Enhancing workforce management using Unified Communications

by Aspect

FORECASTING, scheduling, and tracking the number and types of employees you need at any given time to effectively run a front or back office can be challenging.  Whether you are handling customer queries, processing claims, fulfilling orders or processing transactions, balancing the number of staff with the amount of work is never easy.

That’s where Aspect Workforce Management can help. 

Aspect’s powerful workforce management software helps organisations improve strategic planning, schedule and maintain the right number and types of employees to undertake tasks and evaluate and empower workers to meet business goals.  And with Aspect Workforce Management version 7.3, these capabilities have been taken to the next level by applying unified communications capabilities to enhance the scheduling of knowledge workers to gain efficiencies and reduce costs.

Aspect’s new software, which is based on the PerformanceEdge platform, streamlines the whole scheduling process helping increase adherence and giving supervisors and managers a unified view of staff availability and service level attainment. 

Utilising embedded user presence to determine the identity and availability of resources through Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2, analysts or supervisors can now quickly find appropriate Experts outside the contact centre to solve specific customer 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 co--ordinate schedule bids. 

In addition, contact centre agents, back office employees and knowledge workers can view their schedules in Microsoft Exchange Server to receive Microsoft Outlook appointment reminders to improve schedule adherence.

Other new features include:

• Back office scheduling – new algorithms to forecast and schedule for back office tasks and help optimise 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 – utilising 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 centre business problems and gives agents and other employees improved accessibility to schedules

When combined with other PerformanceEdge capabilities -- quality management, campaign optimisation and performance management -- the capabilities of Aspect Workforce Management, version 7.3 can be enhanced to deliver a comprehensive and versatile set of capabilities.  Enabling organisations to consider everything impacting performance -- like agents, knowledge workers, business processes, customers and systems -- and take immediate, effective, and measurable action.

For more details, please email marketing.uk@aspect.com