Crédit Agricole Charente-Maritime Deux-Sèvres

Crédit Agricole Charente-Maritime Deux-Sèvres set itself a challenge: replace a long-standing, locally installed scheduling tool with a modern, predictive approach to staffing its customer service centre.

A few months after rolling out m-work Planner, volume forecasts are accurate to nearly 99%, and managers have won back time for their teams.

Crédit Agricole Charente-Maritime Deux-Sèvres: a regional bank with a multichannel customer service centre

A regional bank within the Crédit Agricole group, Crédit Agricole Charente-Maritime Deux-Sèvres serves individuals, professionals and businesses across two French départements. Its customer service centre, based in Saintes, handles every remote interaction: calls, emails and inbound requests from digital channels.

A banking contact centre comes with a specific constraint: multi-skilled advisors on rotating schedules who must absorb volumes that vary by channel, by day and by season. Scheduling is a daily exercise in precision.

The challenge: moving on from an ageing tool that had reached its limits

For years, the Saintes centre ran on a legacy scheduling tool. Reliable in its day, it could no longer address three needs that had become central:

• Forecasting contact volumes accurately — calls, emails, leads — rather than observing them after the fact.
• Optimising resource allocation across rotating, highly multi-skilled schedules where each advisor can work several queues.
• Giving managers back their time, absorbed as they were by building and manually adjusting schedules.

The solution: m-work Planner, from forecast to schedule

Crédit Agricole CMDS chose m-work Planner to cover the whole chain: forecast volumes, calculate the headcount needed queue by queue, then build the schedule that delivers it. Deployed in early 2026, the tool went live within months, working in an agile mode with the centre’s teams.

A few months in, three results stand out:

• Volume forecasts accurate to nearly 99% over the last quarter, and still improving as the model learns from the centre’s data.
• A concrete view of coverage, queue by queue, to put objective figures on staffing needs and steer day to day — managers can see where the schedule is right, where it is under strain, and adjust with full visibility.
• An agile way of working between the Crédit Agricole CMDS teams and m-work, which made it possible to move fast and iterate together on the centre’s rules, constraints and edge cases.

What predictive scheduling changes

• Managers schedule less and lead more. Time once spent building the schedule is reinvested in coaching advisors.
• Staffing needs are backed by data. In front of leadership or staff representatives, headcount rests on measured and forecast volumes, not on gut feel.
• Multi-skilling finally pays off. An advisor competent on several queues is assigned where they add the most value in every time slot.

With the right tooling, scheduling stops being a constraint and becomes a genuine management lever. Our thanks to the Crédit Agricole Charente-Maritime Deux-Sèvres teams for their trust.

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