Verint Best Practices – Time Off Management

Transcript

Matthew: Welcome everyone I'm Matthew Storm with Group Elite. Thank you for spending a little short bit of time with us this afternoon. We have an exciting session on workforce management, I'm joined here by two of my colleagues. Chris say hello.

Chris: Hello good afternoon.

Matthew:  Alright and Eric Masson, hey Eric, how are you today?

Eric: All right very good, yourself?

Matthew:  Wonderful wonderful, well let's go ahead and just jump right into the topic at

hand. We've got a lot of people here on the line Chris, I think we're probably going to cross the 100 people mark today on our best practices sessions so uh yeah let's keep these

great ideas coming. Uh just as a quick introduction if you haven't heard of Group Elite before, Group Elite is a Verint strategic partner we do a lot of work for Verint and Verint partners in the partner ecosystem we've been around almost 10 years, will be our anniversary next year. We do a lot of upgrades and works in this space um we also offer a variety of Verint services including new implementations and upgrades. Something that we call quick wins or tailor-made projects based on KPI, and so if there's any other information that you'd like about Group Elite that's not for this call but if you would just uh you know you can ask in the chat or in the Q&A. So without further ado let's get to the topic at hand. You know Chris you and I we've been talking a lot uh in preparation for this that you know I worked in a call center and you know how do I get time off was you know one of the first questions yeah and you know you know 20 years ago it was cumbersome, it was it was somewhat online, it was somewhat paper, it was somewhat through HR somewhat through uh the WFM team. So uh I know one of the topics at hand we're going to talk about today are some of those things that we can just you know reduce the level of effort that it takes in this very arduous process, so I'm going to turn it over to you and I'm going to make you the presenter so you can share the screen and we can come out of powerpoint world and we'll just see it right in the Verint product, so yep, over to you sir.

