Loot selects Open Wave Workforce Management from Sabio for its award-winning contact centre

Open Wave WFM from Sabio will provide the flexibility and control to significantly reduce overtime costs

LONDON – 28 November 2003 – Sabio, the innovative contact centre services company, has won a major contract from Loot’s parent company, Associated Mediabase (AMB) to provide a Workforce Management (WFM) solution for Loot, London’s biggest free ads paper. Loot recently won this year’s prestigious European Call Centre of the Year award, and will use Open Wave WFM software from Sabio to forecast agent resource requirements at its Wembley contact centre and then schedule the correct number of staff to ensure that customer service levels are met efficiently.

Loot’s Wembley contact centre currently has some 140 agents handling 6-7,000 calls per day, and the company is committed to empowering its agents and involving them closely with business initiatives. Following the implementation of Open Wave WFM from Sabio, agents will be able to provide their own personal preferences to ensure family and religious commitments are factored into shift patterns.

“Before implementing Open Wave from Sabio we’d previously used a manual system that didn’t really give us any flexibility, so we typically had all our agents working on a standard 9.00am to 5.30pm day,” commented Lisa Trusler, Head of Contact Centre for Loot. “In practice, this meant that we were regularly under- and over-staffed at various times during the day. Implementing Open Wave will provide us with the flexibility and control we need to introduce new shift patterns and, as a result, significantly reduce our overtime costs. Our agents come from a range of ethnic and religious backgrounds, so we also need to be flexible in our shift patterns and block out the times when they’re not available.

“We chose Sabio and Open Wave ahead of other vendors because Sabio was able to provide us with not only a fully functional product but also the consultancy and ongoing support services we needed to ensure a complete working Workforce Management solution for Loot,” continued Lisa. “We’ve also worked closely with Sabio to deliver training for our agents, and are working with their consultants on other projects to generate further efficiencies in other areas of the contact centre.”

Adam Faulkner, director, Sabio added: “Loot operates a highly successful contact centre, with strong morale levels and excellent staff retention – I’m sure that’s one of the key reasons they were recently selected as the European Call Centre of the Year. Now with Open Wave they’re taking advantage of our Workforce Management expertise to really optimise their contact centre performance, and will also build on this with projects looking at recruitment planning and agent tracking.”

About Loot Ltd
1. Loot Ltd is a division of Associated New Ventures, and a subsidiary of Associated Newspapers Ltd.
2. A market leading Buying and Selling title, Loot publishes17 regional editions each week and has a total circulation of 147,294 (ABC Jan – June 2003)
3. Loot.com, has over 635,000 unique users and 19.3 million page impressions per month (ABCe March 2003).
4. Other specialist titles within the Loot print portfolio include: London Car and Motorbike; Holiday Accommodation and Recruit.
5. The European Call Centre Awards are organised by Call Centre Focus Magazine and sponsored by BT Retail.