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Summary
Benchmark research from Ventana Research shows that the majority of companies still pay little attention to optimizing their employees’ use of their working time, with the majority still using spreadsheets to forecast requirements and schedule time allocations. This is particularly true in the contact center, even though matching agent numbers and skills to inbound call volumes and patterns is not an easy task. Our research shows that only the most innovative 26 percent of companies have purchased a specialized product to address this task. Organizations looking to utilize dedicated products like GMT Planet can also see how it can be used for other business areas to plan and manage resources in any department.

Assessment
To perform effectively, companies must optimize the number of employees they have in their workforce through the organization. This is particularly true in the contact center; recent benchmark research completed by Ventana Research shows that companies recognize that having the right number of skilled agents available in their centers has the greatest impact on the customer experience. GMT Planet v9.7 includes forecasting, intelligent workforce scheduling and analytics and performance management tools that can help manage resources in the contact center, branch offices, and back office departments.

The product supports the entire workforce optimization cycle, including long-range strategic planning and budgeting, forecasting of resource requirements and the production of employee work schedules (including allowances for time off and meetings). It also includes features to support the day-to-day management of resources, among them intra-day re-forecasting, checking adherence to schedules, managing exceptions such as employees going off sick, and management dashboards. As well as empowering managers and supervisors, the product also allows employees to view their schedules, update their availability and request swaps in their schedules or time off. All of these functions are supported by modules that produce reports, analysis and “what-if” scenarios to help longer-term decision-making.

The product is designed to support integration with many of the common call management systems. This allows the capture of historic and current call volumes and patterns, which then can be used to ensure future resource plans match likely future demand.

GMT Planet unifies all of the components in a single architecture, on a single server and a single database, all accessible through a common user interface. The product is available on-premise or on-demand; the latter is particularly cost-effective for small to medium companies or single departments.  GMT provides a range of support options that can include the creation of company resource models, forecasts, reports and schedules and business process optimization. All of these are critical in optimizing workforce utilization and performance.
 
Market Impact
The workforce management market divides into two main categories, products that focus on managing resources in back office departments and those focused on the special needs of the contact center. GMT Planet is one of a very few products that can span both areas and is in a strong position to meet a growing demand for an enterprise-wide solution. The market for contact center-specific products has undergone significant changes in the last few years, with most of the major products disappearing into suite solutions from Aspect, Nice and Verint. This means GMT must compete against these big suite vendors, a small number of vendors that have a purpose-built workforce management module as part of their suite such as Calabrio (examining for research coverage and validation), Envision, Genesys, Interactive Intelligence and VPI, and a very limited number of independent products from vendors such as Invision. GMT has the advantage of being applicable across the enterprise and its on-demand offering is price-competitive. The key decision for companies is whether to go for a suite solution or an independent product; for those that decide a standalone solution is best for them, then GMT is a good choice to examine.

Recommendation
In difficult market conditions, more and more companies are looking to do more with fewer resources. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contact center, where managers are under incessant pressure to reduce agent head-count. However, the recent benchmark research done by Ventana Research shows that companies must be careful not to go so far as to risk queue times increasing and the wrong agents taking calls they are not fully qualified to deal with, both of which can quickly alienate customers. For companies that are seeking to optimize their agent resources and resources in other departments, we recommend they include GMT on the list of products they evaluate. Organizations should consider the importance of optimizing the components of the workforce that have dedicated tasks that involve critical interactions with customers and suppliers along with critical business processing in the enterprise.