eBay Signs On with Blue Pumpkin to Enhance Customer Service

Blue Pumpkin announced eBay as a new customer, implementing the award-winning Blue Pumpkin Workforce Optimization Suite to augment employee performance, customer service and site operations of the world’s online marketplace.

Maximizing eBay’s customer service program, the Blue Pumpkin Workforce Optimization Suite is the industry’s first integrated system to dramatically improve employee performance and productivity across the full range of workforce processes, enabling people to complete their best work.

"We evaluated all of the major vendors, and Blue Pumpkin clearly distinguished themselves with an integrated solution that we needed to optimize our very complex workforce," said Robert Peterson, eBay’s senior manager of global workforce management. "It was also apparent early on that the Blue Pumpkin team was more committed and passionate about a long-term business relationship. With the Blue Pumpkin Suite, we can further align our processes and resources with our customers’ expectations."

With more than 1,000 agents, eBay’s customer service operation has responsibilities and challenges beyond that of most other contact centers.

As one of the most popular Internet shopping sites, its people serve a community of nearly 62 million registered users worldwide.

The Blue Pumpkin Suite will allow eBay to better match customer service agents with workload, thereby facilitating consistent service levels.

Further, employees are now empowered to increase their own productivity by monitoring and managing their own activities.

With Blue Pumpkin, eBay was also able to ensure the right people are answering the wide range of inquiries.

The Blue Pumpkin Suite unified different supervisory areas that had implemented ad hoc processes with a single workforce optimization system to facilitate enterprise-wide visibility and planning.

"Large, active enterprises such as eBay typify the type of company that will be among the vanguard of companies looking beyond traditional workforce management in the future," said Paul Stockford, chief analyst at Saddletree Research. "Once they have the right people working at the right times, the next logical step will be to optimize those resources. Blue Pumpkin's Optimization Suite is well positioned and ideally suited to take workforce management to the next level of workforce optimization, shaping people into a strategic asset."

Recently named "Product of the Year" by Customer Interaction Solutions, the Blue Pumpkin Suite optimizes and aligns the full range of workforce-related processes, including strategic planning, training, time tracking, performance evaluation, budgeting, scheduling, forecasting and more - ensuring that people are performing at their highest levels and helping the customer at the right place and right time.

Blue Pumpkin customers have enjoyed a return on investment of 300-600% and greater.