Complete Automation of Workforce Management Improves Workforce Productivity and Reduces Labor Costs for Telerx

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As experts in customer care, Telerx carefully manages customer interactions for industry-leading Fortune 500 global corporations and extends the brand-building efforts of these companies. Telerx's 1,400 employees in five contact centers in the U.S. and Canada provide clients' consumers with enhanced contact experiences via phone, email, the Internet, mail, and fax.

While Telerx was utilizing technology to drive its service offerings, it was using multiple manual processes and systems to track employees' time for payroll, project accounting, and client invoicing. As a company that understands the value of harnessing technology's power to develop creative solutions, Telerx knew it was time to update its workforce management systems and turned to Kronos.

An innovative interface between the Kronos solution and Telerx's Aspect phone system now quickly and accurately tracks workforce data, yielding significant workforce productivity improvements and earning the company a Kronos Best Practices Award. These awards are presented annually to customers who have achieved excellence through the implementation of Kronos workforce management solutions.

Complete automation

"Prior to implementing Kronos, Telerx used five different and un-integrated systems to track employees' time for payroll, project accounting, client invoicing, and attendance," says Tom Greenwood, Telerx vice president of strategic planning and development. "It was a manually intensive process that required daily administration by five full-time employees." Time and attendance information was entered manually each week into the payroll system. Employees tracked their time on each client's project and submitted a daily time sheet that was entered manually into a tracking system and reviewed again and edited. Each month these hours were then tallied to manually create invoices.

This manual process needed updating, which led Telerx to the Kronos Workforce Central^® suite. The Kronos system is tightly integrated with the payroll, HRIS, project accounting, and billing systems, as well as Telerx's Aspect phone system, the workhorse that powers the call floor. An HRIS interface streamlines data collection with a single point of entry for all employee data.

"Thanks to the sophisticated logic and rules Telerx configured in the Workforce Central suite, everything from pay and accrual rules to employee group sets, labor levels, and timekeeping methods are automatically assigned in the Kronos system," explains Greenwood. "No manual updates to employee information are necessary, which is a great timesaver."

Another key benefit of the integrated system is the connection between employee work activities and accounting. An interface with the project accounting system enables the import of highly defined project and activity codes that are stored as a labor level. With a specific code assigned to each type of activity, this system allows for detailed tracking of employee activities for client billing.

Call system integration further automates specific work activities

Another unique interface, custom-designed by Telerx and Kronos, further automated the data-gathering process. "An interface between Workforce Central and our Aspect call routing switch allows employees' punches to be automatically captured from their telesets as they go about their day," says Greenwood. This innovative system connects Aspect reason codes to specific billing codes to not only track when an employee begins and ends a shift, but also to track very specific employee activities throughout the day.

For instance, Telerx can track that an employee took calls from 8:10 to 8:56 a.m., handled email correspondence from 8:56 to 9:34 a.m., and performed clerical tasks from 9:34 to 9:51 a.m. Telerx knows which activities each employee performed and can automatically bill individual clients for each activity at its respective rate. In tracking these activities, Workforce Central imports more than 10,000 punches each day from the Aspect phone system for more than 1,000 associates.

"While we have seen great benefits in payroll processing with Workforce Central, it has truly revolutionized tracking project-specific data used for client billing and analysis," says Greenwood.

Automated invoicing incorporates multitude of data

Telerx invoicing is largely based on labor hours, with more than 1,000 employees tracking their time against billable project codes. With a powerful integrated system in place that could import thousands of activity codes and export hours and project data, the next step was automating the invoicing process. Telerx creatively captured each project, job, activity, and task in a single labor level. Then, by importing punches from Aspect, an employee's time was assigned to the correct labor level code.

The magnitude of the system's capacity is sizeable. With Telerx's 50-plus clients and programs — each with its own unique customer care program — the Workforce Central suite handles over 50,000 codes or labor level entries when calculating billing information and creating invoices. "While this number is staggering," says Greenwood, "timekeeping and 'transfers' are virtually seamless."

Improved workforce productivity and lower labor costs

By utilizing the Kronos system, interfacing to the Aspect phone system, and related workforce productivity improvements, Telerx expects to save more than 5,000 hours of managers' time. In addition, administrative staff will save another 8,000 hours previously dedicated to timekeeping tasks. Saving 13,000 hours a year is significant for a company that employs 1,400 people. The time savings means that managers and associates have more time to deliver expert customer care on behalf of Telerx's client companies.

"Well-crafted interfaces, innovative technology applications, and creative leveraging of Kronos functionality have already had a measurable impact on Telerx in terms of cost savings and workforce productivity improvements," claims Greenwood. "And we expect to realize additional value and benefits in the future."