Chris: Thank you and uh so as Matthew's clicking the buttons uh thank you everybody my name is Chris Rand with Group Elite, and before coming to Group Elite, I have well over a dozen years of direct experience with the Verint workforce management platform started uh several workforce management teams myself, and have served from everything from just uh starting with forecasting scheduling all the way up through actually management roles and responsibilities including subject matter experts and just about everything in between with that. One of the things that i usually got to do in my role which was definitely um kind of the uh you know utility infielder I guess would probably be a good way to say it was talking with our new hires and one of the things that they always talked about was hey you know number one what's my schedule number two how do I get time off, And working with the Verint system time off was always a big kind of an aspect of our job kind of probably second only to managing the daily schedules, and the intraday type of type of functionality. One of those you know situations that we always manage a lot of, and unfortunately it happens to everybody is you have some employees who have to take some time off at uh situations that may not always be the best for their life situations, whether it be a bereavement or a military duty duty kind of a situation, or even they get that postcard in the mail that says congratulations you've been picked for jury duty. So uh you know yeah knocking on some wood here I haven't gotten one of those postcards in a while, of course knowing that it'll probably be sitting in the mailbox when I go check on it this afternoon. Thank you matt by the way I will I will I will send them your way to go have you served for me if that's okay. But anyways uh being in a larger call center we had a lot of these kinds of situations come up so we were looking for a better way to to handle those and the way that I'm about to share with you today was a way that I developed with the organization I worked with in order to take care of some of those kinds of situations, and make them a lot less arduous. Not only for the employee themselves but also for us on the workforce management side. There are a couple of examples I've actually already pre-built in the system but you know let's just go ahead and kind of we got a little bit of time here so I'm going to go ahead and build another one. So I'm off and I'm going to make this family leave uh if I can type. Family leave. We're using just the standard Verint work administration activities uh activity creation interface here in order to create our activity. This one in the organization the demo organization I'm working with is actually a paid activity and I'm going to fill in a couple of these boxes here. And of course the important box we always have to make sure we check when we're dealing with time off of any type is to make sure that we tell the system that it's time off. Now there's one more very important box down here in the request management system that we do have to make sure we check and that's the use in request option. Now using it in a request means that you actually are able to allow your employees to request this time off item when they are in the time off request management interface in the Verint system. There's also a couple of other boxes that relate to how to deduct it from specific types of the time off pools. Whether that be the daily pool or the interval pool, you can check either of those if you have those specific types of of pools going on for those. Some organizations choose not to actually use those because they figure okay you know what this is a leave and 99 times out of a hundred guess what, we're going to have to approve this item and we're not going to want to have a limitation of those types of pools getting in our way. One less thing to worry about when the employee is going through one less complication. One thing I will point out by the way as I'm creating this activity for us here, is that generally a lot of these types of leaves do require some paperwork as well. So when you're communicating this new functionality to your employees, make sure you do mention that they need to provide you with the paperwork in order to get that final approval, because I know the worst thing that would probably hap could probably happen is that the employee gets approved for it but they forget to turn in the paperwork and then you're forced to go back and deny that request. Once we get the activity approved we do have to obviously map it in order to make sure that the employee stays in adherence with the uh with the system when they are not actually in the office. So any of our leaves and any of our actual absence activities generally the employee is not logged in they're not going to come to the office and sign into the phone and go into military leave or jury duty or things like that. So we generally say you know you're not going to be here so we're going to go ahead and set you up as a no activity on the adhering activities section within the system. Now that we've got the activity mapped correctly we can go over to set up the actual settings for the time off request that we're making over here under the request management system. Now there's a couple of different settings most of these you probably recognize yes this is one of the longer screens in the entire system, and you probably if you're using time off and Verint already these are probably already set, don't worry about touching them because in general, they're the settings you have here are perfectly fine on the settings screen. So we just jump right over to the validation rules. Now within Verint there are a number of different flexible validation rules that we have in order to determine how we handle each of our specific types of time off or other requests. Now I'm going to go ahead and pull up one that I created a little bit ago here called the bereavement leave, and we'll use this as our demo example for the rest of our session here. As we pull up at the opportunity uh the specific time-off type, you'll notice by the way that within our drop down and selector there's a small little you can almost see it here a bunch of little blue dots that are vertical, kind of looks like that pipe symbol that is above the enter key. So what that means in the Verint world is that I can multi-select, so I've got three different options here gonna set up bereavement jury duty and military leave all to be following the same validation rules. Now these validation rules kind of are like the bumpers on the bowling alley so you know when you go down and bowl you can guarantee not to throw a gutter ball, and hopefully that you can actually hit a couple of pins on the way down down the alley and make some points for yourself with that. The validation rules there's a number of different ones of them that are available, in general like I said for the leave type activities we kind of got to have to approve them no matter what. So there's only a few guidelines that I generally recommend folks setting up. The first one of course is complying with the filing rules we don't want to have an employee setting something up for you know bereavement leave for next summer I don't think that they're planning on having attended a funeral next summer you know we're only still in november, so I don't think that that's probably going to be a valid request at that point. Do we also do have a situation where we don't want to have the requested time off being swapped, that can cause some payroll issues especially with some of the different types of circumstances and situations out there. The third one I generally recommend is making sure that the duration of the request is at least 15 minutes you're not going to go to a funeral and stay there for only two minutes and then walk back out because you got to get back to work. Generally you want to have you know your bereavement leave for the entire time that you're using it, so those are the three that I generally recommend folks set up. There are a number of these other ones that are available if you're interested I know Matt's going to put up contact information here in a little bit you know contact us if you have questions about a situation that's going to be best for you and we can work to help you determine what's the best setup for your particular business need within the within the request management and auto processing and time off uh leave rules. We're moving over now to the filing rules, and at the moment I don't have any of these set up specifically because like I said, you know generally they're short term and most people play by the rules and so you know unless you have a problem don't worry about it don't over complicate the process with the uh with the filing rules within the system. Once we've got the validation rules all set up we'll pop over to our auto processing area and the auto processing area is where we set the ground rules in terms of how the system automatically processes our request. Gonna pull up our bereavement leave here and if you have additional organizations down underneath your organization you set it up with you can allow the system to apply these same rules down the down the line to those additional organizations by selecting how to apply it here at the sub organization level. The specific type of time off we're impacting is listed here and selectable from our drop down, and also what uh time requests that we have for those specific types of requests. 

Now here's where kind of the meat and potatoes of the process comes into play. Obviously like I said you know when we want to uh have this process in order to save the most time for our workforce team, generally we'll want to go ahead and have it approved with no violations of course we hadn't set up any violations initially, so hopefully that most of those will go through and be approved. Keep in mind like I said you know remind your agents and employees that the approval is conditional upon the fact that they provide you with the paperwork after the fact, because unfortunately in today's world we do need the paperwork to follow the follow the request. So make sure that they're aware of that. The other side of the screen here over on the denial side is how we make sure that we don't accidentally auto deny any requests that may not have gotten through or put in properly, so we don't auto deny any of these requests. Now that we've got this side all set up um Matt do we have any questions that have popped in so far um ready to pop into the employee side?

Matthew: We actually do, so um the question is in regards to, so you keep mentioning the paperwork that needs to be filed you know um. So I'm assuming that's not in workforce management, but um how would someone in HR know that these are the 32 people that need bereavement, and the 12 people that are on military leave, and the 87 people that went to jury duty that need paperwork um ,well how would you communicate to HR that list of people that took this time off, so that they would know they need the right legal paperwork?  

