didn't necessarily build the best employee or customer experience because we had extra shortages.
People either dropped their weekend day. They're like, Oh, if I get a weekend day, I'll just drop that weekend and then I'll pick up during the week. But that didn't help get our weekend coverage. So we put in parameters that they can't drop whole days and they have to be more on the bookends. If they have a bookend hour, they can't drop the early or the late.
They'd have to drop in the middle of the day. As Almost always, you have the biggest amount of extra flexibility in the middle of your day when all those schedules overlap, right? Knowing that a little bit better on what the behaviors happened once we did open up that Pandora's box of letting them drop whatever they wanted for those core hours, putting in guardrails and correcting that was super important, so that was definitely a miss that we had to begin with.
But having that data to be able to explain [00:22:00] to our employees that this is why we made that change is super helpful. So it was a mistake worth making. And then the final box is complete self scheduling. So they don't know their schedule until two weeks in advance is when we open up those hours and then they can pick up whatever hours they want up to the 40 hours.
They can pick it up. Same day. They don't have to pick it up two weeks in advance. That's just when it opens and same for the core folks. They pick up their self scheduled hours within two weeks in advance, but they could pick it up. I think it's actually down to the minute beforehand. So as long as they sign up beforehand Which is great for folks who have doctor's appointments, right?
Or they don't know when they're going to have doctor's appointments. Or if they feel okay to work that day, right? If they, it actually saves them some sick time and vacation time because they're not signing up for hours that they have to go and then knock off for whatever
Dave Hoekstra: reason. So you're talking about their editing kind of their start times and their stop times all almost in [00:23:00] real time is what it boils down to.
Now, do you see a trend where the agents Take more. How often are they fulfilling their full 40
Precious Bucher: always? Because we have put in the correct guardrails, right? So if they don't work their 40 hours, that does impact their attendance policy and their hours in that way. But they have up until the last minute of that week to be able to complete those 40 hours.
They know in advance where they're at, they have the, in Collaboreal, they can see exactly how many hours they're at so that it's easy for them to manage. But they, we have not, I don't, I do not believe that we have lost any employee to not working their full 40 hours.
Dave Hoekstra: Okay. My brain actually goes what if you don't need them?
But it sounds like you always need them. Is that,
Precious Bucher: We do have unpaid time off options for lower volume weeks so that people, any, [00:24:00] but that applies to anyone. So if they're the full schedule, the self scheduled or the core scheduled they would be able to utilize unpaid time off as available anyways.
But that would be something that for folks in full scheduling, if we don't would not need to work a full 40 hours. Okay.
Dave Hoekstra: And what about Intra shift, right? Are they utilizing the brakes and lunch move capability as well?
Precious Bucher: Yes. Yes, they are. And they honestly, they love that. That's actually one of their favorite features of Collabrio is being able to move their breaks and lunches.
So They can still use that in the full self scheduling as well, if they're scheduled enough hours to require a break. Huh.
Dave Hoekstra: Okay. Now here's the 64, 000 question, which is an old school throwback. It, million dollar question now? I don't know. 64, 000 isn't that much money anymore.
It used to be. But the you said you did a lot of research on, employees and what they want out of their relationship with their employer and [00:25:00] what keeps people engaged and retained and happy. Is this working is really the question that, that we're seeing, what kind of feedback have you seen and what kind of what kind of anecdotal information can you share about this policy and the way it's working for you guys?
Precious Bucher: For sure, we've definitely seen a massive decrease in having schedules be cited for exit leave leavings when our employees are leaving on their own. We also have more people each shift bid sign up for the core shift or the self scheduling which is pretty fascinating because people are like, Oh, it works.
I like, I see My team members doing this and it works for their life because there's a lot of people who are like, wait, I don't have a set schedule. I don't know when I'm working. That seems scary to me, but as they're seeing other people do it and they're having no problems with it and they're loving it because they have that flexibility added to their life.
We have more people each shift bid sign up, which is pretty exciting. We do allow people to switch their schedule model each month if they [00:26:00] chose to yeah. But we don't have a lot of people who change in the middle of a shift bid, which is also pretty cool. But we wanted people to feel safe to try it and not be like, Oh my God, I have to commit for the next six months of this schedule that I don't know if I like, I've never done anything like this before, right?
So we wanted to make sure that there were some guardrails and a safety net for our employees so that they weren't just trapped into something that didn't work for them.
