Delta Defense - Contact Center Professional of the Year
Company: Delta Defense, West Bend, WI
Company Description: Delta Defense manages the United States Concealed Carry Association (USCCA), providing responsibly armed Americans the very best in firearms education materials, instruction and insurance. The USCCA protects more than 235,000 people nationwide from the aftermath of a self defense shooting with their Shield™ policies and publishes Concealed Carry Magazine™ with distribution of 250,000 + readers.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Individual Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Contact Center Professional of the Year
Nomination Title: Tireless Advocate, Talented Scheduler
Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since the beginning of July 2017 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:
Quality is the one element that must be present in a product — or that product is doomed to fail. In a contact center, quality is first established by the service level promised and the rate at which it’s met. 24/7 customer demand, agent availability and preparedness, and proper allocation of resources to meet the growing, complex demands of both a customer base and a growing business hoping to break through to an enterprise level are challenges meant for someone who sees opportunities instead of obstacles; someone who recognizes the most important promise a business can make to its customers: When you need us, we’ll be there. Our Workforce Manager, Dan Bognar, is your Contact Center Professional of the Year.
Here at Delta Defense, we’ve achieved and sustained remarkable growth. We believe and profess that companies and people are either “growing or dying” and that the speed with which we execute our promises will be the deciding factor that allows us to overcome hungry competitors. As an Inc. 5000 “Fastest Growing Company” for seven consecutive years, we witness the importance of rapid execution and excellent, world-class customer service. Dan’s work is vital to our success. Without Dan, we cannot achieve the quality we demand as part of our strategy and customer promise. He pores over our historical data and marketing sales projections to determine what sort of call volumes, social media activity, and email and chat demand we’ll experience. His forecasts were within 3% — despite a 252% overall increase in contacts! Dan balanced customer demand, agent demand and company demand to bring us to premier SLA levels for both phone and chat responsiveness (with 70% of our nearly 200,000 inbound calls answered in 20 seconds or less, and 78% of just over 24,000 chat requests answered in 30 seconds or less).
Dan is not only masterful at predicting our volumes but also surgical in supporting allocation of our most important resource — our people. Dan looks for ways to accommodate the needs of the agent while loyally fulfilling the needs of the business. He is vigilant in tracking for healthy occupancy rates, and he schedules agents so they may achieve home/work harmony. For instance, agents requested 877 vacation days and 130 shift changes. Dan answers the expectation of achieving service level while scheduling training and professional development so agents can improve their skills to fuel our growth. There were 37 corporate events and 13 mandatory training sessions around which Dan needed to plan. Dan must also organize and report on our contact center’s success of achieving our KPIs. While all of this is impressive, what’s most impressive is that on top of all of his “normal” duties, Dan was challenged with moving us to a 24/7 contact center this year while losing 20% of our contact center staff to internal promotions in a six-month span. We added no new staff when we made that initial change, but we did increase our available time to customers by 124%. Dan never allowed us to miss a single contact or for a single agent to go unsupported.
It is vital that Dan be months ahead with speculating when seasonal influences, marketing efforts and company growth will impact our staffing model. As a company that has indeed experienced tremendous growth, we’ve relied immensely on his staffing projections and hiring recommendations. Without Dan, many of us would simply be left to throw darts at a board. Dan is a tireless advocate for our agents, a talented scheduler, a tactical necessity for the success of our company and an unsung hero for us and our customers. Dan Bognar exemplifies the talents, skills and character needed to be recognized as your Contact Center Professional of the Year.