Rentalcars.com Embraces WFM to Support Global, Seasonal Contact Center Needs

With 80 different nationalities—using 40 different languages—staffing its global contact centers, Rentalcars.com faced a complex task of scheduling and sourcing talent made more difficult by the manual way it was handled.

Planners who still used spreadsheets often spent four days of intensive manpower preparing advisor work schedules, then spent even more time making any changes that came about. As Rentalcars.com’s business grew, so did the number of contact center advisors it employed—and so did the scope of its contact center scheduling issue.

Its scheduling problems were compounded by the complexity introduced by Rentalcars.com’s global, seasonal business where the majority of activity takes place during 8 to 10 weeks in the summer. The company’s contact centers needed to be staffed by multiple, multilingual workgroups—plus a mix of full-time and part-time employees—and all advisors had to possess in-depth knowledge of and experience with the car rental business. These prerequisites made finding the right people to work as advisors on a temporary basis for short periods of time a difficult and expensive endeavor.

For that reason, and to deliver outstanding consistency in customer experience, Rentalcars.com prefers to rely upon its existing, experienced staff to work additional hours when needed. But it needed a more flexible, automated workforce management (WFM) solution to drive it.

Rentalcars.com now effortlessly produces effective, flexible work schedules for over 800 people and manages seasonal workload fluctuations from one single, integrated WFM system.

Contact center leaders credit Calabrio WFM with helping their busy advisors better strike that all-important work-life balance. As a predominantly young workforce, advisors now feel more empowered. They enjoy a greater ability to plan their lives—they can see their shifts well in advance, and easily make last-minute changes to their schedules when needed. They also receive dramatically faster responses to their time-off requests—typically within five working days for periods during non-published work schedules and within only four hours for absences requested in the next 48 hours.