Welcome to Working Smarter, presented by Calabrio where we discuss context centered industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. We're glad you're joining us to learn and grow together in order to provide world class customer service to each and every one of our clients. My name is Dave Hoekstra, product evangelist here at Collabrio. And my guest today is a, is an old friend.
we've known each other for quite a few years now, and I'm very excited to have Klaus Bang. Klaus is the senior workforce manager at AB group, which is a Danish insurance company. For those of you not in the know with your Danish insurance companies. we're very excited to have Klaus here. So right off the bat, Klaus, I have to ask Bang. Is that a traditional Danish last name or is that, did you make that up just to sound cool?
Yeah. Hello, Dave. Thank you for having me. I've been so excited to, to come on and, great to be here and, and the last name. Yeah. actually, I don't know if the stereos, called a bang and all of some very famous, very expensive, hardware. And there's so others have the name beside me. I don't know if it came from them, but, yeah, that's my name. Yeah.
So you don't share in the Bang Olufsen fortune of, high end car stereos, do you?
Yeah, I wish, but, unfortunately not. I think actually there's some Dutch, in the last name, but, yeah, I know there's some Viking blood in it for sure.
speaking of Vikings, this is our first, episode with a Dane on, and I'm very excited because, there's, so much, there's, so lore in workforce management with Denmark, right? In, I, this is fascinating to me because, I have, I consider myself a bit of a scholar of Erlang, right? And that just means I know that he's from Denmark.
That's, where, so I, this is actually where I really wanted to start with you is, having been a Dane your entire life and a really understanding Erlang, let's talk about that because I think a lot of our audience knows the name Erlang. And, but they mostly know it as the formula that kind of runs workforce management, but, tell us, a little bit about what you know, about Erlang the man, not Erlang the formula.
Sure. Sure. Erlang is like, he's what Elwes is or was to Ragnusa. You never know if he's there or not, but, that's what I consider Erlang to the WFM, that's. What Elvis was for the rock music, some might even go say he's like a prophet like Jesus was, I don't know, but he's, he's right up there, he's, he's something else, but, I will tell you a bit about him. And then he was a Dane, as you say, and he was born in the, year 1908. No, actually, that's wrong. That's when he died.
He was born a 51 years earlier in the 1878 and he was a Danish mathematics mathematician. He was an engineer and he lived using a statistics and he, got hired by the Danish phone company. in the start of the 1900 and they asked him to, to develop a query theory, to, to find out how many phone ladies do we need to sit on these old phone systems, plucking people in to talk to each other. And he needed to, to calculate. we put out some wires in the country. How big does these wires have to be?
so he made the, he made a lot of famous formulas. he made the, calculated measure called Erlang. And that basically tells you how many calls can be in this wire until it's full of calls. yeah, so, that's Erlang and, and there's a particular formula that he made, called Erlang A and there's also Erlang C. and the cool thing about these formulas is that those are the formulas that we use today when we calculate our staffing needs and that's in Caleb and that's in many other, WFM toys that we use.
And, The Erlang C formula to, start with that's, using that you calculate how many you need to sit on the chairs to answer the phone to, to answer the queues at all time. And you, you expect the, people calling in to have, infinite, patients. And you know that works well, if you're like, the taxes or something, you have no other choice, but why I work at the insurance company, if you're not fast enough to answer the phone, then the people will hang up and they will.
Call someone else, maybe a competitor. And to avoid that, we made the Erlang A formula. And that's what I've been working with lately. That's what I want to, take a deep dive in. Yeah, with you.
Yeah, absolutely. okay. First of all, it's really good to know that the story I've been telling about Erlang and, how Erlang, the formula came to be was pretty accurate, right? I was very worried that you were going to tell me that there was some bad information that I have about Erlang, but I think my story that I've been telling has been pretty accurate. And yeah, you're right. So we've got Erlang C, which, Which assumes infinite patients, right?
