Welcome to Working Smarter, presented by Calabrio where we discuss contact center 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 are 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, a product evangelist for Calabrio, and my guest today is the esteemed Trent.
Ryan, the finalist for S W P, workforce Management Professional of the year, but more importantly, Trent is the manager of W F M Technology at Netflix. Hoekstra you've heard of this company. Maybe that's something a company that you might have run across on a day-to-day. But we are super excited to have Trent as part of our overall podcast series here, and it's great to have you, Trent. So instead of just Instead of meandering on for another hour, let's get right into it.
First of all, how are things, how was the nomination? How was that process go for you and what did it mean to you?
Yeah, it meant a lot to me. I've grew up in the contact center, right? And so to be recognized for that work was really great. It's been my entire professional career and it was my first time attending the S w PPP event, which was just an absolutely fantastic event to meet people, connect with people and share stories and best practices with
folks. Yeah, it's not often you get to sit down with 450 other W f m nerds and every single person you talk to like understands what we do for a living and why we do it. And so it's pretty great. So I wanna start there. You said you grew up in the context center industry. So let's go back. How did Trent Ryan find himself on this
path? Yeah, absolutely. My first job actually was selling computers in high school at a little company called Best Buy Uhhuh. And then I took a job a few years out of college at a entry level call center job in Minneapolis where Calabrio is headquartered. I don't know how everyone up there does it. I determined that to be too cold, so I did two years in the Best Buy contact center.
And then at the time Netflix had just opened up an office in Salt Lake City, and so I made the move to Netflix and I've been there ever since. So I grew up not only with in the contact center, but really in the contact center with Netflix specifically, which is really special as well. So were
you initially, I don't wanna say just, but just a, like a customer service agent.
Absolutely. So I was doing technical support over the phone for Geek Squad at the time Uhhuh. And you would call in, have issues with your computer and I would be the person you spoke with on the phone trying to connect to it remotely. Some really interesting call recordings that are hopefully long gone of, walking through folks getting connected to, remote access systems and, That long ago. It was not a very simpler process back then, so I'm sure it's come a long way since then.
In some ways it has,
We still need tech support people for that. So There you go. Okay, so when you got to Netflix how did we, did you start in the workforce management process or was it you were on the phones and you worked your way
into that? No, so I started in workforce management. I think I was workforce management employee number four or five. In Netflix, very early days, and I got incredibly lucky. My first week on the job was when we were actually standing up our original workforce management software vendor.
And so that's really where I got my start on the system side of things, is I was able to just take all of that in and learn the ins and outs of how everything was configured, how this map to this, and then over the last, eight years have really just. Been able to take that one little more so of knowledge and grow with it, leaning on peers and industry best practices to get to where I am today.
And how have you seen the workforce management program at Netflix grow over the years? What are some of the key initiatives that maybe you guys have tackled over the years that have really Im improved your process and your efficiency.
Yeah, absolutely. I think the big one just from, Netflix is when I started, we were in the US Canada, in, in a real small handful of countries, right? It was predominantly supported by, very simple folks in regions with very simple, scheduling rules. And as we've expanded we've had to really understand not only, how do we schedule in the US but how do we schedule in Europe and the complexity of the labor laws. Have just expanded dramatically.
So we've really had to get folks with local knowledge to be successful and implementing, best practices that apply not just to Netflix, but to, that specific country that we're targeting.
Now was this pre streaming or post streaming or during the implementation of streaming? This
was pre post streaming, but just post streaming. So it had been around for a while. But we had, all of the customer service was streaming only. At the time the kind of legacy DVD business was a separate, much smaller organization.
Okay. So yeah, my mom just recently found out that the D v D side of the business is is closing down, and she's a little bummed. She was still super into receiving, the six DVDs of Anne, of Green Gables and and working towards that. Completing that task. But it's okay. We now have better options for how to do that anymore. And it's fantastic to see the overall growth of just Netflix as a, I mean as the example of, what a modern company should be. And it's great to see it.
That includes the workforce management process. What I would do is I would ask you, let's pretend we just met and I'd, and I really want to understand Netflix's kind of contact center setup, right? So what kind of channels what kind of work do you go through, right? What kind of volumes do you expect? Do you work with partners? Things like that. Give me the, two minute overview of how Netflix is set up.
Yeah, absolutely. The conversation I always have first with folks when they think of Netflix is they go, wow, you have a customer service team. Folks don't actually know that. And I think that speaks to the product, right? Generally speaking, folks don't have issues with the product, but our channel offerings are dictated by, Hey, if I'm having an issue, it's probably when I'm trying to watch tv. And so we've leaned into, really real time forms of support, so that's predominantly voice and chat.
