CUSTOMER PROFILE

Gusto’s collaborative work style needed a workforce management solution that would provide structure yet maintain flexibility. They needed greater insight to metrics, a platform to ensure quality customer experiences, superior integration capabilities and expert advisory to manage it all. Gusto turned to NICE for workforce management (WFM) integrated with the NICE CXone platform and NICE Value Realization Services for ongoing expert advisory, change management and adoption success.

01 THE BEFORE

Gusto’s growing pains: balancing eSat and cSat

Gusto has a unique environment with amazing benefits that draws a young, diverse, and enthusiastic workforce. Employees (aka Gusties) don’t have titles, largely pick their own schedules, and have the freedom to do their jobs remotely, in-office, or hybrid. It’s a place where people genuinely want to work.

However, a young and inexperienced crew occasionally poses some challenges. For example, new Gusties are often enthusiastic but lack contact center best practices. These challenges were compounded by Gusto’s rapid growth and resulted in declining customer satisfaction scores, social media complaints and churn.

02 DESIRE TO CHANGE

Lack of structure leads to gaps in service

Gusties didn’t want structured schedules, but the lack of structure created staffing gaps. Agents also had some flexibility in Gusto’s workforce management system, which allowed them to “backfill” call data. As a result, individual agent performance looked stellar, but Gusto was unable to understand capacity needs to properly forecast or schedule. Within their old system, Gusto also had no visibility to efficiency metrics such as AHT, ASA, Adherence, and Occupancy.

In short, it was creating a cycle of high occupancy, high shrinkage, dissatisfied customers, and agents who didn’t want to answer the phone.

03 THE SOLUTION

Go with Gusto: the rapid transition to NICE

Gusto implemented NICE WFM to create more structure and predictability, and quickly expanded to include NICE CXone. NICE WFM’s robust integration tools, like SmartSync, allowed Gusto to connect their ACDs, CRM, quality, and other business systems into their NICE WFM instance. NICE WFM also gave Gusto the ability to manage schedules in a way that best fit the needs of each team and the ability to import/export schedules with their BPO partners. Gusties now have autonomy over their own schedules but within the parameters of contact center needs. As a result, performance and effectiveness have improved, leading to better customer experiences.

NICE VRS was key to helping Gusto implement NICE solutions in an expedited timeframe and remains engaged in an ongoing capacity. VRS helped Gusto discover the best solutions to capture data for forecasting and scheduling and provides expert insight related to adoption, advanced features and how to respond to what their data are telling them.

04 THE RESULTS

9.36M reasons Gusto’s execs are happy

“Our VRS partner is constantly reviewing our environment and making suggestions on how to improve. This has been invaluable,” says Staniscia “Stan” Holmes, Gusto’s Head of Global Workforce Management and Quality. In less than a year, Gusto has realized over $9.36M in benefits—and growing.

Gusties, who were perhaps resistant to more structured schedules, now appreciate that WFM has made their lives easier – that there is a better balance in their workdays. With reduced occupancy, Gusties are more willing to be on the phone: ASA improved 69%, AHT dropped 16-22% and abandoned calls are down 50%—all improving the customer experience. In addition, NICE’s AI Forecasting has proven to be very accurate and a significant timesaver. Likewise, Gusto has reduced the time to manage schedule exceptions by 75%.

“We have visibility into our forecasts that wasn’t possible before,” Holmes says. “With Enhanced Strategic Planner, we can project everything from service levels to intervals and create hiring plans in one tool. We complete scenario planning significantly faster. For example, a few months into 2022, we had already been through 50-60 ‘what if’ scenarios for FY23. To have the ability to say, ‘here’s an option’ and understand the potential outcomes is incredibly powerful."

05 THE FUTURE

Mission intelligent: evolve & transform

Access to metrics is a major change for Gusto. “We’re able to pump out so much information now and it’s given us so much insight to the business,” Holmes explains. “We have Managed Data Insights, which is a business intelligence tool coupled with expert insight from VRS, so we’re able to look at metrics in a new way. It’s not just the numbers, but we have the “why” behind it and the “how” to improve it. This is really new for us; we’re only using a fraction of what we could be, but we’re already using it to optimize.”

Because of the data and VRS advisory that Gusto now has, they can grow in a more intelligent fashion. They also have the best practice guidance needed to build out an informed quality program and to correlate quality to their WFM efforts. This is important because Gusto is currently establishing a QA program to support CXone Quality. Gusto is also expanding its workforce management team to 20 and adding another BPO partner.