Prior to the arrival of COVID-19, cloud-based software was used widely in school districts for everything from managing student information to providing personalized learning to streamlining back-office work. But the software became even more critical after the onset of the pandemic, when both learning and working went remote. PowerSchool is a provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education, helping educators and students realize their full potential. Today, PowerSchool’s unified technology supports more than 13,000 customers and more than 45 million students. Similar to its customers, PowerSchool needed to pivot its operations during the pandemic, with most support agents transitioning to remote work. This shift, combined with a busy back-to-school season, led PowerSchool to upgrade its workforce management system to improve forecast accuracy and make sure staff was deployed adequately across its various support channels. The goal of the PowerSchool support organization is to forecast accurately and to deploy resources optimally across phone, chat and web channels while maintaining the needed service levels and superior customer experience. Critical to making this happen is PowerSchool’s team of more than 500 employees who are dispersed across three countries. However, as it navigated remote work and the COVID landscape, PowerSchool wanted a simpler method to organize support agent shifts. Working against the company was a lack of workforce management tools to help make sure the correct number of agents was staffed for each of its support channels. For example, staffing was managed with an onerous spreadsheet model. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the shifts required, schedule adherence, call arrival and coverage patterns, PowerSchool needed an omnichannel technology strategy. In turn, PowerSchool deployed Calabrio’s workforce management (WFM) resources to improve forecast accuracy and ensure adequate staffing levels for handling phone, chat and web queues. Using realtime databases with agent and call insights allowed managers to monitor a higher volume of interactions and align agent shifts with customer demand and historical forecast. The company used Calabrio WFM with a Talkdesk integration to match phone resources with added demand to better support the needs of educational organizations. “Agent shift adherence enhanced our ability to manage staffing and help support agents succeed in each customer interaction,” said Pankaj Bhardwaj, group vice president, PowerSchool. “We can now accommodate the different shifts and times of the day our agents work and adjust — in near real-time — the times of shift breaks to better align with anticipated customer call volumes.” With Calabrio’s Talkdesk integration, PowerSchool found support agents tracked at an impressive 95 percent schedule adherence. “Tracking agent shift adherence provides critical insight into the busy back-to-school season’s impact on our different support channels,” said Pankaj. “For example, agent phone schedule adherence tracked at 75 percent due to many agents being pulled into chats as volumes tend to increase on that channel.” Working with Calabrio, PowerSchool further streamlined its customer service operations. By shifting from the onerous spreadsheet model to integrations with business intelligence tools and human resource management, PowerSchool has improved its planning processes and agent satisfaction — leading to increased agent engagement and better customer interactions. Calabrio’s integrated technology also made a positive impact on agent scheduling and their ability to plan shifts, schedules and absences ahead of time. With Calabrio WFM resources, PowerSchool now can adjust quickly to meet customers’ needs, handle increased support calls and engage customers in new ways to assist school staff, educators, parents and students. J Vickie McGovern is the regional vice president, partner management, Calabrio CONTROL Changing the Grade PowerSchool manages the shift to remote work with workforce management By Vickie McGovern 27 REMOTE WORK SOLUTIONS rwsmagazine.com
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