Dave Hoekstra: Because I'm not always just about the rah super positive, I'll ask the other direction of, are there detractors?
Are there people that don't like this? And if there are, like, what are the reasons they're citing why this might not be optimal for them?
Precious Bucher: For some, I would say people who don't get a bid that they wanted in the shift bid. So maybe they got that Saturday, right? That they don't want to work. They're like, Oh, I'll just sign up for full self scheduling so that I can work.
whatever hours I want Monday through Friday. And in high volume times, that's a great solution [00:27:00] for them because there's almost always availability, right? But when there's lower volumes and the seasonality that comes with call centers, it's very eye opening to them when they're like, Oh crap, there isn't enough hours that I want to work.
And now I have no control about when I do work and all of those things. So walking employees to this isn't the model for you. without taking away their feeling of control has been, I'd say one of our biggest challenges, but we, I think we've done a really good job of painting and showcasing like this, you could either have a set schedule and you know what you're doing each week or you don't, right?
And here's what that risk is and what that cost is. If you can never work on a Monday night, Then this schedule maybe might not be for you because there might be Monday nights that's the only time that there's available for you to pick up. So picking the shift that best fits their needs.
So we do have some folks who, as I said earlier, [00:28:00] we let the schedules open two weeks in advance that they stay up till midnight so that they can pick their schedules and they have first dibs. And we get overwhelming feedback about, Hey, I have to stay up till midnight to pick your schedule. If you are staying up till midnight to pick your schedule, then this isn't a schedule for you.
This isn't a model that is actually good for you. And in reality is having a set model or four eights or five, 10. I keep saying that backwards five days or four tens might be a better fit. Or even we can still do a unique schedules. You mentioned like the, we could do. Three twelves. And then the rest, like we could still have other set schedules that would still work for them and the business.
So we do have some options there, but when it comes to the bids, we do traditional and then we get more unique as people have requests.
Dave Hoekstra: That's awesome. And you're like, yeah, I think about waiting in line for concert tickets back when I was younger. It's yeah, I gotta, okay.
My last question about this. And I promise we'll talk about something [00:29:00] else, but the, one of the things that I, when talking to. People who are thinking about doing these self scheduling types of models is trust in the system, being able to make that decision for them, relinquishing control to basically an algorithm, right?
How has that process worked for you guys? Did it take a while to build trust in the system and then understand exactly how it's going to work? Or was it? Right from the beginning, it worked.
Precious Bucher: I think once we switched to Collaborate, we didn't have as much hesitancy because we had been trying something like this for quite a while albeit manually and in our own processes.
But I, thinking back to when we started rolling out like full self scheduling and you get to decide when you're working, as, oh my god, I was terrified. Like how do you know people are going to show up when you need them to show up? And all of these things. I think... The proper [00:30:00] guardrails and expectations, not only for your employees, but for your own self is what makes that successful.
So what are you willing to accept? What are you not willing to accept? Having how I mentioned earlier that we had to rein back a little bit of, no, you can't just drop your Saturday. Cause if you got a Saturday, that means that we needed you here on that Saturday. You can drop some of your hours on Saturday, but you can't drop the whole thing because that doesn't actually solve what we need.
Cause again, it needs to be a perfect fit of. The customers have a need and the employees also have a need or a desire to work during those times. But if there aren't customers calling at the time that you want to work, then you don't get to work. Cause there's not a need for you there. But building in those proper expectations and guardrails from all fronts and showcasing.
Even just sharing what the volume looks like, right? Some people on the frontline employees have never seen a forecast of this is where all the contacts come in and just showing that with your team [00:31:00] members to be like, this is where we decide and how we need you and letting them have a peek behind the curtain of how those decisions are made.
Help them make the right decisions. Guardrails and a transparency.
Dave Hoekstra: It's funny you've mentioned it a couple times, and actually this was going to be my next point, and you led straight into it, was how many times throughout our conversation today, you've mentioned explaining things to the agents, and this is less of a question and more of me getting up on a soapbox for everyone who's listening.
This stuff works, you guys. It works when people understand why you make the decisions that you make, right? When we're making these decisions in a vacuum they seem arbitrary to people, but when you show them like, guys, this is the forecast. This is it. Look, it says right here, exactly how many people I need to be successful.
