Expert Planet agents are located throughout the country. They pride themselves on offering their workforce with the flexibility to work from home anytime, anywhere. But coordinating agents for a 24 hour schedule, 7 days a week in an efficient and transparent way proved extremely challenging. Managers found they were constantly running around, updating schedules and in desperate need of a better means of communicating with their workforce. As the business grew, Excel proved too cumbersome to accommodate. Scheduling agents based on call volume projections, dealing with last minute changes, and different schedules from week to week made it almost impossible to use a manual scheduling process. 

Shiftboard’s dynamic, online scheduling software. When Expert Planet first approached Shiftboard, two full time employees were dedicated solely to schedule coordination.  Had they continued to schedule agents manually, they would require eight additional full time staff, in order to accommodate their growth, which would cost upwards of $200,000 annually. Instead, Expert Planet switched to Shiftboard which eliminated the need for additional employees. By switching to Shiftboard and paying an annual fee of $15,000, Expert Planet is potentially saving $185,000, indicating Shiftboard provided a 15:1 return on investment. "Going from a straight manual system to Shiftboard was absolutely necessary," explains Vice President of Agent Operations Paul Hedgecock. "Today, our agents can confirm, release, change or add work seats with just a few simple clicks. It's exactly what we need to provide the high levels of service that our clients expect in a virtual environment."

With the transparency and flexibility that Shiftboard provides, Expert Planet has been able to save the time and money previously allocated toward scheduling, and been free to focus on a much more important need- successfully growing their business. The management team was able to reallocate time previously consumed by the scheduling process, and Expert Planet agents were able to focus on the job rather than spend time updating their availability, sending emails, and waiting to see if it was actually received and integrated into the new schedule. Today, Expert Planet uses Shiftboard to simply post shifts to the calendar and allow agents to sign in, sign up and self manage their own schedules entirely. Through this process, they have noticed the day to day frustrations of agents has decreased, presumably resulting in a lower turnover rate and that communication between agents and managers was greatly improved with the ability to send broadcast messages out to all or a select group of agents quickly and as often as necessary.