This is a guest post by Travis Fish, Head of Partnerships at Rotageek.
Flexible working has become one of the top buzzwords of 2020. Whether guiding a transition to remote working or supporting those affected by homeschooling and the virus, millions of UK employees have been granted flexibility in the workplace. But what about the forgotten workforce - those without desks?
Here at Rotageek, we provide smart scheduling solutions to not only improve productivity and profitability, but also to increase employee happiness. Shift workers and the deskless workforce are often on roster rotations that would shock office-based teams and we aim to enable businesses to bring a human touch to scheduling by leveraging the power of technology and machine learning algorithms.
By giving employees input into their rota (think, availability, preferences, and flexing hours up and down, as well as swapping shifts when things change last minute) AND utilizing computer technology to compute millions of shift/skill and person combinations alongside business and legal rules in seconds, you can create rotas that not only work better for businesses but also for employees' ever-changing and complex lives.
Rotageek & JRNI
So why would you want to integrate employee scheduling and customer journey scheduling? Surely they are two very distinct areas of operation?
Our partnership is built on the idea that interoperability is good, and even where your solutions don't specifically overlap, (where things like rotas and payroll naturally do), you can sometimes deliver as much value if you think just a little creatively!
Coordinating virtual queuing, contactless store pickup or appointments, and online events requires that the scheduling platform knows not only the times during which those channels are 'open,' but also how many resources (people) are available to deliver that service, and in some cases, specifically whether they are skilled in certain tasks. This is generally solved in most operations by time-consuming double keying, but a JRNI and Rotageek integration would completely remove that work. You could, for example, provide appointment bookings matched exactly to the real-time number of appropriately skilled team members that are working in the store at a given time in the future and inform the customer who will be serving them so they know who to ask for!
Once you have that in place in your operation, we see many more possibilities for embracing other integrations with JRNI. We know that rotas are sometimes over-staffed - so imagine being able to dynamically offer more appointments during those periods. This would provide more options for your customers and would overall accommodate more people in the course of a week.
This is why we are passionate about helping our customers embrace technology that enables better experiences, both for their own customers and employees in tandem. Removing manual processes and adding automation benefits everyone: customers, employees, and the business.