I am looking for recommendations on Workforce Management software.

Our call center is small now, but is rapidly getting too large to manage schedules efficiently. What I'd like to be able to do is to schedule overlapping shifts to provide wall to wall coverage weighted to match the peaks and valleys of our incoming call volumes. An important additional feature would be the ability to schedule vacations and other times off and instantly see the impact.

Your experiences and reviews could save me (and maybe others in the same situation) a lot of guesswork getting to the handful of products to actually trial.

Glenn,

I have worked with IEX TotalView now for 6 years and have spent a lot of time researching other WFM tools. TotalView has excellent capabilities including cross midnight scheduling and also has an add-on tool that you can purchase, a Vacation Planner which can be used by a Planning Team or by the agents themselves on a kiosk workstation.

The IEX website, www.IEX.com is useful but you would be better contacting their UK supplier, www.quality-plus.co.uk.

I have always found the product easy to use and reliable and have no hesitation on recommending it.

Good Luck with your researching, if you would like any advice on the product please feel free to contact me.

Jayne

Glen,

I have experience of IEX Totalview and QMAX. I would agree with Jayne's comments with regards to IEX for call centres that have multiple call types with large degrees of cross skilling of agents. However I found Totalview to be overcomplicated and not as easy to use. If your call centre agents tend to only deal with one type of call each, then I would recommend QMAX as I find it much simpler to use, and I think it does the basic day to day resourcing better. Personally, I have not been as impressed with any of the other WFM's such as Blue Pumpkin or eWFM, but this is of course, a personal view.

As I don't use software for forecasting I wasn't going to contribute
to this one but.

I was looking at packages last year and IEX would have been my choice.

Not just in terms of the product but the attitude of the Quality plus staff
as opposed to another well known brand (We'll call Q-MIN so I don't give the company away!) The Quality plus staff spent an hour with me going through all
the functionality and different methods and weightings it could use, answered alot of stupid questions and didn't mind that I kept going back when I remembered something I'd forgotten. They haven't pushed for a sale since. I got a phone call about 6 weeks ago to see if I'd like the new product literature sent through and asking if we were in the market.

The other company let me go through a fixed demo, wouldn't answer questions they refered to the demo they'd do 'in house' for us for specifics. The guy stood behind my seat making it hard for me to get out and end the demo early and finished by asking "So have I persuaded you to buy it yet?"

Guess which sales technique works for me.

I haven't bought either product although I know the forcasting module on
QMAX has been known to under forecast. I'd go for IEX personally.

At the same time I ought to point out the other options.

Teliopti
Blue Pumpkin
Pipkins
Genysis

amongst others.

Don't just go for the first one, get visits to people using the stuff.

Anything else drop me a line.

Hope it helps a bit

DaveA

Glenn

The three market leaders are

IEX, Aspect TCS and Q max, each system has its positives and negatives but they are all virtually the same.

Having worked with all three I would advise you to go to each vendor and see which solution best fits your needs.

I use Q-max and find it easy to use and plan for.

Its worth considering how predictable and consistant your cal volumes / patterns are as I beleive some packages are better (by design or accident?) at forecasting irregular patterns than others.

Also, I'd think about what adherance monitoring software will be compatable / available for your chosen WFM system if your budget straches to that. Note that some vendors give free upgrades as part of the purchase and others dont!

Si

Major WFM Suppliers:

IEX Totalview - www.iex.com (or www.quality-plus.co.uk for the UK)
eWFM (Formally TCS) - www.aspect.com
Q-Max - www.q-max.co.uk
Blue Pumpkin - www.blue-pumpkin.com
Pipkins - www.pipkins.com
Imaj - www.imaj.co.uk
Genesys - www.genesyslab.com

I have worked with both IEX and TCS, I have also seen Q-Max in action.

I would say IEX is probably the best of the bunch.

IEX beats all the others in a multiskill environment, however in a single skill environment, I think in the right hands TCS equals if not surpasses the system. There's not much between Q-Max, & Blue Pumpkin for the third place. Pipkins & Genesys I haven't had site of, but by reputation they are also rans. IMAJ is primarily focused on Forecasting.

