Angi Drove Over $1M Annually in BPO Cost Savings Through Increased Productivity and Accountability

Challenge

When Angi first reached out to Playvox, they had a number of challenges. With over 800 agents in different locations across the globe, Angi struggled with little insight into agent productivity. Adding to the complexity of having useful insight, Angi also relies on Business Process Outsourcing Companies (BPOs) to maintain staff to support their customers. Without visibility to metrics, there was no accountability for the BPOs Angi leveraged to maintain costs and run operations efficiently. This left Angi with soaring staffing costs, varying customer experiences, and high costs per completed job. Lack of accountability at the BPO also created issues with low productivity, resulting in long handle times, low occupancy and missed SLAs. Most critically, all of these challenges impacted customer experience.  

Rob Lajeunesse, Director of CX Strategy and Operations at Angi, said “We had virtually no ability to understand in real time, if your agents were maximizing their productivity.  We were forced to drastically overstaffed to hit customer experience targets, with minimal confidence in performance if we staffed closer to requirements.” With these issues, Rob was challenged to ensure the Angi contact center and the BPOs they leveraged were as productive as possible. They needed a WFM solution and evaluated a number of vendors with criteria such as automated forecasting and capacity planning capabilities, real time adherence monitoring, tight integration to Angi’s care system of interaction, and workforce tailored reporting and analytics.

Solution

Playvox WFM has now been in place for 15 months. With the Playvox solution, Angi was able to recognize multiple benefits and hard cost savings. Angi was able to hold the BPOs accountable for low-performing agents through real-time visibility of productivity metrics and robust reporting capabilities. Angi was also able to optimize the allocation of resources, based on more accurate forecasts with Playvox’s automated forecasting. The integration between Playvox WFM and Zendesk gave Angi additional insight into productivity metrics such as occupancy and tickets per hour. And, with Playvox, they also could understand clearly if agents were adhering to their schedule and the accuracy of their forecast across their omnichannel business. This allowed Angi to better pinpoint problem areas and immediately address issues which enabled them to control costs and create better customer experiences.

“Playvox has been integral in driving accountability with our BPOs and is operationally critical to running our agent operations.  We would not be able to effectively balance costs and performance in the way we do today, without support from Playvox tooling and their team”

Results

Since implementing Playvox WFM, Angi has estimated an annual impact of over $1M in BPO productivity gains and cost efficiencies. Agent occupancy increased from 43% to 80%. Touches per hour improved from 2.5 to 5.5. SLAs went from 70% to 90%. Angi was able to identify low performers easily and the percentage of agents working the minimum of 5 tickets per hour improved from 20% to 60%. Automated demand forecasting saved Angi 30% in cost per full-time employee.  Angi also used Playvox as a core component of renegotiated BPO contracts, using workforce insights to set contract parameters around metric goals and enforcement of KPIs.

“Playvox has been crucial to Angi being able to take back control of our agent operations. Driving accountability across our agent pool has not just improved customer experience and financial performance, it has also increased our team’s ability to deliver on both of those metrics as other factors outside of our control shift.  We would not be able to effectively run our contact center without Playvox.”

Learn more about Angi here