Prasanna Chand

Associate Director - Service Analytics & Workforce Tech, Wayfair

Wayfair is the destination for all things home, in one inspiring place. With quality finds for every style and budget, and a convenient experience from inspiration to installation, Wayfair empowers everyone, everywhere to create a space that is just right for them from its family of brands which includes: Wayfair, AllModern, Birch Lane, Joss & Main, Perigold and Wayfair Professional.

Wayfair generated $12 billion in net revenue for the year ended Dec. 31, 2023, and is headquartered in Boston, Mass., with global operations. The company’s customer care organization serves 22 million customers in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany and Ireland via phone, chat, SMS message, email, and will soon launch WhatsApp as a support channel.

Supernova Award Category: 
Future of Work: Human Capital Management
The Problem: 

Wayfair had seen a meteoric spike in orders during the Covid pandemic, when sales, revenue and contact center activity all doubled in volume. This was then followed by a contraction as the nation entered an era of inflationary pressures and a more fragile economy, where agents were often overscheduled.

When contact center agents have fixed schedules, it’s difficult to change agents’ schedules to meet forecasts alter the department’s staffing needs. As well, fixed schedules make it challenging for agents to have work-life flexibility – a significant workforce detractor as retention in the contact center industry overall tends to be high.

The shift to the remote-work reality accelerated by the pandemic has made staffing with gig workers more practical. For the customer service realm that often struggles with high turnover, gig economy employment offers greater autonomy and satisfaction, allowing an individual to select their own hours and opt-in options for jobs that match their skills, values, and lifestyle.

Recently, Wayfair revamped its contact center operations by adopting a new workforce approach to give the retailer greater flexibility in scaling to meet customer demands, enable customer engagement operations to be more cost effective, and support “gig economy” agent opportunities with flexible schedule options.

The Solution: 

Wayfair embarked on an extensive process to evaluate its current technology, build versus buy considerations, and conduct a market and competitor assessment to support its vision of contact center operations.

Wayfair employed a number of best practices to ensure thorough solution evaluation. These included getting the system sandbox in front of users as early as possible and as long as possible so they can test the day-to-day usability, and having scoring and success criteria that is clearly and collaboratively defined and aligned with stakeholders and end users. This also will hold everyone accountable to attend and provide feedback in demos, meetings, etc.

The company had been an existing Verint customer, leveraging its Workforce Management Solution, and in the end of the evaluation process, opted to renew with Verint as the vendor’s vision for contact center technology aligned with where the Wayfair team wanted to take its implementation.

The Results: 

Wayfair's new contact center staffing model relies heavily on Verint Workforce Management to staff to the variable demand curves and agent availability. The solution leverages AI and flexible scheduling tools to promote anywhere, anytime, work models. The ability to leverage AI to optimize scheduling across its 2,200 contact center workforce with agents working full-time, part-time, seasonal, and Bring Your Own Schedule schedules has been a game-changer for Wayfair.

Previously Wayfair had six brick & mortar contact centers; the company shuttered five of these, keeping 300 agents working onsite and moving the rest of its agents to a remote work-from-home model. While previously 98% of agents worked full-time, Wayfair diversified its workforce model for a new “layered” staffing approach that relied on a mix of full-time agents, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) support, seasonal workforce help, and a new “Bring Your Own Schedule” part-time workforce.

The BYOS attribute enables Wayfair to tap into a previously underleveraged type of talent with more pronounced flexible schedule needs, enabling the retailer to leverage this workforce to add “floating” capacity that is “waiting in the wings” quickly and easily whenever needed.

Wayfair is now able to maximize staffing during peak hours, manage unexpected surges in call volume, and accommodate for continuous follow-the-sun operation, to name a few of the many key benefits.

Metrics: 

Key metrics and results:

This new workforce model has enabled the company to more cost-effectively scale its contact center workforce as needed to better handle retail market volatility, resulting in better coverage (more stable intervals), and significant cost savings, which the company projects to be over $7 million from 2023-2025, with $3 million coming from the power of Verint’s variable scheduling.

The Technology: 

Verint Workforce Management is a cloud-based scheduling and forecasting solution that uses artificial intelligence to automate forecasts and create schedules for all employees and work types, to accommodate flexible schedules and self-service schedule changes. The solution considers and accounts for variables such as shift swaps, vacation seasons, and unanticipated call volume swings, to optimize schedules based on agent availability, work rules, skills, holidays, breaks, service levels, and budgets.

Disruptive Factor: 

Wayfair is leveraging AI-infused technology to improve both the customer experience by ensuring optimal resources in the contact center, and the employee experience by bringing newfound flexibility to contact center work. Additionally, they are achieving significant operational cost savings. The largest expense in customer service is the workforce. Worldwide there are 50 million customer service workers x $40K in average salary = $2 trillion in annual labor spend. Industry analyst firm Omdia says, “We believe AI-based solutions can bring 85% cost savings (mostly labor) to customers by meaningfully reducing the live agents/seats.”
 

Also, Wayfair is supporting an inclusive workplace, by opening up job opportunities to candidates who are unable to work traditional schedules. For contact centers, tapping into the gig work paradigm is an operational and philosophical advantage that can positively transform both employee and customer experience initiatives by optimizing staffing requirements while giving employees greater work-life flexibility. This improves the customer experience by ensuring the department is staffed with the correct number of resources with the needed skills while freeing agents to take on other non-contact-center work or enjoy free time with their families when interaction volume is low.

Shining Moment: 

Wayfair continues to explore ways to optimize its workforce to meet its dynamic staffing and customer needs and has a unique and vital partnership with Verint.

Wayfair was an early tester and beta customer for advanced technology which would later be acquired by Verint and branded as Verint’s TimeFlex Bot solution which revolutionizes and redefines the flexibility of contact center agent scheduling. Wayfair validated the use case and the technology in advance of Verint’s acquisition. The company is planning to deploy Verint’s TimeFlex Bot solution in the near future.

About Wayfair

Wayfair is the destination for all things home, in one inspiring place. With quality finds for every style and budget, and a convenient experience from inspiration to installation, Wayfair empowers everyone, everywhere to create a space that is just right for them.