Unless and until your staff strength reaches 500+ and you got multi skill schedulling... I dont think you really need to invest in any WFM software ( Since they cost a bomb ).
Some one with a good Excel knowledge and good analtycal skills will do the job for you...

I disagree, you can get many benefits from WFM software even with a low number of staff. Granted there is a point where call volumes are so low / agents so few that it becomes overkill.
However when set up correctly the WFM can be central to a call centre, it can forecast your workload, schedule your staff (testing a multitude of scenario's along the way), and produce a variety of reports. The system takes a real time feed so you can monitor your agents against their schedules, you can reforecast throughout the day to see if OT is going to be required / breaks need to be adjusted, etc, etc.

is there a good WFM software that also gives alerts on increases in forecasts? Can you share me the details on how the forecasts are planned for, is it mostly machine or do you need a good WF team as most forecasts I know are intuitively done.

I think most WFM's have integrated graphs which would effectively show you forecast vs reforecast. I've worked with TCS & IEX and in terms of intraday management my favourite was TCS. You can customise the intraday screen and add thresholds.
Forecasting is probably a WFM's weakest link, as it has to be generic to apply to every business. However when used correctly it can produce good robust forecasts. What sort of team you require really depends on your organisation.

I tend to agree with Adish here.. i am an excel programmer myself and have just designed a module for my organization in my past time. You could actually hire someone to do it for you. Depending on what time interval you expect ur calls to come in, days off, leaves, etc. You could do it easily and not spending much.

Let me know if you need assistance designing this.

Best Regards,
Swapnil

Glenn

I'd like to echo the thoughts of most of the contributors here i.e. that in a relatively straightforward environment Q-Max and Blue Pumpkin are the ones to look at whereas Totalview and e-Workforce Management are at the more complex end.

A couple of things that I would look out for –
Get your resource planners trained on the principles of resource management but not one run by one of the software suppliers, this means that they won’t be tempted to adjust the working of the office to fit the tool and they are not tied a particular way of thinking
Excel In-house solutions tend to be too specific to the one person who designed them; they look attractive to business heads because of the cost but don’t have the functionality and robustness of a ready-made solution and can become redundant if the designer of the system moves jobs
Have a ratio of 1 resource planner to every 100 agents to get the best benefits out of any system
Once installed don’t let the machine do the call forecasting on its own, let it concentrate more on the call “shape” delivery, work out the volumes offline yourself and then scale the profiles in the software to what you think they are going to be

And most importantly – don’t let it run the office, don’t blame it when something goes wrong and never say that it creates the resource plan.

Eamon, I agree with the comments you have added to this post as I was "trained" in the principles of resource management.
Having this I was able to move from Q-max - TCS - Blue Pumpkin - IEX and lastly to Open Wave.

Well then, you would appear to be in the best place to assess the reletive merits of these systems. Go on then, do a top five!

Eamon

I just wanted to add another factor in looking at really any form of technology for your call centre..... you mention that you are rapidly growing.... and as mentioned by others some of the WFM packages such as Q Max and the low end B Pumpkin tend to be better for the smaller based call centres, if your growth plans are aggressive it may perhaps be prudent to sway away from these....also in my experience (if it counts) IEX and now Open Wave are easy to use, have a good breadth of features and also have constant development to improve and keep up with the needs of the call centre market. These also appear to be more receptive to listening to client feedback and requirements and actually doing something about it.
Other products who shall remain nameless appear to be more of a one man band with very little development for the future. In the ever changing world of technology, I personally believe that the "roadmap" for the products is very important when selecting new technology. Little or no development and you will find your product out of date and unable to keep up with your changing business needs.

Obviously, there is the issue of what delivery system you are using. For example, if you are using Genesys CTI for call delivery, then Genesys' own WfM software is the one to choose - here, the data comes from the Genesys environment, not from the PBX, where all other WfM systems need to be integrated, adding cost and data corruption. If you have a Voice over IP environment, look at what data the IP stream provides, and how you can use it in the WfM application.
In essence, WfM software is reliant on quality of data - garbage in, garbage out.