Product Details & Literature:
Technology Overview
Good decisions, operational efficiency, and accurate allocation of resources are achieved through intricate attention to detail.
Consider the core technologies that your business relies upon to automate and optimize. How intricately have these technologies been treating your historical data and daily plans? As you look to invest in more of these technologies, how secure is the presumption of ROI. Careful examination reveals some surprising opportunities to achieve breakthrough results. First, lets understand the conventional limits that apply to resource allocation technologies.
Forecasting
The science of forecasting demand has changed very little since Erlang first developed his methods over 100 -years ago. Yes, he died 80-years ago but his work is indeed 100-years old. Should modern businesses be concerned about are using 100-year old methods for planning purposes. Perhaps not, provided the inventor had expressed confidence that the method had been perfected. This was not the case.
Erlang thirsted for better and more detailed information than was available in his era. He described each of the shortcomings of his method and cautioned practitioners that accuracy would be poor under the very same circumstances that prevail in your modern business. Erlang was clear that he would discard and re-invent his methods the moment he had access to the data necessary for understanding the true distribution of demand. Sadly, Erlang never had access to such detail -- and so had to settle for less.
Modern businesses have the raw material that Erlang sought. Unfortunately, the vendors who provide forecasting solutions have never made the effort to carry out the modernization that Erlang instructed them to undertake. If we know exactly how activity is distributed, then assuming it is random makes optimization a mater of chance. The result is costly misallocation of resources. When performance measurement systems make the same random assumptions, then all negative outcomes are reported as optimal. What is the business value of technology that ignores reality? What is the business value of a breakthrough technology that embraces reality?
Scheduling
The prevailing approach to allocating staff optimally to forecasted demand is a random number generator. This is not an attempt to be metaphorical; the technology really is a random number generator. How could this be so? Whenever a vendor of scheduling technology speaks of their scheduling product running simulations, they are talking about random trials. Here is how it works. They start with a forecast for how many workers are needed for each half hour interval. If the first interval calls for 50 workers, then 50 employees are selected at random, given a random end time and random breaks. If the next interval calls for 75 workers then 25 more employees are randomly selected for this interval. When the forecast has been fully in-filled with random shifts, one random trial has been completed. Next, 10,000, to 20,000 random trials are generated and the “most optimal” trial is selected as the schedule for a given day.
Thus, the automated schedules that planners start with give every worker a different start time every day of the year. There also tends to be a proliferation of short shifts that may be a very poor fit with the real life mix of full-time and part-time workers. How do planners cope with such random outcomes? In practice, the automated schedules are discarded and the planners quietly carry on a manual scheduling practice. What is the value of workforce automation that perpetuates manual scheduling? What is the value of breakthrough technology that automatically produces schedules that are efficient, consistent, fair and embraced by the workforce?
Analytics
Modern analytics are limited by the extent to which knowledge workers and managers can participate. If the reports are too slow and inflexible, then in depth analysis is unlikely. If the system requires teams of specialists to author new reports then intelligence becomes stale and usage declines. If the analytics solutions are closed and can’t effectively share their output in a manner that supports authoring business documents then the outcome is a laborious and repetitive cycle of cutting, pasting and re-formatting. What is the value of business intelligence that obstructs the flow of data? What is the value of breakthrough technology that fosters rapid adoption, full participation, and a seamless flow of analytics into decision support documents?
CRM
Why is it that Client Response Management and Work Force Management exist as completely separate sciences? Should we not be comparing the forecasted demand to the scheduled agents to identify periods of spare capacity for customer contact? Simply put, if the forecasts incorporate coarse and unrealistic assumptions then they cannot identify intricate pockets of spare capacity. How much additional productivity and new revenue can we drive if spare capacity can be uses to provide customers with front-of-the-line service?
Call Routing
Does conventional WFM software understand global demand for services? Not when the raw materials for planning is locally handled calls. Consider 12,000 calls distributed across five sites. Only 10,000 calls are handled. The conventional WFM solution will schedule each site’s future staffing patterns according to the calls that were successfully routed to and handled by each. The excess demand is ignored. Future revenue is lost. The customer base grows frustrated and becomes more costly to service.
Do networks intelligently route calls to global contact centres? Whenever the call allocation strategy is first-available-agent or least-expected-wait-time the outcome is called ‘fire-hosing’. Network wide activity is focused on one contact centre at a time. Some queue’s are flooded, other queue’s are starved. Certainty, this is not the promoted or expected outcome of intelligent routing. Expected or not, fire-hosing is unavoidable when call routing and WFM are disconnected from each other.
What is the value of breakthrough “Network Aware” WFM that flawlessly interprets excess demand and instructs the network in real time how to intricately route each call?
Breakthrough ROI
“WFM Wisdom™ delivers solid cost savings and productivity improvements. Reality based forecasts, flawless schedules, efficient shift trading and meaningful adherence measurement add up to compelling ROI.”
Kevin A. Hartley, Teleservice Manager, Alterna Savings
These are the results when resource allocation technology is intricate, and fully integrated.
Learn more about Return On Investment
Breakthrough WFM Technology
WFM Wisdom™ is fully web-based, multi-tenant WFM software for networked call centers. This is the world’s first and only “Network Aware” WFM solution. It has advanced the science of WFM years beyond ACD based forecasting. A universal connector for all switches and routers makes this an equipment independent solution.
WFM Wisdom™ never assumes that calling activity is random. Instead it interprets the actual arrival patterns of each customer to determine agent requirements. This approach eliminates call pegging errors and other interval effects such as toggling between understaffing and over staffing.
WFM Wisdom™ never produces the random schedules that WFM planners have found unusable. Instead, WFM Wisdom™ produces Uniform Schedules™ that are optimized for both agent needs and efficient labor allocation.
WFM Wisdom also fully integrates CRM, appointment booking, Next Generation Call Backs™, Predictive Fault Tolerant Routing™, Rich State Adherence™, Rich State Punch Clock™, Exception Tracking, Vacation Planning, fully automated payroll reconciliation and enterprise business intelligence.
Breakthrough Analytics and Call Routing
High Definition Telecommunications Analysis™ software reinvents the art of contact centre planning to resolve modern challenges. This web based transaction analysis engine provides an enlightened view of capacity requirements across all levels of infrastructure including IVR, ACD, Agent.
Foresight Routing™ provides fault tolerant call routing for high-load contact centre networks. This is the only solution that prevents call bursting because it achieves zero latency. This is possible via the unique art of real time HD Telecom Analytics™.
Learn more about Analytics and Routing™
Breakthrough Enterprise Business Intelligence
How is Business Wisdom™ different from Business Intelligence? The key differences are accessibility, ease of use, performance, process integration and cost of ownership.
Business Wisdom™ makes reporting and multidimensional analysis accessible for the knowledge worker. It is easily used and maintained by any employee who has the basic skills needed to use office productivity software.
Business Wisdom™ enables a higher plane of process integration and automation. Business Wisdom™ allows any user to customize web reports as easily as they would format a spreadsheet. Users can work with web reports inside a browser but the reports are portable into any office application. At the click of a button the entire reports including formatting, charts and pivot table functionality are flawlessly imported into spreadsheets and documents.
Managers get immediate access to decision making information. Better decisions save money and improve revenue.
Learn more about Business Wisdom™