And, if anybody has ever worked in a call center before, that's really rare actually is infinite patients. And so Erlang A, which, can, take into that. and this is, the part where we're going to get a little nerdy here, but, you, for those of you that can't see. Klaus is wearing his WFM Ninja t shirt, that's, was given to him by Collabra actually. so he's, the Danish WFM Ninja is if you really want to get a sense of who we're talking to here on this.
And, the discussion of Erlang A, This is where I think I got this is where you and I got to know each other really well because you and I were talking one of the things that I like to ask people quite a bit. as we're speaking, is do you know where your service level targets come from? And most of the time you can imagine what the answer is. It was like that when I got here. It was like that when I got here, right? And you can almost see the lightbulb go off in their head a little bit.
that's a really good question. I don't know why. And, One of the coolest things, as you and I were, speaking, you said you actually had a great answer to this question. And so I'd actually like to start there. So when I said to you, Klaus Why is your service level target set the way it is? Tell me, why,
Yeah. I know because, the service level indicates, your customer's patience. And, and I have to start somewhere else because I wanted to do the prediction of the answer rate in Callio. By getting there, I needed to use the Erlang A formula. And to, get to that, I needed to know what is the patience of our customers. I looked at our data and I found the target we want to be at. We want to be at a 90 percent answer rate.
And I thought, okay, What is the patients off our customers these days where we hit our target on 90 percent answer rate? How many number of calls do we answer within 60 seconds? service levels that basically a percentage of how many customers do you want to answer within 60 seconds? And I could see on our data that when we answered 45 percent within 60 seconds, then we had an answer rate of 90%.
In Calabrio and in my analysis, I put 45 percent within 60 seconds, I told the company, this is our new target for service level.
And what did they say? How did they, were they like, okay, sure. We trust you Klaus. Or did they want some proof?
they have, a high level of trust in me, but, I explained to them, I took them on the journey and explained to them why it needs to be here and it was actually not that hard to convince them because they were like many others, they didn't really know why the service was the way it was. and they didn't really. But one thing that they really cared about is how many customers do we answer? What is our answer rate? That was what was important to them among many other KPIs, of course.
But that's what they really worried about. They didn't worry so much about. Okay. How many percentages within how many seconds do you say? And no, that didn't work. Really.
how long ago was
this? this was actually not that long ago, half a year.
Half a year, okay. And what is, what's the difference? What, has it done to your staffing requirements? What has it done to your overall performance making this adjustment in your service level target?
what has us done really is that we can be a very precise in a, our targets. we have a target at work, 90%, answer rate. And, we use the budget modules also we have in a Calipo. And that's where it really started. we had a summer last year where we were missing staff, always behind, had to work extra and so forth. And we were like, okay, we don't want to end up in this situation again. How come we didn't? Figure out how many staff we needed at the, right time.
and I was like, if we start to look at the, answer rate, which should be our target to, to get to know that, then we need to know our service levels. We need to know our customer patients. We need to have full control of our shrinkage. We need to have full control of our average handling times. We need to be precise in our forecasting measures, all that, and when we are there. Then we can get the right answer rate, the prediction of the right answer rate.
And then we can look at our budgets, our FTE budgets, and then we can predict where we're going to be for like a year ahead or two years ahead, whatever we want, and be sure to hire the right staff at the right time.
And so you're telling me it worked. Is that what you're telling me? It
worked. And the funny part is, we didn't, get into my, WFM history, really. But, 15 years ago, I worked at the Danish bank, at Danish bank in Denmark, the biggest bank called Danish bank, funny enough. And, they had very high service level there and they had very high answer rate. They wanted to answer All calls. So we used Erlang C there. Actually, the only calls that we didn't want to answer was the one who just, put the phone down within 12 seconds because they, died wrong or whatever.
So we use the Erlang C formula there. And, we had problems in the end. So when I came to, to the insurance company, we, we had, two large company who just merged for one and a half year ago. And, Both companies were using Calabria actually, we were using them in different ways. And now that we built a new common foundation for the WFM, that was the point where we could say, okay, now we really know what we want and we want the answer rate. How do we get there?
