Scheduling system created by doctors enables O2 to reinvest £2.5M in customer experience

O2 to reinvest £2.5M in customer experience thanks to new online scheduling platform RotaGeek, enabling store managers to efficiently create and amend staff rotas.

The system offers a number of smarter scheduling features, enabling businesses of all sizes to optimise even the most complex staff rotas. Features include instant staff notifications on scheduling changes; payroll tracking; a multiple store management facility and even a mobile app for both Android and Apple OS, allowing employees to view their schedules on the move and request swaps and leave at anytime.

These features have led to an optimisation of staff scheduling across 270 O2 stores resulting in 6,300 employee hours per week, or £2.5M per year, better spent by improved matching of store staffing to customer demand. This has allowed store teams to invest in the customer experience without increasing cost. With a recent survey showing, 96 per cent of O2 store staff also rated RotaGeek as Good, Very Good or Excellent.

“As a leading digital communications company, we feel it’s vital for our staff to enjoy the same experiences as our customers do in terms of managing their everyday through digital technologies.” says Marks Sims, Head of Stores Continuous Improvement at O2. “What we’ve achieved through RotaGeek is the ability to satisfy the needs of our employees and when you have happy staff, you have happy customers.”

RotaGeek was the brainchild of a man who knows a thing or two about how important staffing can be. Chris McCullough, its co-founder, used to work as a doctor in Accident and Emergency.

“Get it wrong and you can find that the waiting area in your A&E department starts to look like Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon but even less happy” he says. “Get it wrong in a shop and you can find – as people did on Black Friday – that your shop starts to resemble a disgruntled A&E department.”

RotaGeek began its journey with O2 back in 2014, when they ran a trial with O2 after being accepted onto Wayra, Telefónica’s digital start-up accelerator. In two years, they’ve grown into a team of 11, with staff based in London and Melbourne. Earlier this year, RotaGeek closed a funding round of over £550k.

Gary Stewart, Director at Wayra in the UK, believes the success of RotaGeek was down to their forensic approach and understanding of what O2 were trying to achieve in their stores.

“The team at RotaGeek worked tirelessly to understand the value it could bring to O2 and those who work in its stores delivering great customer service each day. This kind of meticulous planning and approach is what a young business must do in order for it to land deals with the big corporates and scale fast.”

RotaGeek are now following in the footsteps of Qudini, another Wayra start-up, who last month became the preferred global supplier of queue management to the Telefónica Group.

“Our aim is to take RotaGeek global, to deliver value, simplify scheduling and delight customers around the world.” says Chris McCullough.