And that was very intentional because, folks don't want to be, going back and forth over email, weeks at a time for support when it comes to their streaming. They just wanna sit down and watch tv. One of the changes we did make though, is when I joined the entire workforce management team was based in Salt Lake City. It was a very small team. We could just swivel, pivot. Change things, roll it out very quick. But as we've grown, we've had to expand in different markets.
So now the team is, there's a team in the us, a team in Latin America, a team in emea, as well as a team in APAC as well. All part of the same global workforce management function.
But what's been something we've really had to be very intentional about is deciding what things as an organization, do we want to be globally aligned, and where do we want to have regional differences in terms of best practices and working with partners or working, procedures, processes, and just ensuring that's really.
Clearly laid out, and the expectations are set very clearly because we're not just in one office building anymore where we can, turn around and talk to the entire team, change something on a Tuesday and have it implemented by a Thursday.
So you already mentioned, local labor laws and schedules. Obviously there's languages across there. Are there any other examples of kind of unique challenges that different areas? We have a. We have a strongly, predominantly North American audience here, but what are some of those unique things that say a Brazilian Netflix has to deal with, or somebody in emea.
Yeah. So two things come to mind with that. One is the forecast, right? So content varies so dramatically by region. We may have a show that's hugely popular in the US that drives contact volume that's not popular in another region, or vice versa, right? So the contact volume forecast being very, hyper local and what goes into that is, is one piece of it. So let me pause
other piece. Let me, yeah, let me pause before you. So take a show like Squid Game. That is probably insanely popular in, Korea, but also then becomes popular in the us. Is that, did you guys have a, a unique and when we say a show becomes popular what types of is it just my sis my streaming's not working? Is it, you're probably not getting questions like, Hey, what's this actor's name? Or things like that. But, what are, is that the type of interaction that you get from those situations?
Yeah. So anytime that there's a particularly popular show, right? We see a slight increase in contact volume is associated. It's not massive, right? But it does, tho you know, maybe, there's an issue with, a particular subtitle or something on a piece of content. That sort of thing will pop up and get to the right folks to get fixed. Okay.
And all right. You said that was point number one. I, one more follow up on that one is how closely do you work with the content part of the, of your organization to when you find out there's a show that's going to be particularly popular or not, how does that influence your forecast?
That's one of the things we have in our contact volume forecast, right? Is what the sort of forecasted popularity of a show is that drives the contact volume forecast that we ultimately staff to. It's one of many factors that we look in, in the forecast, but it is one of the pieces of the contact volume forecast and what is the one
show that comes to mind? That's an, that's a good example of that.
I'll say it used to be much more impactful. Okay. So when I joined Netflix, right? There was, at the time I was joining in the House of Cards era. Okay. House of Cards came out. It was massive. And there was like one, two big shows a year, right? It would be. This huge event, right? Our contact, we'd have to staff up to the contact volume. Not so much anymore. We do still see it around holidays, right? So everyone goes out and gets their, streaming player of choice for Christmas.
They plug it in, a couple days after Christmas, and we see, a. Spike in volume of folks having, wifi issues, setup issues, whatever that, looks like in these sort of one to two weeks after Christmas on there.
All right, so sorry for digging too deep into the process of it, it's fascinating to me cuz you know where, what's really interesting, we very rarely get contact centers that are like rock stars. Most of the time it's it's an insurance contact center or a water utilities company or something like that. And these stories are particularly fascinating. One of my favorites is, one of the cable companies we work with and their story was how before all of the big boxing fights their volume just.
A hundred x and they have to deal with that. And so those are great stories that come across. All right, so that was point number one. What was point number two that you were going for earlier?
Point number two was, and this was really new to me, coming from a very US perspective is just tfn. So toll-free numbers are not prevalent in every market in the world. Okay. We think of us 1 801 8 8. Just standard practice. But in a lot of, emerging markets or just different markets, the expectations of customers are very different. Maybe their, telephony providers actually charged them, really high fees to call it one 800 number. So one of the things that we did is we actually implemented.
VoIP and app calling directly in the app. Ah-huh. And that was, many years ago. I think we were, very early on that, I know it's somewhat more commonplace today. But that was, a real new staffing challenge for us in terms of, do these contacts have a different a h t right? Do we need, different sort of measures in place if, the kid gets a hold of the phone by mistake and accidentally hits the, talk to a human button.
Those were all sort of new challenges for us to figure out when we implemented that. And I don't think it's something you would implement in, a us, dominated customer service experience. But when you start going global, it's one of the things you have to think about.