Chris: Awesome question, so you know that's good thing caught me here just before I dropped into the uh the agent level view. There are several reports here in the Verint system that have a number of different uh opportunities and functionalities that are available. Now down here in the time off reports area what we can do is we can go in and actually pull a report for one of the a list of employees by organization. So what we can do is we have our our HR team either A: jump in and pull the report themselves or B: using a specifically designed filter, we can actually set up a report so that it will automatically either be available to them or actually, be emailed to them as well through the email distribution system which is down here at the bottom section of the report parameters. Now this is an area that a lot of people forget about I find when I'm talking with them about it,  just about everyone i've talked with going oh that's right we can do that and set it up so that you know we as the workforce team can you know set up a list of employees that we want to have see this report and have it set up as a recurring basis every day, every week, or every month, and then have it available to our hr team or even you know if you want hr@group elite.com. 

Matthew: So just send them the spreadsheet every monday at 7 00 a.m for the previous week or something like that.

Chris: That's correct, have them do that and even have a custom subject here for the uh for the for the email as well so it just drops in their inbox every you know every day, or every week, or every you know every month, or the first monday of every month. So as they're going through the processing of the prior months time they can say okay hey this is uh our list okay check box here Joe's got his paperwork jan's got his paperwork oops you know judy forgot her paperwork, hey judy uh you know can you send me that bereavement uh paperwork that you were asking for, and she said oh yeah no problem you know it's I've had a lot of things on my mind and you know no problem and two minutes later she scans it in and sends it over via email or whatever. 

Matthew: I'm sorry, so while you're switching over to the h inside um, I will remind everyone if you have a question for uh Chris ask in the chat box ask in the Q&A we're going to take we're going to have time for a little bit more  Q&A here. So um while you're loading that Chris another question is there a way to notify the supervisor of the employee as well?

Chris: Good question. Thereis actually if you're using the employee notification system through either the desktop messaging alerts or even through some of the schedule change alerts. There are ways to send that notification to not only the employee that their time has been approved but also to the supervisor or another group or or um a group of employees within the contact center say your management team via a email notification that uh Judy got approved for you know jury duty or whatever kind of a leave, and that's actually just building on the functionality that's already within the system of the time off request. So it's a relatively simple addition to that.

Matthew: Okay gotcha, all right, go ahead Chris.

Chris: So now let's go take a look at uh putting in the request from the employee side. Most of the employees will drop into the Verint workforce suite in the my home module here, and over in the my home module there's a number of different areas that depending on the packages that you have within the suite. You'll have they have access to anywhere from their basic information to their schedules to their request module which they hopefully are pretty familiar with because that's how they request their time off, as well as several other performance and and learning modules that allow them to take more ownership of their performance, and activities within the center in order to assist the center in meeting its goals. So now that we've gotten into our our requests area, I'm going to go ahead in and flip over my view to the time off section you'll notice it changes the screen just a little bit slightly, and shows a listing of the time off that i've either taken or have requested along with a calendar for the next several months within the system. What I'm going to do now in order to do this just simply go over here to the my request, and create a new request and I'm going to select bereavement and put in the dates that I want to do, so I'm going to do the 23rd and the 24th here and set those dates up within here, and make sure I get everything correct and then hit the save button now hopefully, come back here in just a moment as it spins and looks like I have an approved two days worth of bereavement time off right here. As you saw live and in full color five seconds after, I hit the save button I have my approval and as you can see the system says automatically approved so that's great that easy that simple all ready to go that just saved the workforce team a whole bunch of time, because I know when I was processing leaves and stuff like that it would generally be between five and ten minutes per person. So you know five or six seconds versus you know five or ten minutes is a lot of a time savings. 

Matthew: Chris, I'm gonna uh I'm I've got two more questions here for you um. Is there a way to configure that report to go out Saturday through Friday for the prior week to go out each Monday?

Chris: Good question. The report range that is set up within the system is dependent upon a couple of different settings, the the major one being the start day of the week that the system is configured for. So that's kind of the the the setting that it is in there we could probably work with you to figure out if there's a way to alter that based on your business needs. There are some other options beside that one report that I demonstrated that may have some other options as well so there are possibilities. And Matt I think you may be on mute.

