Start managing your most critical resource - the agents!
Contact centers thrive on two major performance factors: ability to reduce operational costs, and potential for generating revenue. Both of these aspects are directly impacted by a single and the most critical factor – the agents. Agents are not only the most expensive resource but also the most difficult to manage. Conventional workforce management software require contact center administrators to continuously update and adjust daily schedules according to a number of parameters such as agent’s availability, changing service level objective, skipping production targets, and variable performance of agents. Stratasoft’s workforce management software provides complete and comprehensive tools for contact center administrators to intelligently forecast, schedule, and monitor all variable dynamics of their contact center.
High Fidelity Forecasting™
StrataWFM’s High Fidelity Forecasting™ tool intelligently analyzes calling patterns, service levels goals, historical trends, occupancy rate, and peak requirements to determine initial agent requirements. Conventional forecasts produce half hourly staffing requirements. A single staffing level is chosen for an entire half hour: The assumption is that calls land evenly every 30-minute. In reality, demand arrives much more intricately. Stratasoft's workforce management software identifies more intricate real-life demand fluctuations that occur among your historical calling patterns. This eliminates toggling effects. The result is substantial improvements in labor utilization and reallocation of labor to periods when staff can generate more revenue or satisfy more customers.
StrataWFM’s High Fidelity Forecasts improve labor utilization by 4% and can increase agent revenue outcomes by 5% and higher.
Super Capacity Planning™
By conventional methods, forecasts and schedules can only migrate right and down overtime. The extent to which these errors accumulate over time is stunning. StrataWFM’s Super Capacity Planning ™ intelligently determines the difference between actual and forecasted staff requirements and adjusts schedules automatically according to shift patterns, service level goals and agent’s availability.
Rich State Adherence™
Intelligent Rich State Adherence (I-Adherence) is a powerful real time and historical monitoring tool for supervisors. The true strength of the system flows from the workers’ ability to see their own adherence in real time. This information is integrated with employee’s web based punch clock. Staff recognizes that adherence is fair and achievable. Full compliance becomes self-regulating. Breakthrough gains are achieved in service levels, productivity and revenue generation.
Next-Generation Call Back™
Next-Generation Call Back technology is a fully integrated approach to forecasting, appointment booking and CRM. It empowers organizations to intricately re-book excess callers into periods of spare capacity. Each caller is given realistic inbound appointment times for front-of-the-line service. The qualitative benefits are very important. A conventional call back solution ‘holds customers hostage’ until their phone rings. The outcome is a longer queue for all callers. Next-Generation Call Backs empower customers to choose their own timeframe for front-of-the line service. It’s a kinder, gentler experience. Happier customers spend more and cost less to service.
Uniform Scheduling™
Schedules that are automatically produced using random trials (simulations) are often found to be so inappropriate as to be unusable. It just is not reasonable to give staff a different start time every day of the week and every week of the year. Once the realities of random trial schedules sets in, organizations have limited recourse:
- Configure fixed schedules
- Manually re-assign consistent patterns
- Return to a fully manual scheduling practice
Clearly these are not optimal outcomes and there is little or no real life ROI. Stratasoft's workforce management software builds schedules based on logic not chance. The logic includes configurable levels of schedule consistency. Depending on the level of consistency you chose, staff get daily start times and weekly patterns that range from highly consistent to perfectly uniform. Staff can be fairly rotated through morning, mid-day and evening shifts. Rotation rules are highly customizable. StrataWFM also allows you to blend fixed schedules for some employees with variable schedules for others.
Proactive Shift Trading™
For many organizations, shift trading is a double-edged sword. If they allow shift trades, hours of productivity are lost while staff grazes the organization for willing trading partners. The administrative effort to approve and track the trades can easily become a full time job for one or more supervisors. In response some organizations forbid shift trades. This can cut the administrative cost. However, absenteeism becomes the only alternative to working an unwanted shift.
StrataWFM offers Proactive Shift Trading™. An employee who cannot work a shift is automatically presented with a list of eligible trades. In one-fell-swoop it is easy to solicit one or more co-workers from the list. Recipients of the trade request reply with a level of interest. Supervisors see a ranked list of each trade and approve the top ranked shift that avoids overtime. Strata WFM does all the background work to clear redundant trade requests.
Predictive Call Routing™
WFM solutions that focus on ACD data are unaware of any call routing problems. If calls do not reach a call centre they do not turn into handled calls and cannot be measured by ACD data. If calls pile-up in short bursts that are difficult to handle within a service level then the conventional WFM solution simply ignores the real arrival pattern and plans as if calls arrived randomly.
StrataWFM is the only network aware workforce management software. There are many benefits to this technology:
- Fire-hosing, bottlenecks and other network problems are automatically identified
- The cost of the problems are measured Forecasts are automatically corrected
Most importantly, Stratasoft's workforce management software provides real time call routing instructions that enable centralized call routing solutions to route calls without any fire-hosing. These real time instructions ensure that calls are equitably and evenly distributed across all contact centers including your outsourcing partners.
Business Wisdom™ Analytics
Most workforce management software offer simple reporting interfaces with fixed-axis canned reports. StrataWFM includes powerful interactive multi-dimensional reporting. It is entirely web-based and truly customizable. By adding the Strata Wisdom BI Server, customers can gain integrated BI reporting across enterprise-wide databases and business applications.
