* Addresses companies' growing deployment of virtual agents and enhances employee working environments with streamlined scheduling.
* Improves customer service levels by 20% to 30%.
* Integrated with Aspect Unified IP 7.1 (Tiger Shark) to provide control over and visibility into enterprise interactions.
Aspect Software, a leading provider of customer contact and enterprise workforce optimisation, has announced the launch of Workforce Management 7.5, an advanced, integrated workforce management product and the newest iteration of the Workforce Management 7 platform.
Workforce Management 7.5 helps companies improve the customer experience by creating a better and more streamlined work environment for contact centre agents and better control over interaction outcomes for supervisors, which in turn deliver improved consumer interactions.
"Workforce management solutions have always been critical for the success of large and complex contact centre operating environments. Increasingly, they are also being used to simplify management of multinational and multi-site dispersed agents, including at-home workers, in contact centres and support organisations of all sizes, said Donna Fluss, DMG Consulting president and contact centre industry analyst.
"The use of home-based agents gives organisations access to a much broader talent pool or resources. It also introduces new challenges that require next generation technologies, including workforce management solutions that have been optimised to address these opportunities."
According to a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Aspect, technology plays a large part in delivering these customer experiences: 73% of survey respondents view technology as playing a large to very large role in their customer experience strategy. Equally important is the alignment of a company's contact centre strategy with a company's customer experience strategy. Nearly half of the survey respondents say that their contact centre strategy is the cornerstone of their customer experience strategy.
The working environment of contact centre agents becomes critical then as it directly correlates with customer service levels. Workforce Management 7.5 improves upon Aspect's WFM platform by offering self-service shift bidding, coupled with features for supervisors to use shift bidding approval strategies to incentivise top performers. Not only does this provide more flexibility for at-home agents who have unique scheduling requirements, it also provides the ability to reward and recognise agent achievements.
"Agents love our at-home agent program because they can focus on the needs of the customer without the distractions found in a busy contact centre," says Seth Ettwein, Manager Call Centre Work Force Planning, Alaska Airlines. "Aspect Workforce Management allows our management team to focus more on training, problem-solving, and delivering the best customer service possible, instead of spending a large portion of their time on schedules and hours, and communicating across multiple work sites."
Aspect's WFM solution enables flexible work streams and processes, and seamlessly works with existing technologies. Aspect customers have realised improved customer service levels by approximately 20% to 30% and reduced agent labour and operational costs by around 16%. Workforce Management 7.5 integrates easily with virtually any contact centre's interaction management infrastructure. For Aspect Unified IP 7.1 (Tiger Shark) users, it can also lower the total cost of ownership with features such as automatic prerequisite software delivery, more robust patching capabilities and streamlined silent installation that reduce deployment time and resources.
"As a market leader in workforce management solutions, the enhancements to the Workforce Management 7 family allow us to continue offering flexible, enterprise-wide technologies for next-generation customer contact while addressing the evolving needs of our customers," says Spence Mallder, senior vice-president, general manager of the Workforce Optimisation division and chief technology officer at Aspect. "With the recent release of Unified IP 7.1 (Tiger Shark) and this release of Workforce Management 7.5, Aspect is providing our customers with the tools to offer exceptional customer experiences."
Workforce Management 7.5 offers additional enhanced features that address other challenges facing contact centre managers, including:
* Expanded intraday shrinkage analysis: Remotely analyse intraday shrinkage at any time to determine if agents are working as expected and calculate statistics and allocate intraday performance forecasts in one operation.
* Dynamic Productivity Analysis: Reveal agent trends across time and teams with a new dynamic analysis view of agent productivity information, providing a better understanding of what is not working through root cause analysis.
* Supervisor mobility: Manage workforce from anywhere with easy integration with Aspect Workforce Mobile, a customisable mobile application for supervisors and managers that provides immediate access to both Aspect Unified IP and Aspect Workforce Management systems via a mobile device.
Workforce Management 7.5 is available globally. More information about Workforce Management 7.5 is available at Aspect Workforce Management 7.5.
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