U-Haul: A Company on the Move to Elevate Remote Agents’ and Customer Experience
Company empowers agents to work from home and scales its contact center operations with forecasting and scheduling.
-
Eliminated
Thousands of man-hours of work annually
-
Supported
contact center growth along with agents’ needs for schedule flexibility and work-life balance
-
Reduced costs
and improved productivity through modernization and automation
"What Verint gave us in workforce solution was a tool to help us succeed. What I didn't expect was their mobile application to go above and beyond what I have seen in the industry... Employees are happy; customers are happy; the business is happy."
Opportunity: Simplify Contact Center Operations
In operation since 1945, moving equipment and storage rental company U-Haul International conducts one million transactions a month. Its contact center operations, which handle 25 million calls annually for 12 lines of business, are a vital element to keeping its customers and business operators moving forward in support of the company’s growth. Between 2010 and 2020, U-Haul’s contact center workforce grew more than six-fold – from 400 to 2,500 agents.
U-Haul wanted to find a way to simplify the day-to-day operations in its contact center to become more efficient and save money via operational efficiencies. The company turned to Verint, a leader in helping organizations modernize and automate customer and employee engagement, to realize those benefits.
Solution: Workforce Management Enables Working from Home
U-Haul uses Verint Workforce Management to scale its customer service operations in a cost-effective manner, while enabling the company to become an “employer of choice” via work schedules offering agents the flexibility to work from one to 40 hours a week, while working from home.
“Our agents work from home, they have obviously busy lives, and they want to be able to balance their work with their life,” says Joel White, forecasting manager at U-Haul. “So the ability to get time off whenever they need it, or the ability to swap a shift with another agent is huge for us. We used Verint to automate that program. As long as it falls under certain criteria, the agent gets instant results, knowing that it got approved and knowing that they can take care of their family and their life and not having to wait for an approval.”
Watch Here
Improved Forecasting and Scheduling with Mobile
The automation and modernization afforded by the Verint software within U-Haul’s contact center operations and, in particular, its forecasting and scheduling function, are far reaching. The impact extends beyond the contact center’s four walls and beyond employees.
“What Verint gave us in workforce solution was a tool to help us succeed,” explains White. “What I didn’t expect was their mobile application to go above and beyond what I have seen in the industry. With [Verint Mobile Work View], agents have the ability to interact with us on their schedule directly from their phone in their own time.”
“If that agent needs to take time off, they can have the day off and then we can send out a message to all other mobile users to see if someone wants to pick up their shift. Employees are happy; customers are happy; the business is happy. So, it works for everyone.”
Read the Case Study
Working with Verint: Customized and Innovative Solutions
“U-Haul’s relationship with Verint has grown over the years to address different areas of the business with different solutions,” notes White. “The value of Verint to U-Haul expands every day. We wanted a software tool that was customizable to our needs. We got that and then we wanted to go and innovate through the mobile app and that was able to be accomplished.”
The value of Verint to U-Haul also includes partnership. With Verint as a trusted advisor, U-Haul can leverage Verint’s experience and expertise to not only help ensure it is successful today, but help it address its future vision, goals, and challenges via other workforce engagement solutions to further simplify, modernize, and automate its operations.
“Verint has completely exceeded expectations that we have had and now we are moving into the next phases to see all of the different new technologies they can add on top of that,” White continues. “The entire time, the service and support team has been there, right by our side, and has done an amazing job making sure that we are running every day and the product is working exactly how we need it to.”
Benefits: Automation Saves Hundreds of Man-hours for Remote Workforce
“What makes U-Haul different is that we have a large number of employees who work from home,” says White. “[Verint] allows us to be responsive when we have call volume spikes and agents are able to pick up extra hours on-the-fly, and also support our overall business requirements if they say, ‘I can’t work for the rest of the day.’ Without Verint to manage this fluctuating number of agents and contact center demands, we would be overspending for talent with agents not being fully utilized.”
Verint Workforce Management has improved productivity for managers and agents by simplifying, modernizing, and automating its operations—providing auto approvals for 16,000 requests for time off, and 36,000 shift swaps in the last year alone—processes that would have required 30 to 40 FTE managers to handle manually.
“Verint gave us the ability to bring all our employees’ needs in one basket and figure out a way to manage those needs and be able to meet our customers’ needs at the same time,” White concludes. “Not just simplifying, but modernizing it and bringing it forward as we expand and grow. We have a product that is seamless and is perfect with everything that we have a need for. We have been able to automate all those employee requests, taking out hundreds and hundreds of man hours, and become just that much more efficient.”
Featured Workforce Engagement Success Stories
Verint Solutions Featured in This Success Story
