Customer satisfaction is the driving force behind the success of Office Depot, the world's largest seller of office supplies. So when the fast-growing Delray Beach, Fla. retailer began exploring ways to increase productivity at its three regional call centers, customer service was the number one priority.

"The customers who call Office Depot expect and deserve a prompt response and professional service," says Chuck Ballotta, scheduling and attendance coordinator for the company's call center operations. "We knew that by finding more efficient ways to staff and manage our call centers, we would have more satisfied customers. And that means more office supplies sales."

Office Depot was looking for a workforce management solution that would reduce caller wait times and hang-ups, improve sales agent performance and boost the overall call center profits. The company found those capabilities in TotalView Workforce Management from Richardson, Texas-based IEX Corporation.
Global Leadership
With worldwide 1996 sales in excess of $6.1 billion, Office Depot operates 581 retail stores and 23 Delivery Warehouses in the United States. The company's U.S. operation also includes three Images stores, two Office Depot Express stores and five Furniture at Work retail stores. The company is a leading source of office supplies for businesses, home offices and institutions.

Outside of the U.S., the company operates a delivery network and 36 office supply retail stores in Canada, and has joint ventures or license agreements in several other countries, including 10 in Mexico, eight in Israel, four in Poland, five in Columbia, three in France and two in Thailand. In addition, the first Office Depot location in Japan is scheduled to open in late 1997.

Office Depot also operates three regional call centers handling an average of 23,000 inbound calls in a typical business day. The company's Delray Beach, Fla. center seats from 300 to 450 agents and fields an average of 10,000 daily calls. With an average of 250 agents on staff, its Concord, Calif. center handles about 6,000 calls a day. The company's Norcross, Ga. facility seats 500 agents and takes an average of 7,000 calls a day.

The majority of incoming calls are customer orders generated by the company's full-service office supply catalog. The direct orders generated by these catalogs are routed through the call centers and account for a significant and growing portion of Office Depot's total revenue. Call center agents also handle technical inquiries and general customer service calls.

The call centers employ Rockwell Spectrum and Rockwell Galaxy ACD technologies to route incoming calls. According to Ballotta, the operation's goal is to answer 80 percent or more of all incoming calls in 20 seconds or less and to provide the highest possible level of customer service.

As with any call center operation, a key to increasing productivity and caller satisfaction is management's ability to match agent staffing with the incoming volume of customer calls. Staffing too many agents wastes resources and reduces call center profitability. Staff too few agents, and customers languish on hold, hang up and take their office supply business elsewhere. "That's the challenge," Ballotta observes. "You want to find a happy medium that keeps your customers happy, your agents busy and your bottom line healthy."
A Total Solution
After a rigorous search that included the close evaluation of four competing call center management systems, Office Depot implemented TotalView Workforce Management from IEX. TotalView is a client/server based call center system that provides management tools for forecasting both short and long-term call volumes, scheduling, daily management, staff planning, team and office analysis, and database administration.

TotalView runs on a UNIX server linked to one or more PCs and is capable of storing and analyzing up to three years of calling data. The system evaluates call volumes and staffing levels, and continuously provides updated workforce reports to call center managers.

Ballotta says Office Depot chose TotalView because it was the only such system that allowed the company to create a centralized relational database on a single server to support all three of its call center locations. Office Depot management also liked TotalView's familiar Microsoft Windows graphical user interface (GUI) and that the company could immediately launch a comprehensive call center management solution without the need for lengthy and costly software customizations.

TotalView allows managers to track the performance of a single agent, a group of agents or an entire call center. The system's powerful relational database also provides quick access to all TotalView data.

In addition, TotalView allows call center managers to closely monitor and adjust schedules to meet seasonal and temporary changes in call volumes. "We usually see an upsurge in call volume by 10 percent in January and September," Ballotta reports. "With TotalView, we can prepare for these cyclical changes, while at the same time adjusting quickly to short-term changes in staffing requirements." The system also allows the input of employee preferences for work and vacation schedules and generates proposed schedules, which balance staffing needs with the wishes of call center personnel. This unique feature helps guarantee quick acceptance of the TotalView system by both call center management and customer service agents.
Superior Service
In addition to supplying an excellent workforce management product, IEX provided Office Depot with a solid support and training team throughout the TotalView implementation process. Ballota says, "IEX's staff made outstanding efforts to maintain a high-level quality of technical support. Office Depot has been 100 percent satisfied with both TotalView and the genuine interest and response that the IEX support team has shown our call centers."
The Key to Success
After one full year using TotalView, Office Depot has seen measurable improvements in its call center performance. Bottom-line productivity, as measured by call center revenues compared to staffing payroll costs, is up significantly at all three Office Depot sites.

"TotalView gives us the tools we need to answer calls faster and at a lower cost," says Office Depot's Ballotta. "The office supply business is a very demanding marketplace, and this new call center system is one more way we can stay a step ahead of the competition."