Case Study: Online Scheduling

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 11:17:00 EDT

Hundreds of varied companies, including EBay, rely on Expert Planet LLC to address business inquiries that vary from product support to marketing. They provide a high level of customer service, matching the right products and services with the right people. Based in New York, Expert Planet is a product support call center that goes beyond the typical order entry-type call center by offering over 400 extremely knowledgeable, “expert” agents who work remotely from their homes. Expert Planet agents are located throughout the country. They pride themselves on offering their workforce the flexibility to work from home anytime, anywhere. But coordinating agents for a 24-hour schedule, 7 days a week in an efficient and transparent way proved extremely challenging. Managers found they were constantly running around, updating schedules and in desperate need of a better means of communicating with their workforce. Vice President of Agent Operations Paul Hedgecock explains, “We used Excel. People would send in the times they wanted to work and we would block out those times to confirm it.” But as the business grew, Excel proved too cumbersome to accommodate. Scheduling agents based on call-volume projections, dealing with last-minute changes, and different schedules from week to week made it almost impossible to use a manual scheduling process.

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Case Study: Online Scheduling