And I knew Erlang and I said, He actually did make a formula for, just this, instance. And, and I got news
for you.
Yeah, exactly. I have 100 years old news for you and we can use that.
So that's fantastic. Now, okay. You said it now I want to get into your history a little bit, because I do like to know how'd you get to where you are today? Like, where did it start? How, what, I often find that talking to, especially WFM people, we don't grow up. Nobody asks us when we're in elementary school, what do you want to be when you grow up? And we say a WFM analyst, right? So how did you, arrive at where you are today?
actually, I started somewhere completely different, as many WFM specialists do, I was working with my hands. I was working with IP telephony, which was new at the time. And, and then I thought, all right, I need to try something different. I had a good friend working at this big bank and they said, we have an opening in the IT department. I know I like math and I like analysts and I like to document things. And so I said, okay, that could be interesting.
And, and then I found out that this it department, it wasn't really as an IT guy, it was at something called WFM. And I was like, what is that? But okay, maybe it's, I, if I can just get my foot inside the door, then I can always go to the real IT where the real magic happens. So I'll just take this WFM job, whatever it is, let's find out.
And, and I came in and there was a, this old guy sitting there and, and he taught me everything he knows and he knew a lot and then all of a sudden I found out, okay, this WFM, this is a, this is actually pretty cool. It's much better than it. This is what I want to do, and this center was a, it was a huge center. It was a open 24 seven, all days around the year. And, on, on the most busiest of years, we got 50, 000 calls a day and.
I don't know in the American standard, but in Denmark, it's pretty high. we're like 5 million people. yeah, so, that was pretty high. So that was, yeah, I learned a lot there. That was interesting.
Now, the, were you good at math? In school? Yeah. You were. Okay. Cause I wasn't. I was terrible at it. And, one of the things that I liked about workforce management, there was just enough data and, looking at information to keep me interested. But I actually liked the people part of it. I liked working with the people and helping them, find ways to better their schedules, better their lives, things like that. And so I, hate math.
I hate it so much I can't even stand it and it's funny that I'm in a job where I, have to talk about things where people use math all the time but I, I'm always curious about whether or not you, use math and all right, so you started there and is that kind of a, journey you just continued to work with over the years?
Yeah, I was there for 13 years and, things, that's, the beauty in the WFM world. Things really change, even though you think you have control of everything, then you get a new director and then we're going to make a new department and we're going to move calls here and there and then you can just, start over and, that's always a lot of fun, I think. but. After 13 years, I thought, okay, I need to try something new, not new because I love WFM, but maybe a different environment.
and, in insurance, there are, a few different parameters than in the banking business. So, that's nice to learn something new there.
Now, speaking of change, you recently have facilitated a couple moves, within your insurance company, right? You're combining some contact centers. You had some companies come together. what's going on there? What, and, what are some lessons that you learned in merging different groups?
Yeah, it was a culture thing and it was, extremely interesting. we had, two companies and they were both using Calabrio. they had their contact centers and more or less the same build. One of them were on one physical location and the other had four different locations. So, there was some differences there, of course, but it was the same system that we used really.
And then one of the big difference that I learned was that in, in one of the, Companies, they used, everything they could incalibrate. They also makes it everything and they empowered the employees, they empowered the leaders and, yeah, that was how they were using it. And the other part of the company, they were. holding things back a bit, holding them in a tight leasing. I don't want to automate this. I want to be in control. I want to do this.
And the employees, they had to write the WFM team asking, Oh, can I get some administrative time or something like that? And the WFM team were putting it into the schedule. So actually in one of the companies, they were like three times as many WFM employees, and they weren't really handling that much more employees than. The other company.
Interesting.
