The ultimate case of buyer's remorse....

[sld72382]

I just have to laugh at this....

A few months ago, my call center invested in a new employee scheduling software. According to the higher ups this was supposed to make the supervisor's jobs easier as it did the scheduling and the lunches, as well as providing interactive lessons for new services we were going to be offering to clients. The other big feature was that it was supposed to learn and predict the call pattern of calls coming in. This software is so big that they had to gut an empty room and built a "command center" for it.

Well... it has not worked out that way. The first big sign of trouble was it eliminated the Mon-Fri 9-6 shift, saying it "wasn't taking enough calls." My center has what they call a "3 1/2 day week," which is a 6 hour day on Wednesdays and 3 12 hour days from Mon-Tues or Thurs-Sat (which is what I am on). At first it looks like a blessing, but once Saturday comes I am dead tired. They need to realize that I'm not the same person as I was 12 hours before.

Next, any seniority that employees had went right out the window, a person being there for 6 years is looked at the same way as a person who has been there for a month. Why? Because of a new "ranking" system, the software looks at your productivity and your evaluation (audit) scores and ranks you accordingly. Problem is, a person who was working there for a month and had no bad luck with our crappy quality manager would get a higher ranking than a person who's been there for 2 years and the only thing wrong was two bad audits (for stupid reasons), as was the case with me.

Next was the "ability" to pick your shift, but once again how long you've been there meant nothing. It went by ranking. I was placed #74 (the supervisors could NOT believe that - they all said I deserved to be in the top 10) only because of two lousy audits, and I found out when the time came to pick your shift there was a few Mon-Fri shifts but all they were all taken by employees ranked higher than me, even though their troubleshooting skills were not as good as me.

Another peeve is that before this new software came into play you could place a client on a brief hold and it would reset your handle time (length of time you were on a call) so that on a supervisor's monitor, it would go down to 0. This was great as if you were on a long call (that required more than running a scan and getting the client off the phone) you would do this every 40 minutes. Now the software tracks your total time regardless if you put the client on hold or not, which results in supervisors getting on your ass for spending too much time on a call.

Next is the "adherence" to your schedule. Although it's pretty lenient now, anything less than the required adherence will result in you not accruing vacation hours (4 every two weeks for meeting adherence). Sound OK? Personal days (sick days, etc...) lower your adherence. Better not get sick, otherwise the software will punish you by not giving you your vacation!

Now, here is the kicker. They are dumping the software! Why? Apparently a lot of long time employees quit because A) the software would schedule their lunch at crazy times (sometimes 8 hours into a shift), B) many people suddenly found themselves without vacation hours as they needed to take a day off sometimes and were too late to file for a vacation day, C) many people NEEDED the Mon-Fri shift and when it was taken away they were force to quit. Plus many other issues. Oh, and it's not doing the thing it was supposed to do: predict the call volume!

Let's hope when it goes away I get my Mon-Fri back!

[Sandman]

Looks like the managers didn't remember the phrase

"If it isn't broke, don't fix it!"

[Knightmare]

Many companies are going to those automated schedulers, with horrible results. My old company RadioShack started using them (WorkBrain or something like that) and it schedules employees at very dumb times. Last time I was there, in the morning (in a "dead" mall) there were 5 employees there in the morning, and only one closing. Why? Cuz all the old people who were walking the mall came in to buy batteries. They had a large number of tickets, but they came up to less than $5/ticket. As it died down, the employees left, and the closer came in. Now it is company policy that there should always be two people closing (more of a guideline, actually. I can't tell you how many times I've had to close by myself), but this software throws that right out the window.

Ugh.. I hate those programs.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

We supposedly went to an automatic scheduler some time ago, but I think the managers still can make changes, because we really don't have problems with people getting scheduled to take their meal breaks at odd times, and people still get scheduled when they are available for the most part.

[cpux]

Sheesh. You'd think something like that would be easy. It's just a matter of taking time samples (say, 15 minutes), and take a weighted average between that and a weekly histogram. A good program would have the ability to program in holidays where the call center is inactive, so α can be set to 0 and the average doesn't get thrown off.

The principle isn't too different from predicting rate of packet arrivals, with the whole probability of calls/minute determinable by a poisson random variable.

[ NAVG = Ni * α + NAVG-1 * (1 - α), where Ni is the current rate, NAVG is the weighted average, NAVG-1 is the previous weighted average taken the weeks before, and α is the confidence factor which is between 0 and 1]

Yes, telecommunication and computer networking is my area of expertise. How'd you guess? Also, sorry for the excess nerdiness.