That's actually honestly fascinating because I don't think a lot of people think about the mechanics of contacting someone by the phone. It used to be just purely phone and now we have options. Did you guys use a particular technology or did you use your own technology for that? In-app? Calling. Calling.
I am not close enough to tell you with a hundred percent certainty that was built out. Very early in my tenure here at Netflix. Traditionally though, we do use a lot of our own, Technology when it comes to building out, like the agent experience and our sort of contact center platforms that we use. Okay.
And so example would that be the, delivery mechanism of their knowledge base, that kind of stuff? Is that the kind of thing you're talking about? Yeah, it's
evolved over the years. But so the crm a c D. Knowledge base is an example where that's currently in-house and we've experimented with other options over the years, right? Slightly outside of the workforce management realm. But workforce management actually was one of the few. It was the first piece of like third party technology that we implemented in the contact center and we took a look at building it ourselves. Actually. We came up with sort of a list of base level requirements and the.
Sheer complexity of what would have to be built in order to make that successful was just not, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. We looked at it and said, we can't really add anything. New to this space that other folks have not done. And that's how we ended up, using third party tools in workforce management. And I think we're, on a bit of a journey as many companies are with implementing more and more third party tools where it makes sense into our infrastructure.
Yeah. The build versus buy. Conundrum. It has always we at Collabreo see it a lot with organizations that are out there oh, I, I could build this in Excel. And generally there are certain things that you absolutely could build from database tables and things like that. And like you said, the hard part is getting the formulations just right and it takes a long time to get those right. And we often see a lot of those organizations do come back to us and say, yeah, that. That wasn't the best idea.
Let's talk again. And that's what's, that's what's fun about the journey to enable a lot of these organizations to do it now. So let's talk a little bit about the W f M process that you guys go through right. From early on in the forecasting and the different departments. Kinda walk me through the structure and the setup of how Netflix approaches, let's start with forecasting and then move through the different phases of workforce
management. Yeah, absolutely. And we can maybe talk about this as we go as well. I always joke in our org that my mission is to get rid of Excel files and Google sheets. I just, they're so inefficient. They serve a place, but anything that we're generating this Excel file every week or every month. My goal. Is to have, Excel file zero, right? No Excel files at the end of the day. And it's a bit of a joke, right? But be careful that hits
the heart of some of the people that are listening. I'm sure.
I know. It's so powerful, right? But if there's an Excel file that requires, 30 minutes for you to put together and it's the same 15 steps every time, why aren't we automating that and just generating it automatically and presenting it, to the user, right? But anyway, to answer your actual question, and we can talk through some of these Excel files, we've. Maybe gotten rid of over the years. So in the workforce management work, we have, essentially three main functions.
We have a capacity planning organization, a scheduling organization, and then an intraday sort of real-time organization. And those folks are all regionalized as well. Something that is unique is we actually do not do our forecasts. On the workforce management side. We do the short-term forecast, but we get past the long-term forecast from our finance org. Who are, for a multitude of reasons, just better set up organizationally to generate a better forecast.
We take that, the capacity planners take that forecast and generate the long range staffing requirements. Those. Then, going through the chain of workforce management, they're doing the long range hiring plans, long range, staffing plans. Factoring in things like call center shrinkage, FTE definitions, which vary dramatically from country to country. They pass that over to the schedulers.
The schedulers are responsible as the name would imply for doing the actual scheduling, but also, giving that feedback loop to the capacity planners, right? What is my schedule inflexibility, right? Because of, labor law, AZ. In this market, we're actually gonna have, a 20% or a 10% or a 15%, right? We've seen these vary dramatically by hours of operation as well as labor laws and then, very traditional as well.
The intraday folks are there to really execute the plan, what's happening today, tomorrow, this week, and really drive the performance that we're targeting for the business.
So you mentioned, externally from the WFM tool that you build the Ferguson. It's funny because. We see that a lot. We see that in a lot of organizations and I think it also shocks a lot of organizations like, what do you, why would you have this tool and not have it do the work for you? And I think a lot of it is because there are so many external factors that go into a larger organization's forecast. What are some of those forecasts you mentioned like potential show popularity.
What are some of the other key drivers of a forecast?
Contact rate. So we know like customers at different 10 years and their Netflix viewing experience will contact us at different rates. Big ones too that are, we talk a lot about the contact volume forecast, right? That's what everyone drives to, but we never talk about the a t forecast, right? And so we actually in some cases will, not in all, but in some cases we'll forecast different ts for different contact drivers, right?