Yeah. The, what company I was from, that doesn't really matter, but, of course it was the automated one. of course. Oh, wait. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. no. The other day they knew what they were doing. They were just doing it in a different way. And that was the culture thing about it. but, the fun thing about this is that, we said, okay, let's try and automate some more things because, we want to do more. We need to do more work and we don't have the resources and so on.
We need to merge all this and we're going to be a lot of busy doing this. So we want. Have that much time to do like day to day planning and moving a lunch or whatever. So, we, started on the journey of automation and they're one of the things we had a employees writing to us asking for some administrative time. We put that into the plan right back here. It is, or, if we weren't fast enough, they started concept with their leader saying, Oh, I need some time.
And then they just did it and they were out of adherence and, things like that. We also made it that. Okay. And, it saved the WFM team like an hour a day doing these manual things, and it saved the employees a lot of time asking for it. And in the end, they started using less administrative time because they got the power themselves to actually put it into the schedule. Aha. Yeah, so we, we earned a lot of time by doing, working smarter in Calibrio, actually.
This is why you have a t shirt that says WFM ninja on it. Yeah, it's because You get the concepts right the concepts is if you start saving time here other places become more productive And when you become more productive you find other ways to save time and it creates this Rolling process of continuing to work for it. So is that move done? Are you still in progress?
No, it's more or less done now. And, I just need to add also to, to, to what we did there. It also raised the employee satisfaction actually a lot. and that's, an, that's a thing sometimes you, forget in WFM and, in my WFM career, when I started, it was a lot about, being productive, finding the little parameters that could gain us some extra employee power, or, just thinking about the customer, and not really so much the employee.
But now as I grow older, I start to learn, okay, if we have certified employees, then we have less attrition. Then we don't need to hire as many. And then we have more stable average handling time. Maybe we can sell some more, all those things. And, yeah, WFM is not always about just turning the screw. That's a Danish expression, but, turning the screw and getting the most of your employees. Maybe you need to think about the employees also a bit.
I love it. And you're right. I've noticed that you and I are about the same age. And so we both started in our roles about the same time in our lives. And as we've grown older, when I first started in workforce management, There was not even anything that was aimed at the employee because, the technology was relatively new, and it was still learning and everything was focused on staffing and schedules and really maximizing the, as much as you can get out of an employee. And throughout the years.
I've noticed that I still am very, concerned about the agent, themselves, and who's taking these calls and who's answering these chats. And, oh, as we, get into positions where we can make decisions, we, decide we want to do things that help these employees that we've never forgotten about it. And I've noticed that a lot of contact centers are now being run by, People our age and they have the same process, which is why a lot of these employee facing features have become very, important.
And yes, I totally agree. And who knew? That if your employees are happy in their job, that they want to stay. I, I'm glad we figured this out. We just cracked the code Klaus, you and me right here.
I think it's important every time we talk about doing something, you need to stop and say, okay, if we do this. Who gains by this? Do we earn more money? Do we do something for our customers or do we do something for our employees? And you tend to forget the employees while you're dead historically, but, not anymore. We need to empower the employees and we will see results.
Yeah. So what, other kinds of automation have you guys built into, you, you mentioned it a high level, maybe give me a specific example of some of that automation that you might've, that you might, that has really benefited you.
absence, for instance, when, when we do absence, when we do the big vacations in Denmark, we do it like. In a social kind of way, people that give their wishes and then we talk about it. We sit by the fire camp Talk about okay. What can we do?
Look at the fg budgets Okay, can we move something so we can just give as many people vacation as we want as they want And then we try to do that and once we do that, then we we set some parameters We say okay We can afford to have this number of people off for vacation Only half of the quota has been met so far, but the rest is just automation And then it's just, I don't know if you have this expression in, in, in America, but in Danish we have first to mølle and that means first to come to
the, mill to get the corn, grained. So you know, just, yeah, first come first serve, you have it.
That's it. Yes. That's how we would say it. We don't necessarily use the mill analogy. no. We do that. We, yeah. First come first served. Yeah, no. And that's great.
