Workforce Management

[Victoria]

I have had extensive experience using Aspects TCS ver 4.x, eWFM ver 6.0, GMT Planet and now Blue Pumpkin. Any questions
please email.

[ahumbert]

Victoria,

Thank you for the post--I am currently reviewing BP as we are under implementation. We are though investigating other WFM Software packages though.

Would you have comments regarding those that you use or have experienced from feature/functionality to implementation to support?

Thanks!

Allison

[Victoria]

Hi there and thanks for your reply.

By far the most easiest solution to use would be Blue Pumpkin. It is more flexible and easy to learn and apply into your contact centre. I have had 4 years experience with Aspect, 6 mths with GMT planet and now 1 year with Blue Pumpkin.

You can email me direct on victoria.zicopoulos@premier.com.au for a more comprehensive description.

Thanks
Victoria

[healani]

Victoria or anyone else...

have you had any experience with Irene? Our company uses Aspect's eWFM program, but an outsourcer we will be contracting with uses Irene. I'm doing some research on it and wanted to know what users thought about the program.

[Victoria]

Hi there
No I have not heard of Irene. Do they have a website where you can go to further investigate it? Is it a WFM tool? What are its capabilities? These are the sorts of questions you will need to ask the contractor! How many sites has it been successfully deployed to??

Thanks for your query!!

Cheers
Victoria

PS you can email me on victoria.zicopoulos@premier.com.au

[ForceGuy]

Irene is a good setup in that startup costs are extremely low and from a financial point of view, that portion of your costs are fixed..also reduces your internal talent/headcount requirement as you won't need a full blown WFM team. ...for full internal flexibility and future growth I'd lean towards your own in house system...Blue Pumpkin and IEX are both excellent. Can't really go wrong using either as your WFM system.

------------------------
forceguy_2@hotmail.com

[Stewart]

Look here for information;

http://www.isc.com/irene.htm

[brian_S]

I have managed a call center without workforce management software. It was not fun. I spent a lot of time researching WFM solutions.

CenterForce Technologies, IEX, Blue Pumpkin were very good.

What makes a good WFM tool is:

- Intuitive GUI
- Short implementation
- Less than 1000.00$ per client cost
- Fully Web enabled application.
- Pre-built performance reporting tools.
- Inbound and outbound forecasting capability.
- Skills matching

There were a lot of choices out there!!!

Good luck in your search.

Brian

[tamiT]

Our enterprise is unique in the fact we have various types of
business units that all reside under the same newtwork and switch each using various features. We are Pension, Mortgage, Banking, Health Insurance. As you can imagine each business unit does not look like the other and business needs, expectations, goals and service levels are all so very different.

We have over 800 ACD agents with over 100 skills at the 'home'
location. We do have 'vitual' contact centers thru the US.

Is there others who have a similar enterprise as ours?
Does one WFM vendor meet the needs better than another in this type of environment?
We do have a business unit with 150 ACD agents and 25 different skills. If your enterprise is similar to this? What WFM tool do you use? We need to segment each business unit out and have it's WFM design different than another business unit in our enterprise.
Our experience with other tools we have implemented, such as call recording, BSR, Dynamic Advocate, etc is so very different for each business unit. Each uses these features to varying levels.

We are considering a centralized support area that is very familiar with the different business units and who would be accountable for the WFM tool and assisting the various business
units in achieving goals of WFM. This team would be in close contact with the vendor in consulting and learning the WFM tool so they can best utilize it within the business units.

[brian_S]

Tami,

Most WFM tools have the capability to work remote. As long as the remote Agent has a voip connection.

And most WFM solutions have skills and service level matching capability.

Most WFM solutions allow you to group people in any number of ways.

You can email me direct at bryan7654321@yahoo.com

Look forward to hearing from you.

[forc3d]

I recently migrated from Blue Pumpkin to eWFM. I'd like to know if i can generate an adherence rating per agent per day from eWFM similar to that of Blue Pumpkin. The adherence report should be able to classify how many % in a 9-hour shift is the agent following their schedule - whether to be online or offline, i.e. breaks, lunch, development.

The compliance rating that we're getting from eWFM only displays start/stop time adherence.

Any help will be much appreciated.

[blm1971]

I have found that most of these tools are very similar. Have had favorable experiences with BP and IEX

Rightforce aside from WFM also has some secondary features that I find especially helpful. They have one of the only WFM tools that incorporates Outbound planning, but also have a planning tool for best time to call and demand forecasting, a tool which might be an add on but does benchmarking and analysis on all your centers solutions and a model that allows you to create financial impact modeling for staffing changes and if process changes in your centers (ACD, IVR, adjusting head count ect...). Perhaps these are features incorporated with BP and IEX but I have not used them in the past.

Hope this helps.

[Tiffany]

CenterForce has now been acquired by Concerto Software. Its intelligent WFM application "RightForce" is still the only WFM tool that forecasts and schedules not only for inbound call centres but for outbound and blended voice call centres as well as planning for web chat, email, workflow and back office. RightForce incorporates a planning tool for best time to call to optimise outbound call cente lists and increase right party contacts by 20- 45%. It is just as feature rich if not more so, than applications such as BP, IEX or eWFM, yet less complex to set up and can be depolyed acrosss the whole enterprise rather than just within the inbound call centre.
If anyone has any questions or would like any further info on RightForce you can email me at tiffany.mannion@concerto.com

[dpzim]

I have been working with wfm software for years. I have worked with TCS, BluePumpkin and now eWFM. I have never been satified with the reports that I receive from them. So what I have decided to do was link there tables in there oracle database to access. But with this wonderful eWFM they use a start moment, which is really the number of minutes from some date in 1890 something.
I was wondering if anyone else has dealt with this and if so what did you find the easiest why to overcome it?

[Jasmin]

Hi,

You're probably looking at UTC time, which can be a total pain to work out, it is based on the number of seconds elapsed since the start (0) date. Once you have it figured, most DB have built in functions to handle it, or you can do it in Excel manually. Start date is usually around 1972, but check for your particular version. It's hard to project dates forward too, because it gets adjusted twice a year if required by a tiny amount to keep it accurate.

Good Luck,

Jaz