And if all of you want that day off, I will not be successful. So you can see my conundrum here. And I think it's great. I was wondering, do you guys have a [00:32:00] systematic approach to showing them this information or is this a kind of whenever as needed?
Precious Bucher: I'd say more whenever as needed. I'd love to be in a place that I'm more systematic.
And at some point we'll get there. But it's definitely more as needed. We do what we call ops open houses. We have a slack channel that's open all the time. So when people have questions that they can come in and ask whenever are needed, we do round tables. We do a quarterly sentiment surveys, but that's not just for the operation that's across for the entire department.
So all of our training, Leaders all everything is fair game when it comes to the sentiment survey. So we go out looking for feedback and we do our best to implement that as much as possible. And what our ongoing strategy is, right? Obviously not all ideas can take flight. We've definitely have had people like you should never have an attendance policy.
I'd love to be in a world where we don't need an attendance policy, right? We've actually tried that. It didn't [00:33:00] work. But we do have a very lax. Attendance policy and it's no fault and people get to use it how they deem fit and that came partly from feedback from our employees to make sure that we were getting what they needed.
And even before we rolled out our self scheduling, we spent quite a few weeks meeting with every team and saying what is when we asked them what they wanted. They're like, we want flexibility and we want stability. And I'm like, those are it. Opposites.
Dave Hoekstra: We want black and we want white,
Precious Bucher: Yeah. So what does that mean to you, right?
And that's, it just proved the case even more that it's not a one size fits all. So how do we be able to bucket those? We can't have unlimited options cause it still has to be manageable, which is why we have three sets of buckets that folks can choose essentially. But getting that feedback and having them be a participant in the conversation is super important to that buy in.
But it helps build that trust. It helps them understand what [00:34:00] their responsibility is. And it's actually really cool to just be talking with the folks that your decisions are impacting on the daily basis to truly understand what that impact is. Sorry. I guess I'd correct myself. We do have processes in place, but it also is as necessary.
Dave Hoekstra: Sure. No, absolutely. That's, there's never a, there's no absolutes when it comes to this kind of thing. And, I'm just super happy that we're to a point in not just contact centers, but employer employee relationships where this is a thing, right? When I first started back in the day, I'm sure there were there are organizations that did that, but contact centers were very much sit down, shut up.
Take calls and you have a job, which I was right. I was super thrilled. I, and looking at the way things are now, we we, we managed and we survived the great resignation and the great reshuffling. And now the tool is more about, all right, how can we really make [00:35:00] this to where we are retaining these people for a long time, who are very good at what they do.
And it's great to see what you guys are doing with that. So I am just absolutely. gobsmacked with how awesome you guys are handling this. And it's really great to see not only the way you're doing it, but the way Collaborio can help along with that with that journey as well. So I will definitely say Precious has been wonderful having you as of the podcast.
And I'm super excited to see the continuation of that whole story and how you guys are continuing to work. And, I'm sure that we'll have many more conversations as the time goes on. But I do say typically as part of the podcast I like to give the guests our final word.
Espouse some wisdom, let us know what's going on or anything you'd like to say out there to maybe someone who is thinking of considering workforce management as a career or something you'd like to say. So the floor is yours. Give us the final word.
Precious Bucher: [00:36:00] Awesome. Definitely. I think I touched on it mostly here.
The whole time anyways, but your employees voice matters, right? Rather you're a supervisor and a leader in, in, in what they're doing, or you're a part of the workforce management team, or you're a C suite, whatever you are, your employees voice matters. And. Ask for it regularly because it's going to make you better.
It's going to make them better. And it's going to make your whole company better on an ongoing basis. So that would be my parting wisdom for everyone in business.
Dave Hoekstra: Amen. And I'm right there with you. Thank you precious for joining us here on the working smarter podcast. It's been a fantastic pleasure having you here with us.
For those of you out there that listen, we always appreciate. Time you spend with us as always, if you would want to be a guest on the Colabrio podcast, or would like to suggest a topic, please let us know. Just send us an email marketing at Colabrio. com. And we'll be glad to put that idea into consideration.
So huge. Thank you to precious. Thank you for joining us today. Precious. [00:37:00]
Precious Bucher: Thank you for having me, Dave. This has been fun for the
Dave Hoekstra: rest. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode of working smarter, as always have a great rest of your day, a great rest of your week. And we'll talk to you soon on the next episode of working smarter from Colabrio.
Thanks everybody.