We have, yeah, we have a lot of agriculture, so I guess that's why we're talking about the mill, but yeah, anyway, so we do first come first serve for that. That's just a small part of it. We do a, day to day absence also, and we do it automated. We use the app. So in theory, people, they can sit Sunday evening, look at their schedule saying, okay, I need to get up at eight in the morning and work. I don't really want to do that. I'm tired. I was watching football all day.
Then they can just go in, ask for absence between. Eight or nine, if there's room for it, just get automated approved right away. And then they can sleep in, that it's, it took some work with the leaders because they were like, But I don't know what my employees are doing and they're not here. Oh, I can see they took some time off. Oh, all right. Is that okay? Okay, I guess that's okay. So yeah,
when you rolled it out Did you roll it out a very small and then get bigger or did you turn it on for everybody all at the same time?
We just went full blown on it and turned it on for everyone. Yeah, and, some were very worried about it, Okay, I can see a lot of people got time off right now. is that really possible? And what about the customers? But, so far things, they work. They've been working. But, of course, sometimes the system can make a mistake. Because the system is not better than what you feed it with.
And if the forecasting is not correct, or if the customers decide they want to call a bit more than they usually do on a Friday afternoon, then maybe we already gave some time off there. And then, you can't really get that back. But as a human being, you could do the same. You need to trust the system and just do it.
Yeah, and as long as your forecast is good. Yeah. That's, the key. Okay. Changing gears a little bit. You and I talked a lot about. Idioms between our various languages and what I want you to teach us a Danish idiom. And you mentioned there's something about a goat being shaved. Is that, what, is that?
Yeah. Yes. So, then that goat is shaved and that's really when you, do a job and that's finished and everything is all right, then the goat has been shaved. Yeah. That's a saying. Yeah.
Say it in Danish again.
Okay.
we'll work on that, but I love it. learning about the first to the mill gets the corn and then, first come first served and now shaving goats. This is the kind of stuff you can only learn on a Colabrio podcast. I'm a, I, And I want to point out, you, you, got dubbed the WFM Ninja by some of the Collabrio employees here, which I think is great. And you've got this awesome t shirt. You wore these amazing shoes to our customer event in Copenhagen, which was awesome. How did that, make you feel?
Getting the Ninja shirt.
Yes.
it was great. I was, usually I'm not that easy to surprise, but I was socially surprised and I really didn't know what to say. And as you can hear, I usually don't have a problem saying anything, but, no, it was a lot of fun. And, yeah, it was cool. It's a pat on the shoulder, I'm very happy about that.
That's great. you deserve it, my friend. you've been an amazing, person to work with over the last few years, as you and I've gotten to know each other a little bit. And, we're very excited to make sure that you get that recognition that you obviously deserve. So it's great to partner up and, do this episode, but, we'll, be doing other things. All right.
So What I like to do with some of our guests, especially the ones that have been working in the contact center for a long time, I call it the call center lifer quiz, where, if you've been in the contact center industry for a while, I have a few questions for you and I want to run these by you, quick answers, don't have to go into too much detail, but tell us about, so first question on the call center lifer quiz. What is your favorite KPI?
Oh, that's, that's one of the worst questions you can ask a WFM employee because they love them all, but my favorite one. I think actually it's occupancy. And the reason is really because I love that word. I really love that word occupancy. Yeah. But seriously, adherence is a, great one also, I love that. Okay.
We can, do occupancy and adherence. I love it. Okay. Second question. What was there a moment in your career where you said. I actually like this. What was that moment?
I'm, I don't know if I can pinpoint it really, but one of the times where I really love doing what I do is, when I make an, I make some analysts and I can see, okay, if we do this, then we can, improve our, services. We can improve our answer rate. We can save some employees and, we can do this faster and better, build something.
Yeah, it's a good feeling.
Yeah. Yeah. and of course it's also nice when, an employee come ask, Oh, can I get some time off? And you say, yeah, of course you can.
