Case Study: Nordia

CUSTOMER PROFILE

THE CHALLENGE

Nordia grew to become Canada’s largest provider of customer service solutions by focusing on people. And it remains Canada’s fastest-growing provider by taking on steep challenges. In January 2018, one of Canada’s most iconic brands came to Nordia with a bold proposition: go live with a new service operation in just three months on a path to absorb 60% of the brand’s entire customer service operations by year’s end.

Of course, Nordia accepted the challenge of becoming the brand’s primary customer service provider, but that commitment meant building a new and high-profile customer service operation on the fly. Due to time constraints, the first six waves of new agents were hired and on-boarded using manual spreadsheet-based processes. The brand client had unique service level compliance requirements for Nordia which required cultural shifts, and Nordia knew the new service team would need to be self-sufficient and able to perform at a high level immediately out of the gate.

THE SOLUTION

To meet and exceed the new brand client’s expectations and put employees in the best position to succeed, Nordia selected NICE Workforce Management. The solution was launched on-time, with end-to-end configuration that met the client’s needs and Nordia’s best practices. Building the team with experienced NICE Workforce Management experts and the professionals who would be using the new system day-to-day was one of the keys to rapid success. “In record-breaking time and with the amazing patience and support of the NICE training team along with four Nordia WFM team members, training was completed and our application launched within 120 days,” McNamara said.

More time to focus on success

The Nordia WFM team wanted to make sure that supervisors could focus on agent and client success rather than administrative details. So the deployment plan included a detailed training guide showing supervisors how to work quickly in NICE Supervisor WebStation. This makes it easier to assess KPIs and work directly with agents, rather than working with software. And it supports Nordia’s real- time adherence initiatives, providing alerts that prompt supervisors to take immediate action for agents out of schedule adherence.

Nordia also needed employee self-service to hit the ground running. The NICE solution enables supervisors to code certain activities for automatic schedule approval or denial, providing agents with faster responses to change requests. Global shift trades empower agents to swap or give shifts away to other agents with equal skillsets across all of the Nordia contact center locations, improving flexibility and cutting down on the time needed to find a trade partner. Nordia has further improved scheduling flexibility by introducing unpaid time off allotments, which can be approved or denied based on capacity.

Making the right moves

Nordia knew that building a world-class customer service organization for the major brand client would require making changes on the fly.

These adjustments have helped Nordia minimize attrition at the most crucial point, when agents have less than 30 days of tenure with a new client. Over the first nine months, Nordia projects a best-in-class annualized attrition rate. Improvements such as new schedule rotations and the introduction of unpaid time off resulted in a 10% decline in attrition over a single quarter.

With NICE Workforce Management’s scenario simulations and ability to optimize dual-skilled agents, Nordia is able to balance capacity between the brand client’s services more nimbly. “This feature allowed us to achieve Service Level results during peak season, which was initially projected to be unobtainable until 2019,” McNamara said.

Standing up such a huge piece of business in a short period of time wasn’t easy. But success has been sweet for the entire Nordia organization. “NICE Workforce Management helps Nordia deliver the best possible schedules to our agents, providing work-life balance while meeting the multi-skilled, inbound service level metrics of our client,” she said. “We now own 100% of four of our client’s services and 60% of the remaining business and we are able to manage those services end-to-end.”