And so we think there's a contact volume forecast of, A thousand calls of, this contact driver, that's actually a particularly complex call for our agents. We know we need to increase the overall a h t forecast, which can drive the requirements just as much as, contact volume can as well. Do
you know which streaming devices cause more problems with your your
customer base? That is a fantastic question. So one of the things at Netflix is we have a lot of data, so Somewhat I'm sure does. It's not something we've looked at in the CS space though, because it's not very actionable for us. From a CS perspective.
Okay. That was just interesting. Could you go to Roku and say, Hey, how many Rokus? You said, oh no, get ready for all the calls. But I dunno this is just where my brain goes from time to time. So you've got a lot of handoffs. In the, in this process. So are there any real roadblocks that you've run into or any streamlining opportunities that you've landed on that could really help another
organization? One of the things that we used to do so I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but from a capacity planning standpoint, we do that externally. And we used to do it in, spreadsheets. We had It's probably some 50 some odd capacity plans, right? That we're individually staffing to. We used to every single month get the, for the forecast from finance, load it into a spreadsheet staff to that, and then provide those headcount numbers back to finance, right?
For the financial forecast, and then load them into, Calabrio for the schedule generation. And so we've been able to automate that entire life cycle of the capacity plan. And so rather than, 50 plus Excel files having to be sent, three, four times throughout the whole process, that just happens automatically. And then one of the things my team has been able to do as a result of that is really provide.
Dashboards to anyone in the business who wants to view, Hey, what does our customer service staffing look like? Projected, service levels look like for a line of business, 1, 2, 3, 4 in the organization. Right? And that's something that's very unique to Netflix is it's such a culture of openness that anyone in the organization can come in and say, Hey, why did I have to wait, two minutes for my call to be answered?
And they could pull up, in theory, the customer service staffing for that week, and they might come ask us and say, Hey I noticed, you all have, a one minute wait, two minute wait. What's going on there? And so we're able to provide that not only to CS members, but also just anyone in the business who needs to see what's happening with CS staffing. That's pretty cool.
Automation is always something that everybody is, should be striving for. And it's great to see that you've taken these steps to reduce that complexity and make it so much smoother. Do does, do any of your, when you guys would go out and try to identify a third party solution do any of those, did any of those solutions really stand out for you? I noticed you said you at some point, you, I think you guys used Twilio Flex as a primary driver.
Any other types of technology out there that really stand out for you as drivers to your success?
Yeah. Twilio's is used on the teleph. I'm not an engineer. It's used on the telephony delivery side. And it's been used quite heavily within our internal tools. In terms of other things, when we looked for workforce management particularly we really wanted something that was going to be extensible. And scalable. And for example, because we build our own, a c d we have to actually go out and build that integration. Ourselves, right?
Yes. So Netflix builds the integration between our a C D platform and the collab RT api. And while it may not have been important for many folks in the business, because I'm plugging off the shelf, a ac d into off the shelf workforce management, for us that was actually quite critical is that the, APIs be easily, There to integrate. Yeah. On the flip side though, probably more important for most people is what does the data warehouse look like that we can tap into?
Because, to the earlier point, workforce management is great at reporting. We can go into workforce management, see, Skill level, performance forecast, all that stuff. But it's all in the workforce management box, and not everyone in the organization is going to, wanna log into the workforce management application. Sometimes you need to be able to push that data to them. I find that
hard to. I find that hard to believe. Everyone wants a piece of W F M.
I've made so many logins, Dave, for folks, and I say, look, you can just do this yourself. And they say, no, I want my, Tableau dashboard, or I want my PDF emailed to me. So I, we do always have a joke about that, where, it is there if you want to go look for it, folks are, set in their ways in terms of how they want. The data to be presented to them.
So if I were to ask you, so now you spent you spent a week at s w PPP in Nashville, which was, get to meet a lot of your peers and a lot of people. If I were to ask you, what's one thing that Netflix does significantly better than other contact centers that you've run into? And maybe one thing that, maybe there's some room for improvement there. What would you say?
Yeah, absolutely. I think I was really struck by. Just in terms of the peers that you know, I met who were there, just how on top of it all of these organizations are right in terms of the sophistication of. Everyone's really there when it comes to workforce management now or is on the path to getting there. And so that was really impressive to see.
Yeah. You don't run into a lot of people that go, gosh, what? What do you mean by shrinkage? What do it's man we had people coming up to ask and ask us, how do I do interval, interval level shrinkage on a skill-based team when I have multi-site applications? And it's wow, these are not things that I necessarily had to tackle back in the day. And it's really, yeah the level of complexity, but also the level of knowledge is astounding these days that's out there. Yeah. So
great. Great example. Absolutely. Something that a lot of folks are just seem to really have nailed down and something that I think. We can always improve on is just really clear communication within the team, right? In terms of we have, multiple team members in multiple continents. In multiple countries, right? And just trying to be really thoughtful about how do we work asynchronously. Not everything needs to be a meeting.
