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Ted Lango:"ROC" Projects
Resource Optimization Center (ROC)
What Is The "ROC"?
The "ROC", or Resource Optimization Center is a business unit tasked to support the creation and adoption of “best practices” needed to maximize Customer Care resources. The ROC’s mission statement is to:
Drive efficiency and maximize Customer Care resources in the Southern Division through improved forecasting, call routing, workforce utilization, 3rd party allocation and oversight, and dynamic resource management.
The ROC will consolidate key WFM functions at Division:
- Forecasting Aggregation & Validation
- Call Routing Oversight, Avaya Skill Template Management
- Real-Time Monitoring and Incident Management
- Third Party Management, Forecasting & Real-Time Monitoring
- Bi-directional Interface with other functional departments
- Universal IVR Monitoring and Customer Experience Management
- Adoption of the WFM Best Practice Playbook
ROC Mission Statement
The ROC's mission is not to simply re-allocate call traffic, but to drive efficiencies in all areas of resource management, through both strategic planning (forecasting) and improved tactical execution (real-time management). The ROC's core goal is tied to a structured Event Management system. Through this Event Management system, the ROC creates cases to document periods of time throughout a day in which a call center fails to operate within Service Level targets. The method of capturing these events is tied to a fixed cause-effect fishbone, allowing for consistent conclusions to be reached by the ROC Analyst working an event.
This analysis is central to the ROC's core goals. In providing daily case analysis, the ROC will capture patterns where failure in some area of resource management has led to a degradation in service level. The cases provide support to determine where investments need to be made to improve methods used in strategic planning and real-time resource management in a call center.
In summary, the ROC's goal is to leverage workforce management principles, telephony and desktop technology, reporting & analytics - all to continuously balance customer experience with the operational expense. The ROC model is considered a foundation framework, supporting a service-profit chain, and core operational strategy for any customer service operation.
ROC Deployments
Comcast - Southern Division
I launched my first ROC Project at Comcast on June 22nd, 2009, with the goal to deploy the operation in 90 days. Standard project management discipline was used for planning, organizing, and managing resources associated with the ROC project. This project is managed through QuickBase. The ROC Project was categorized into 5 groups, with 85 tasks. After 90 days, 56 of the 95 tasks are 100% complete, with the remaining "in-progress" tasks in the areas of:
- Completion of the hiring of analysts
- Building of SOPs for both Real-Time and Strategic operations, and
- Application & Software development.
The ROC Project finished on target for deployment, and under budget, with the completion of most major launch tasks on or before September 22nd. September 22nd marks the Soft Launch of the ROC Control Room, with equipment installed, and hired resources deployed. The following phase focused on the application configuration and SOP establishment, which continues to be fine-tuned throughout Q4, 2009 - Q1, 2010. The next major milestone completed was a full Operational Launch; after sufficient application tuning and SOP development is developed to provide beneficial input into overall resource management, the ROC will Operationally Launch. This milestone was reached on October 22nd. The final 60 days of 2009 will be utilized to expand SOPs, fine-tune applications, and begin to establish recommendations for optimizing resources and routing.
Comcast - 4 More ROCs
After completing the Southern Division ROC, I was asked to help facilitate 4 additional ROCs at Comcast for the West Division, the East Division, the North Central Division and one for National HQ. I also transitioned to a national role at Comcast as we brought the 4 additional ROCs into production.
MetLife - A New ROC
After seeing the way the ROC model helps drive visibility into optimizing contact center operations, I proposed and secured funding to build another ROC, this time at MetLife. This funding was secured in 2013, and our ROC Command Center was officially launched on July 24th, 2014 in Dayton, Ohio. The work at MetLife not only focuses on the same transparency on our contact centers' performance, but this project involved a complete re-engineering of the workforce management approach. Significant work included:
- Create a Command Center: Leading edge command center that will provide improved visibility to live call queues, improved incident response times and interval level service consistency.
- Dashboard Development & Consulting: Consulting services in support of the design, development, and testing of a real-time reporting dashboard using IQ & SitScape to acquire, display and analyze datasets from existing systems.
- IEX Functionality Upgrades: Reconfiguration of the IEX database to utilize the multi-skill technology that exists but is not currently utilized in the tool.
- CMS Skill Template Standards: Evaluate, Optimize and Develop fixed CMS skills template inventory to meet business needs.
- IEX Skill Mapping & Configuration: Accurate IEX skill mapping which will allow full utilization of the multi-skill simulation module.
- Enhanced Incident Management: Migrating & redesigning current state Incident Management processes into ROC model for more efficient incident handling.
- Long Term Capacity Plan Development: Robust Long Range planning tool to plan and optimize center resources and performance. And, continued data integration into capacity planning tool; IVR and collision calendar.
- Examine Flex Staffing Options to Optimize Schedules:
- Flex Staffing Model: Create a volunteer-based flex staffing model to optimize utilization of human capital.
- Schedule Optimization: Schedule Quality Index recognition via improved schedule mix options, vendor schedule integration.
- WFM, ROC Standards Creation & Implementation: Comprehensive creation of operational/break-fix/change management standards and process documentation to drive operational discipline.
- Manage Talent Up-skilling: Job Family Re-alignment, Recruiting current positions, up-skilling, training, job alignment. On-site classroom training for ROC team on running simulations in a multi-skill environment.
- Scorecard Development: Reporting Measures of success from ROC enhancements and WFM re-engineering.
- Collision Calendar: establish a company-wide collision calendar system for events that have the potential to impact CSC. As events are known in advance, the ROC is responsible for forecasting the impact of these events.
Virtual & Home Based ROCs
As the pandemic set in, I built out a ROC based from home. Similar concepts, but I also added streaming and video switching capabilities. Ever since building this ROC in the basement at home, I've always set myself up with multiple monitors for work use - not just 2 or 3, but usually no less than 5. While I sold this home in 2022, I maintain "Mini-ROC" operations from my locations leveraging 12 monitors. Check out a 360 degree view of my previous home-based ROC!
