Company
Yanfeng is a leading global automotive supplier of interiors, exteriors, seating, cockpit electronics, and passive safety. The company employs over 57,000 employees at 240 technical centers and plants across 20 countries. Just about every global automaker equips their vehicles with Yanfeng’s products.
Challenge: Calling off with a hotline system was a manual, anxiety-ridden hassle for everyone.
Devin Frosheiser is a procurement manager at Yanfeng responsible for sourcing vendors for the company’s U.S. and Canadian operations. When one of the facilities managers approached Devin about increasing the minutes on their plan with their current call-off vendor, a call center hotline, she took it as an opportunity to evaluate the vendor as a whole and question whether or not their current solution was meeting their needs.
“Yanfeng is at the forefront of automotive innovation, so imagine my surprise when I heard how we were doing call-offs with this vendor,” Devin told us as she was recollecting what she learned.
She discovered a process that felt antiquated and manual:
“An hourly employee would call a phone number, then an actual person on the other line would answer to record why you were calling off. They’d send that information to our HR team who would have to manually log the info in our timekeeping system and then follow up with the employee to verify everything. Meanwhile, the employee would be crossing their fingers and hoping the operator captured their name and site correctly!”
HR was receiving approximately 150 call-offs per day across a dozen locations and was growing increasingly frustrated with the time and effort that the old process demanded.
Not only did that antiquated call-off system impact HR, it left a lot to be desired for the experience of their hourly employees who used it.
Devin recalled, “When employees call off, it’s typically because their child is sick or there’s a family emergency. There’s a lot of emotion involved. No one wants to talk to anyone when they’re in a bad mood. No one wants to explain that they can’t come into work because something terrible happened.”
Knowing that there had to be a better solution, Devin turned to Google search and found TeamSense.
Devin weighed the employee experience greatly in her decision, stating how nerve-wracking it was for hourly employees to depend on another human—the call center attendant—to make sure call-off information was received and tracked accurately.
With TeamSense, the entire call-off process is automated, alleviating those concerns and giving employees peace of mind.
It didn’t take much convincing after that to get the rest of the Yanfeng team sold on TeamSense’s product.
“When you have a high-quality product, it's easy to get people behind it. For me, TeamSense is a very high-quality product.”
Solution: Elevating the employee experience with text-based call-offs
When it came time to implement TeamSense, Devin recalled a very easy, seamless rollout at their first four sites:
“I would like to think this was as close to flawless execution as one can get.”
Feedback from employees was overwhelmingly positive. Most employees call off with TeamSense via text, but some still prefer phone calls with TeamSense’s interactive voice call-off feature.
After rolling out TeamSense for call-offs, the HR team began to explore TeamSense for communication purposes, like open enrollment and plant closure alerts.
Devin said, “Using TeamSense for communication was a massive added benefit that we weren’t expecting. We’ve had some tough winter weather in Michigan lately, and so it’s been great to quickly communicate things like site closures or requests for overtime. The team absolutely loves it.”
Results: Building an inclusive, proactive, and operationally efficient work culture.
Yanfeng hasn’t looked back at their call center hotline days.
That’s because TeamSense became much more than just a call-off solution for Yanfeng. The solution helped them take steps toward building a culture of accountability and a work environment that works for everyone, including hourly employees, HR, and supervisors.
Devin said that TeamSense is the driving force behind the quality of life improvement in the HR team’s day-to-day:
“Instead of having to spend an excessive amount of time focused on data entry for call-offs—which is a very reactive process—they now can be proactive and focus on engagement.”
Devin reports that TeamSense has given their operations team the ability to improve manpower planning:
“If supervisors know that five of their team members are going to be off before the shift starts, they can plan appropriately. They can request overtime, call another teammate to come in early, or swap employees from another division on the floor. The ability to staff has really improved with TeamSense.”
And finally, Devin spoke to an example of how TeamSense fosters more inclusivity for hourly employees.
“We have a strong Arabic population in our southeast Michigan sites and a lot of native Spanish speakers in the southern states. Being able to accommodate non-native English speakers with TeamSense’s language translation capabilities has made a difference in the culture out on the floor. They feel more included because the things that make them unique are being celebrated.”