Matthew: Got a couple more questions, what I'm going to do next though is I'm going to just share a couple more details here and then we're going to have time for some more Q&A. First of all we've documented some of these steps for you and if you'd like a copy of this, you're going to get an email from Eric here probably in the next half hour, just ask him for a copy of this he can send this to you. Also some useful resources about berentconnect, if you're not already a member go out there and register for that um you know go out to the idea portal, go to some of these uh resources here if you want some of these links we'll also send those to you. If you have questions about some of the other engagements that we talked about um, feel free to reach out to one of us we these are usually very short engagements that we do for Verint clients that are usually centered around a specific KPI. Like schedule adherence or net promoters for a particular KPI. One last thing I will offer for those of you who are attending, that Eric's also going to be emailing you a request to a book a time to meet him about, so the first three people that respond to eric's email book of time on his calendar are also going to get a little bit of free consulting. Chris or somebody the other on our WFM team well we can do a mobile app readiness check for you to see if you're ready to implement the mobile app. Maybe review some of these conversion processes, maybe look at after leave reporting requirements, and if those are questions that you have you're going to be getting an email from Eric just you know just click on the time and just let Eric know that uh that you'd be interested in having just this little bit of hour with one of our consultants around WFM. So uh let's go back to some of the questions that we have um so if we just go back let me just open up the chat window here again, got a few more questions um. So the uh question is from your experience how strict is the net staffing validation rule, for example 100 positive net staffing to submit time off. What would your recommendation be?

Chris: Well, the net staffing like you know that's a little bit outside the kind of the the scope of what we're dealing with here in terms of the lead, but the the net staffing can is one of those validation rules um that I have seen used for other types of time off, and i like to kind of tell people that you know it's a this is a computer so basically you tell it the parameters you draw the you draw the lines around the you know the box in terms of what you want to have it approved and it'll follow those lines uh to the letter. So you know if you have a specific value that you've got set up for that specific item, it will follow that and anything that is outside of those those boundaries will generally depending on how you have the auto processing set up either you know drop into a pending state or potentially drop into some other sort of like a waitlist, or uh potentially even depending on how strict you want to have it potentially even deny it as well.

Matthew: Is there an override process for denied time off?

Chris: Good question. There can be a um an override request essentially it's what's called an escalated request and each business is a little bit different in terms of how it sets up those uh rules regarding the uh the second level kind of an escalation. Some organizations want uh the employee to talk with their manager first, other organizations use the escalation button on the Verint time-off request module to indicate that they need to talk with their manager. Everybody is a little bit different it's all a matter of kind of what what's working best for the organization and certainly we can work with you on trying to figure out which way works best and kind of work it into the business rules and culture that your organization has.

Matthew: I'm gonna I'm gonna table a couple questions in in regards to integrations with payroll. Eric I might let you feel those questions um uh for it looks like Vicky and Jose if you have questions about interfacing with payroll and approval and denial processes and tools like workday and day force and things like that. Let's take the and answer those questions for you offline because there there are a number of integrations both on the time off side and on the availability side, and um which ones and what versions and what details um i'll let you answer that. We got one more final question then we're going to have to wrap up because we said 20 minutes but you know this is workforce management so we got to go a little longer because we've got 10 you know.

Chris: No going over because I'm going to have to have my workforce people that edit all of our time, that's right time is money. 

Matthew: Is there a way to set up email notifications that can be set up to send to supervisors once associates PTO hours hit negative.

Chris: Good question, there are some ways to monitor the PTO allotments, and each organization has that a little bit different. So there is no one kind of blanket peanut butter answer to that. Um it's uh you know everybody's a little bit different, there are some potential opportunities for uh for doing that if we wanted to, and it's it's all a matter of you know everybody there's no two circumstances that are right, which is why when we're in working with our customers we find the best way specifically for them. You know what works for company a may not work for company b which may be totally separate from company c, so that's the value of uh obtaining services from Group Elite is we're there to work with you and make sure that the system works the best for your specific needs.

Matthew: Gotcha, um all right we've got we can squeeze one more in here you got to be quick Chris. So uh we have a team managing time off requests with an app admin role can this role escalate auto denied requests?

Chris: Good question. That that's actually a setting um within the system the ability to escalate is actually a separate checkbox. So you know if you've got an uh manager or someone with a manager or supervisory type of a job duty, there is the ability if they have visibility to the employee requests. They they do have the ability to hit that little escalate button just as well as the employee assuming that that's part of your company culture.

Matthew: Gotcha, all right. Wow Chris amazing. Stay tuned next month, we're going to switch back to QM we kind of QM WFM a little speech this one's going to be on calibration in QM, so if you get the invite and you're WFM and you know the QM team forward it on over or vice versa. We're going to be we're going to be doing these we've got two or three already scheduled out. Again be on the lookout from an email from Eric if you're interested in one of those consultants please reply as quickly as you can we're gonna do that for the first three people. Also we have uh a number of questions and if there are questions we didn't quite get or maybe you have follow-up or whatever again to pose those to Eric, and we can get you the right resources and see if we can answer them or point you to the right person. Again thank you so much for attending, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your afternoon. And wow with like 30 seconds to the bottom of the hour, so with workforce management accuracy, I'll say uh goodnight and good luck and and hope everyone has a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you again Chris.

Chirs: Thank you everybody, have a good one, look forward to talking with you all soon.