PerformanceEdge Offers Enhanced Workforce Management Capabilities

The PerformanceEdge Group, a dedicated Aspect organization comprised of contact center performance optimization professionals, today announced that new PerformanceEdge™ workforce management capabilities will be generally available in Aspect eWorkforce Management 7.2 on 17 December 2008. This release will include more than 45 new features designed to significantly streamline the scheduling process and therefore lower operating costs. Furthermore, Aspect eWorkforce Management 7.2 will offer a new enhancement package for scheduling physical positions for front- and back-office staff, as well as provide extended scheduling and assignment capabilities and enhanced synchronizations with other PerformanceEdge applications.

The new Aspect eWorkforce Management – Reserve enhancement package enables users to maximize how they utilize existing workstations as well as training room facilities to automate the seat planning process by matching up the right seats with the appropriate agents.It can reduce real estate and administrative costs by enabling flexible seating or “hot desking” in an automated fashion. Companies using Aspect eWorkforce Management – Reserve can assign seats across teams, floors, sites and facilities automatically, enabling organizations to reduce their physical footprint, postpone capacity-adding decisions, and reduce operating costs.

“Workforce management vendors have traditionally focused on optimizing agent schedules because staffing represents the most expensive component of a contact center or back-office budget. What is too often forgotten, however, is the difficulty of managing physical seats and the associated facility costs,” said Robert Kelly, vice president, PerformanceEdge Group. “Now, PerformanceEdge gives customers a way to reduce facility costs, while optimizing agent and supervisor performance and decreasing administration costs, which can help give these companies a clear-cut competitive advantage in today’s volatile economic climate.”

Many customer-requested capabilities are also now available in the new release of Aspect eWorkforce Management 7.2 which include:

• Extended Scheduling and Assignment Capabilities with the ability to create team-based schedules or to schedule for one month at a time.
• Enhanced Synchronization across all the PerformanceEdge products with the ability to utilize quality scores and other key performance indicators (KPIs) to schedule coaching and classroom training sessions, or to prioritize schedule assignments. 
• Additional eSchedule Planner Enhancements to provide agents with a new, graphical view of schedules that offers administrators more flexibility.

“The new features of Aspect eWorkforce Management demonstrate that Aspect continues to listen to our customers’ requests to add value to PerformanceEdge by helping them gain visibility into capacity planning and employee scheduling,” Kelly added. “And, by leveraging Aspect eWorkforce Management with other performance optimization applications, companies will have a more holistic view of its performance, providing them with the insight and tools they’ll need to make changes to more easily drive improved service, sales and collections.”

Aspect eWorkforce Management is a complete automated solution that provides the capabilities for forecasting, scheduling and tracking, to ensure contact centers have the right staff, with the right skills, at the right time. The end result is increased productivity and revenue, improved customer service and agent performance, reduced staffing and operating costs, and increased profits and customer satisfaction.

About PerformanceEdge
PerformanceEdge combines workforce management, recording and quality management, performance management, campaign management, and coaching and eLearning to enable organizations to holistically respond to changing business conditions. The PerformanceEdge applications dynamically interoperate to help contact center managers consider everything and act immediately, ultimately making it easier for inbound, outbound and blended contact centers to control costs, enhance service levels and align performance with strategic goals. For more information, visit www.performanceedgesuite.com.

About Aspect
Aspect provides software and consulting services that turn the potential of unified communications into real business results across the enterprise and in the contact center. Applying 35 years of insight and experience, Aspect helps two-thirds of the FORTUNE Global 100, as well as small and medium enterprises, power their business processes with communications. For more information, visit www.aspect.com.