by Richard Snow |
8/1/2008 | Article ID: M08-27 | Article Type: VentanaMonitor
Summary
The workforce management market historically has been divided into products that focus on the enterprise workforce and others designed specifically for managing contact center agents. Products also may be divided among those that deliver only workforce management – creating and managing plans, tracking compliance to plans and producing reports – and those that go one step further to include optimization, by applying rules to gain maximum workforce utilization. InVision Software is an emerging vendor with an integrated suite of products that supports different workforce categories, including contact center agents, and includes workforce optimization capabilities. Ventana Research believes significant cost and cross-functional advantages can be achieved by using a single product to manage and optimize workforce schedules. We therefore encourage companies to evaluate the InVision product.
Assessment
Managing a workforce can be challenging, especially in the contact center. There shift patterns vary in intervals as short as 15 minutes; change is common in team structures, skills requirements and peaks and troughs of call patterns; and more kinds of part-time workers (home agents, knowledge workers and mobile workers) are taking customer calls. InVision is one of a few vendors with products that include functionality to support both the enterprise workforce and the special demands of the contact center, allowing companies to standardize on using a single product without compromising functionality.
The full InVision Enterprise WFM suite consists of 18 products that span the end-to-end functions of workforce optimization: forecasting, scheduling and optimization, time management, and reporting and monitoring. The forecasting product uses historic data to produce forecasts, capacity plans to profile medium- and long-term staffing requirements, and one-off planning for specific projects. Scheduling supports the management of employee schedules,, optimization of schedules based on defined business rules, integration of training plans, alerts to inform individuals about changes in work schedules and a new module to help manage resources such as computers required by the employees. An innovative feature allows individuals to select their preferred shift times, after which the system fills in the gaps from resources that don’t have stipulated requirements. This allows individuals to better balance their lives with work. Optimization contains algorithms that seek to optimize all available resources to meet defined criteria, such as utilization levels, skill balancing and variable shift patterns.
Time management, which was added to aid retail users, supports Web-based time recording, management of time and expense transactions, and calculation of individual time and expense accounts. Reporting and monitoring supports production of standard reports and real-time visual dashboards to monitor ongoing performance and includes AdherenceMonitor which tracks deviations between plans and actuals.
The final four products are part of the core platform. They include the main enterprise server, which is Web-based and highly scalable. AdminPro manages configuration data and settings. Xlink supports integration with external data sources such as a personnel system and allows two-way flow of data between systems, saving time and data errors. InVision SDK is the vendor’s own development kit, made available to clients that want to develop their own customizations. It can track changes so developers can roll them into new releases of the core InVision product.
Market Impact
Benchmark research from Ventana Research shows that few companies have adopted a dedicated product to manage their contact center workforce, instead relying on manual methods supported by spreadsheets. This often leads to inefficiencies, such as some time slots having more agents available than required to handle inbound call volumes and others where customer have to wait in a queue because there aren’t enough agents available. InVision and other vendors such as Aspect, Envision, Genesys, GMT, Nice, Verint and Voice Print International have products that support the production of agent work plans and help companies manage these resources more effectively. InVision has been successful in its home country of Germany and is using this success to expand into the rest of Europe and the U.S. The fact that the product is applicable to the entire workforce gives it an advantage over several of the alternatives, so we believe InVision is positioned to grow a significant market share in a market that is opening up to vendors with proven products.
Recommendation
The cost of running a contact center has always concerned executives, and the fully loaded cost of agents accounts for more than 60 percent of all ongoing costs. Companies therefore need to get the maximum return from this critical resource. Ventana Research does not think they can achieve this while managing their work plans with spreadsheets. We believe that they should focus not only on maximizing utilization of the core contact center team but also on managing the time of an increasing number of employees who also handle calls, such as knowledge workers in back-office business functions, home workers and mobile workers such as service engineers. InVision addresses its products to all types of workforce, so we recommend that companies looking to optimize both the contact center and other workforce groups include it on the list of vendors that they consider.
Related Research Notes:
Customer Performance Management Research Agenda for 2008
Customer Experience Management Can Refocus Contact Centers
Customer Experience Management Technology
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