[Geek King]

This is a great example of what people always seem to forget: Programs are only as good as the programmer! If the programmer doesn't understand your business, well by golly, the program won't either! Any kind of automatic scheduler pretty much would have to be special made for for a particular business. Plus, any major shift like this should be accompanied by a hefty beta-test period. Sounds like neither happened in the two cases mentioned.

[Der Cute]

Home Dopet did the same thing.

Corp HQ said use the software, it goes off last years same day sales, and puts people in the departments "as needed".

Well, lo and behold, I got them pretty good.

I was going to college, wanting to work 40 hrs per week and able to. But by Dictatorship, it was deemed that only people with OPEN schedules were allowed to be in the pot for software placement. Leftover people (specific scheds) were used on the weekends.

Ha.
I called the state. Applied for Underemployment. I was avail for 40 hours per week, even with college! And Orange Box wasnt using me as needed!
Well HR went haywire, and I said, uh, sorry, I've already been authorized.

Store mgr was pissed, but I said, well instead of using the software, you could use me. :P I liked those weekly checks.

Cutenoob

[AFpheonix]

We have a somewhat-automated scheduler, but it lays in shifts badly, it's hard to fix availability once it's been laid in, and is just in general a pain in the butt.
Thank goodness all I have to deal with is the tech schedule. The pharmacists have to deal with a district-wide scheduler, who is an absolute idjit.

[mrtauntaun]

They jsut put one of these at one of the help desks at my company. It's so bad, some people would come in to be told they must immediately go on break. WTF?
Others would get lunch 30 minutes after starting their shift. It's truly a terrible piece of software, and I think it cost the company something like 5 million to have it implemented.

[Crosshair]

Nice Cutenoob, way to use the system to your advantage. So did they toss that computer system I hope?

[Cia]

Sounds kinda like the purchasing/ordering program one of our vendors instituted. OMG what a piece of crap. Double, triple and no billing and shipments. Who the hell is 'Braun' and can we kill him/her. The people who sold them the software spent months and many bucks to get it running the way they said it would run.

[bean]

sld, this sounds a lot like Blue Pumpkin - we had that at the last call center I worked at. It would routinely schedule me to work 7am to 5pm one day, then 11pm to 7am the next, then 9pm to 5am, etc.

Garbage.

[Polenicus]

Heh, the call center I used to work for used software like this.

Let's just call it Red Jack-o-lantern to avoid any issues.

Anyway, Big Red had been installed a long time before I joined the company. By the time I left, it STILL wasn't working right. It would do things like schedule 2 hour shifts (By law in B.C. you have to be paid for a minimum of four), schedule shifts within 6 hours of each other (Close one night, come in for mornings the next day) have breaks and lunches all over the map (One girl had a break 15 minutes into her shift, and then her lunch 30 mins later).

It TRIED to predict call flow, but about once a year we'd have a big virus outbreak (Sasser, Blaster, etc) and be swamped with calls. And those two weeks of having the needle pinned threw the whole rest of the year off. Most days we were either calling people to come in, or sending people home early. In DROVES.

When I left after three years of working there, Supervisors were still having to manually review and correct the schedules.

[wagegoth]

I was just reading about this software today on my way into work. OMG! How insane. I think some kind of software like this would be handy as a rough draft scheduler, but it needs to be finalized by a human. And, frankly, any software that doesn't follow legal requirements shouldn't be sold. This software really does have to be customized for each company and, within the company, for each region, and even each location, which would cost a lot more than just running a simple program.

Of course, Wal-Mart is installing it. They say it's worked very successfully at some of their stores. But what it does is treat people very obviously as just another piece of equipment to be used by the company.

[SuperDan]

Our front end is the largest department by a long shot, and they're the only department that uses computer-generated scheduling. The schedule program does try to predict personnel need (based on that week number of the previous year) but as part of the process it shows the prediction to the manager running the schedule and allows the manager to make changes (it basically tells you, for every 15 minute block, how many cashiers are needed, then the manager can raise or lower that number based on whatever, like a one-day sale, a weird promotion that will probably pack the store, a holiday falling on a different day of the week than it did last year, etc). The manager also manually enters an availability time range for each cashier and manually enters the non-cashier shifts (CSM and service center, bookkeeping, dedicated backshop, etc). The schedule program runs the schedule from there based on the availability as put in the system as well as cashier seniority. The program can also schedule breaks and lunches, but we've never used it for that, probably because it wouldn't do it right, instead leaving the scheduling of lunches to the CSM of the evening before, as part of their responsibility in creating the "lane sheet" (a who-does-what-where deal telling what register people are on for what times, and the breaks are also recorded on there).

Every other department schedules by hand. Of course, the next biggest department is slightly less than half the size of the front end. The program, btw, is SuperSched.