The challenge
4Front Credit Union’s contact center lacked the data and tools to guide staffing and scheduling decisions. Their reliance on manual reporting and an aging on-premises phone system led to inefficient shift coverage, high overflow call costs from a third party partner, and inconsistent member experiences. At the same time, their agents faced burnout risks due to unclear break structures and unnecessary Saturday staffing, all without reliable data to justify scheduling choices.
Their goal: Maximize efficiency, minimize costs, and provide members with the best service possible.
The solution
4Front partnered with TTEC Digital to replace its on premises contact center with Genesys Cloud and implement Workforce Management (WFM) software — a solution that predicts call volumes to ensure the right number of agents are scheduled at the right times.
The transition included structured training, extensive testing, and data driven scheduling guidance. TTEC Digital also integrated SmartApps to streamline member authentication and prevent fraud within the new platform. Finally, the team built custom forecasting models and trained leaders to use data for scheduling and ongoing optimization.
Our mission is to value experiences to support our members on their journey. We have one hundred thousand members in the state of Michigan and we are a full service financial institution with every service that any of our competitors offer. Hi, I'm Kent Nordin. I'm the Vice President of the Communication Center at 4Front Credit Union. My name is Katrina Lafferty. My role here at 4Front is a Communication Center Assistant Manager III. So for us, you know, our members are calling us because they need help, and we're here to answer that call and help them with whatever situation they might be experiencing. So our contact center is on the smaller side. We have about fifteen to twenty phone agents, and sometimes our call volume exceeds the amount that they can handle throughout the day. We then have a third party who is a great work partner that we roll those calls over to. However, there is a permanent expense for that service and some of the calls our vendor can't provide one touch resolution for. So what we were looking to do is maximize our efficiency and minimize our cost and provide our members the best service we could. Our contact center did not have any sort of data to make decisions on. We had a functional phone product. However, everything we wanted to do on a staffing side was manual. Manual compilation of reports, trying to figure out what worked best, and trial and error. Without that data, sometimes we were playing catch up and reacting, which doesn't provide the service that we're looking for at the credit unions. Our previous solution was kind of just that basic phone system. So we were on the on prem solution and we were presented with the opportunity as it was being sunset to upgrade to Genesys Cloud and this brought a lot of new features to our team members that really helped them manage their day. The TTEC group helped us through that transition and built the partnership starting in September of last year with a go live date in April. So we scheduled structured trainings, we learned about the system, and we had to launch this live where one day the old system was gone and the next day the new system was live and functional. So after we went live with Genesys Cloud, we then decided to jump right into implementing workforce management. So from there, we worked with Tommy at TTEC Digital, he did a great job by building out our organization. And we spent several weeks with him learning the workforce management program and becoming acclimated to that. Eight weeks after launch, we were very excited to dig in. And during that eight week timeframe, we had some weekly touch bases to make sure we understood the data and how we could best use it. One of the first things we did is looked at volume of calls in the forecast and where we had people scheduled. We were able to reallocate when we had people there, fewer openers and closers and more people during the middle of the day. We have a very efficient schedule supported by data. And as this data builds and builds, we'll go from an eight week look back of forecasting to a year over year forecasting that will help us become even more efficient. If we can reduce the number of Saturdays our team members are working, they're going to be happy about that. It was clear and easy for us to see that we had too many people scheduled for those days and our occupancy was lower than we had wanted it to be. We made the decision from an efficiency standpoint to change the schedules and this was a huge one for the team. We're so excited that now when they're here on Saturdays, their time is being efficiently used. As a nonprofit cooperative owned by our members, we are tasked with being good stewards of our members' money. We have cut that cost immensely and been able to provide better, more efficient service. Our handle time has decreased nicely. Our team members now have the ability to see and track their own handle time. Maybe even more impactful was our reduction of the calls rolling to our third party. We have been able to reduce that by at least fifty eight percent over the last six months of the year very consistently. So working with TTEC Digital was really great for launching our phone system. They kept us on schedule and provided great updates and information and expertise as we were implementing that. We needed guidance in this. We knew where we wanted to go and we knew it was important. We didn't know how to get there. The advantage of having an expert tell us how to get there after asking tons of questions about what this journey looked like for us to make sure our usage of the product was consistent with our values and our goals, Having a trusted work partner to guide you through and set benchmarks can ease your concerns about this, and building good open communication can get rid of those questions so you can launch with confidence.
The results
By migrating their on-premises contact center to Genesys Cloud and implementing WFM capabilities, 4Front transformed their operational efficiency. Most notably, they achieved a 58% reduction in overflow calls sent to their third-party partner, keeping more interactions in-house.
This approach allowed 4Front to lower operating expenses, speed up service delivery, and reduce handle times, all while providing a more consistent and professional member experience.
