Aspect Announces General Availability of Version 7.3 of its Workforce Management Offering
eWFM Brand Name Retired with Release of Unified Communications-Powered Aspect Workforce Management 7.3; Provides New Scheduling and Productivity Improvement Capabilities
29 Apr 2010
CHELMSFORD, Mass., 29 April 2010 – Aspect, a global provider of unified communications and collaboration services and software, today announced general availability of Aspect® Workforce Management 7.3, based on their PerformanceEdge platform. This latest workforce management release includes improved scheduling and enhanced productivity through its unified communications-enabled collaboration capabilities. This new functionality enables organizations to optimize the use of enterprise knowledge workers, including back office employees, to provide better customer service. Aspect has retired the name ‘eWFM’ as the new unified communications features broaden the capabilities of its industry-leading offering.
Aspect Workforce Management is tightly integrated with complementary workforce optimization capabilities on the PerformanceEdge platform, and can be delivered as a stand-alone solution or as part of a synchronized offering.
"Aspect's new enterprise workforce optimization solution demonstrates the company's focus on aligning communications to the fundamental needs of the business. By developing new unified communications capabilities within the workforce management solution, this release will help companies to accelerate extended business processes and give hundreds of administration hours back to overburdened contact center and back office personnel," said Hyoun Park, research analyst, Aberdeen Group. "These enhancements in core workforce management capabilities will help to minimize and automate manual and time-consuming tasks that threaten agent productivity and high customer service levels."
This latest release of Aspect Workforce Management provides unified communications capabilities that communications-enable business processes to enhance the customer experience. Utilizing embedded user presence to determine the identity and availability of resources through Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2, analysts or supervisors can quickly find the appropriate person to solve specific problems. They can then make contact via instant message (IM), email or via a voice call with a few simple clicks. This enables supervisors, managers and staff to collaborate on topics like service level attainment and other staffing topics, obtain schedule adherence for experts and back office employees, and seamlessly coordinate schedule bids.
In addition, contact center agents, back office employees, and knowledge workers can now view their schedule in Microsoft Exchange Server to receive Microsoft Outlook appointment reminders to improve schedule adherence.
Customer Response
“High customer satisfaction is a key focus in ICE’s business strategy. Because of this, we are constantly striving to identify strategies to improve our communication flow between our workforce management team and front line supervisors and agents,” said Adelina Petrov, executive director, operations & sales analysis, International Cruise & Excursions, Inc. (ICE). “Aspect Workforce Management 7.3 and Microsoft Office Communications Server did just that. Once we started using the click to communicate functionality, our efficiencies improved tremendously. The time saved in generating the communications, and the instant delivery to recipients resulted in higher service levels that have positively impacted the organization and our overall customer experience.
Added Petrov, “Another functionality we find immensely useful is the Microsoft Exchange 2007 Integration, as it allows agents to receive Outlook reminders for team meetings, training and coaching sessions. We observed an immediate increase in our schedule adherence resulting from this improved communication tool. In addition to the valuable cost savings to ICE, Aspect Workforce Management 7.3 helped ICE increase the speed of communication across all levels of the call center, perfectly aligning the workforce management practices with our business objectives.”
“With the available functionality in Aspect Workforce Management 7.3, we knew we could address the ongoing issues that were tying up our workforce,” said Louise Andrew, manager of workforce planning, Fairmont, Raffles, Swissôtel Hotels & Resorts. “The cross-reference data tool has allowed us to save several hours of time and labor. Cleaning data space, which had taken up a few hours every six months, now takes less than one hour and most importantly the overall performance has improved.”
New Features
The latest version of Aspect Workforce Management contains the following new features:
• Back office scheduling – new algorithms to forecast and schedule for back office tasks and helping to optimize around longer service level times and backlogs
• Improved schedule adherence view – a new and improved schedule adherence view allows users to graphically view time out of adherence.
• Multidimensional intraday performance – utilizing this pivot table-like view, analysts can now slice and dice intraday performance data across time (days, weeks, months, etc), staff, and types of work.
• UC Enablement – allows users to collaborate more effectively on common contact center business problems and allows agents and other employees improved accessibility to schedules.
“This release is focused on using unified communications capabilities to enhance the scheduling of knowledge workers to gain efficiencies and reduce costs,” said Andy Bezaitis, senior vice president of product management at Aspect. “Aspect Workforce Management 7.3 streamlines the whole scheduling process, helps increase adherence, and gives supervisors and managers a unified view of staff availability and service level attainment, ultimately elevating the customer experience an organization is able to deliver.”
About PerformanceEdge
PerformanceEdge is a Microsoft .Net Web services platform product that synchronizes workforce optimization capabilities including workforce management, recording and quality management, performance management, campaign management, and coaching and eLearning to help organizations execute on their unified communications strategies
About Aspect
Aspect is a global software and IT services firm specializing in applying Microsoft® unified communications and collaboration to help customers achieve optimal results through enhanced business processes across the enterprise and in the contact center. Aspect provides IT consulting, integration services and business applications. For more information, visit www.aspect.com.
Follow Aspect on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/AspectUC.
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Aspect, PerformanceEdge, and Aspect Software are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Aspect Software, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. The names of other companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.