And if everything needs to be a meeting, Someone's always gonna have a really bad, time zone meeting at 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM Right? And so that was an interesting one that I saw a couple folks really have great ideas on how do we work effectively, asynchronously, maybe not, specific to workforce management, but that was one takeaway from the conference that I had. All
right. So the final question I would have for you is, you we talk to a lot of people on the podcast that have really achieved the level of success that a lot of other people have been shooting for. You included, what are some things that you might say, maybe one or two tips that you might give to either an organization or individual who's maybe a little earlier in their journey about how you might have reached reached the level you were at?
Yeah. I appreciate you saying that. It's very kind and generous of you. I'm not sure if I entirely agree with the premise of the question, but I'll go ahead and answer it for you anyway. I would say just be curious constantly, right? Yeah. There are so many resources out there. When I learned workforce management, I learned by hitting F1 and going into the help file and just reading the whole thing front to back, right? Not literally, Pretty muchly. Almost literally.
Yep. Yeah. And there's so many good resources. That was one that was available now, but now there's, LinkedIn groups, community groups that are available and folks who are willing to help you just because they're giant nerds on the topic. And you'll see me in some of those groups sometimes chatting with folks, what's the best way to do this? Or what's the best way to do this on both sides, right? And it's a really collaborative environment and, be curious, ask for help.
And you know you'll get there for
sure. I. Completely agree. And I actually, most of my fellow collaborators that I work with are probably sick of hearing me say that if there's a singular trait that leads to success, especially in what we do for a living, it's curiosity. It's why is that the way it is? And, you get out your shovel and you just attack and keep going until. Until you're until you hit rock bottom and then you gotta crawl your way out of the hole. You dug yourself, but, and usually that means more work, right?
When you discover that you have to do something, you're also like, now I have to do it forever instead
of going forward. There's nothing worse than finding out something's been, miscalibrated on a model and being the one to point it out because it means now it's on you to fix it. Yeah. It's the,
The age old boy. I shouldn't have raised my hand. If I'd have just kept my hand down, I'd be, I have so much more free time. Absolutely. Yes. Okay. Trent, I have to say, first of all, Congratulations on the nomination. We know at this point that you didn't actually win the the award, but being nominated, you you, you might not even made it that far.
So being nominated is a pretty great honor and, for an organization like S W Ppp, to recognize the work that you're doing, I think is fantastic and it really shows the dedication and professionalism that you've put forth. So congratulations on that. Second of all, Huge thank you for joining us on the podcast and letting people know, the Netflix name as is pretty synonymous with success that's out there. And so we're glad that you hear.
One of the things that I always like to do is give, our guests the last word. So if I said to you, Hey, you've got a, you've got a soapbox here or a podium to say out to anyone that might be listening, what might you want to provide?
I think I, I'm gonna just anchor back on that. Be curious, right. I think that is the number one lesson I've learned in my career is that, while it's sometimes scary, it's okay to raise your hand and say, Hey, why is this set up this way? Or Why are we doing things this way? And then that is going to dovetail into. Conversations and change and things you're just gonna have to figure out. But it's gonna be a fun journey along the
way and know that you gotta back up your curiosity with data. You can't just say, Hey, this feels wrong. And then, run out like the Skeletor meme where it just runs out of the
room, right? We absolutely, you can say, Hey, this feels wrong. Give me a day and I'll, get some data and we can look at this together. But you can't just say, Hey, that seems weird. And then go about your day. You didn't solve anything by doing that, right? Absolutely. Trent, it's
been an absolute honor and a privilege to spend some time chatting with you here. And I think we're, a lot of people are going to be gr very excited to hear what we have to say here. So first for me, thank you really appreciate the time. And second of all, thank you as always to all of our listeners for you guys to give us some time of your day. It makes me super happy. And we are always looking for the next great Collabreo podcast.
So if you are listening and you'd like to be featured on the podcast, let us know. Just go send an email to marketing@collabreo.com and say, I want to be on Dave Podcast. We can certainly take steps to make that happen, but I appreciate it. We all appreciate it. And most importantly, Trent, thank you so much for joining us.
My name's Dave. Thank you. Oh,
absolutely. My name's Dave Stra product evangelist here at Collabreo. So thank you to everyone out there, and we'll see you on the next episode of Working Smarter from Collabreo. Thanks
everybody. Have a great day.