Yeah, that's, it is a good feeling. I, agree with you. Okay. who is the person or role that has had the most impact on your career?
I think it's my old colleague, Sean Bramley was his name, at the Danish bank that, that, taught me most of what I know and, taught me to, to break down the walls, in the WFM. yeah.
Great. Fantastic. have you ever worn the headset? Were you an agent?
yeah, but, in a very small contact sense of being two people, I don't think you can call that a contact sensor,
but
I did service. I did service.
Yeah. If you're tied to a phone, Yeah. I
was tied. I was tied. Yeah.
Yeah. All right. and so what, was that job?
that was IP telephony, it's, it was all new. And, in Denmark we had some really bad wires everywhere and, the, quality was so low and I had to support that and it was almost impossible because, yeah, the, internet connection was so poor. So that was, challenging.
It's it just can you repeating itself? I can't hear you. Cause the phone lines are poor. the phone lines are poor. That's why I'm calling you. I'm sorry. I can't hear you. They're very cheap. So just. Yeah. All right. So final question to the call center lifer, what's one of the biggest mistakes you made in your career that others can learn from?
Not really sure I made that many. No, of course. no, I think, I think in general, just, when you do some kind of, analyze work, just double check it, because, once you gain the trust of your bosses and they receive something for you, they're going to run with it. So make sure you are accurate.
Yeah, you can't really, the, as we would say in America, the cows are out of the barn. Yeah. Once, once they're out of the barn, you're not getting them back in. Yeah.
So yeah. Yeah. I would say that.
Is there a Danish equivalent of that phrase?
I don't have to think about that. Nothing springs to mind. Nothing springs to mind.
That's okay. It's okay. Okay. So that concludes our call center life for quiz. You did fantastic. We now have a better idea of who Klaus Bang is. and so as we're getting close to wrapping up, one of the things that I really like to do is to give our guests the final word or, tell us, something you learned or give us some, wisdom or advice here. So Klaus, the floor is yours. Tell me, tell me, expose some wisdom.
All right. All right. Thank you. Yeah, I was listening to, to some of the other great podcast and One guy was on and he was saying keep it simple. I was like That's what I wanted to say because I love to be simple. So I'm going to say something else and I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it in a, in a Viking way, I think, because I have a big post out in the hallway with the Ragnar from the Vikings, I guess most know him and if they don't, they should see the show.
But anyway, Ragnar, he says, don't waste your time looking back. You're not going that way. And I think that works really well for the Vikings, but for a WFM employee, I would turn it around saying, spend time looking back. Learn from it and use it in the future.
Okay. Yeah, it's, good to do debriefs. It's good to do, come back to things later and say, all right, what happened, let's do some analysis so that you can learn from them because you really can learn a lot. I would even add to that take notes because I tell, my kids and my family, the biggest lie that human beings tell themselves is, Oh, I'll remember that.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. every day I take notes on what happens today and what was interesting. So you can use that when they're predicting the future.
That's wonderful. Klaus, it has been an absolute awesome privilege to spend some time with you. The WFM Ninja from Denmark. very, exciting. we're really glad you were able to come join us and I just want to say thank you.
Thank you for letting me come.
Yeah, absolutely. All right, everybody. This has been a fantastic episode. I'm very happy to have Klaus from the AB group in Denmark. And, we're always looking for new guests and new stories to tell. So if there's something you want to talk about, or, or you'd like to be a guest on the collaborative podcast, Please let me know. I'm happy to, to, put that into the, into the hopper. So thank you again to Klaus, our guest. thank you listener for spending some time with us here.
We at Collabrio are always, just so privileged to have such great customers, such great partners, such great team out there doing the things that we do. And our goal is to make everybody better at their jobs and to really, turn around that. That discussion from turning customer service from a chore into a privilege. So thank you guys so much for spending some time with us. And we will talk to you again on the next episode of working smarter from Calabria. Thanks everybody.
Have a great rest of your day. And thank you to Klaus.