WFM systems - the good and the bad

Hi Lauren,

I have recently dis-counted Q-Max it was not able to support long range forecasting, most of the large corporate that I have worked for in the past have used Nice (IEX) in one example I had over 400 seats across 3 location on and offshore.

The other thing to consider in the purchase is will you company in the longer term look to have a forecasting tool for non-demand activity!

Clearly licensed gives you the control that is needed real-time where as hosted may require conversation with the supplier; however updates to the platform which can be costly would be covered by the hosted provided.

I think it comes down to the amount of control you want to change things in your operating model now and as the centre grows.

Additionlly i would also say be clear about the amount of MI you want from the system, in my experiance once you start using a WFM platform desire in the team and the business for MI grows very quickly, some platforms are better than others!

You may also want to post your question on the following forums to sense check suppliers:

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=1839636

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=1863313

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=1803753

Hope that helps

Neil

Hi Nadine,

Do you know if this is a recent change, when we looked at Qmax in March and had one of there Tech guys on site we were told that the system could not do for example a 12 month forecast.

Neil

Hi,

We first purchased Impact 360 just over 3 years ago now, and also use Cisco for our ACD.

It is fundamentally easy to use for someone with Planning/Scheduling knowledge, and while 100 fte may not be a ciritcal enough mass to gain real benefits from the scheduling side, the Time Off Manager etc should pay back man hours quite rapidly.

At 100fte you pretty much want something with minimal cost, and it is only the level of skills you are using which makes me hesitate on saying stick with Excel.

Impact 360 will cope with the multi skilling approach but you may need some exposure to Simulation instead of the old Erlang approach to ensure you get the mots out of the product. It also has Prefences, but they are the last priority it will impact when creating a schedule.

Shift and work pattern creation is pretty intuitive, and having previously used eWFM I don't regret the change. I've used an old version of QMAX, and at that time it was very rota based which we found a little restrictive. I can't comment on how it has developed since though.

Because of the multi skilling element, Impact 360 utlises Simulation method rather than the Erlang calculation you would typically use in Excel. Erlang can over resource due to the formula limitations - assuming all calls handled, being able to assume spillover through periods etc. Simulation attempts to "play" the day over and over again, assigning random events to probabilities (so your AHT profile and call profiles have probabilities of occuring through the periods etc). This allows the system to cope with multiple queues being skilled by agents without having to assign a % of their time to each queue/skill. While this probably makes it more accurate most of the time, it also can be a bit more difficult to get your head around if you are used to Erlang and absolutes.

I would suggest getting some basic understanding of Simulation theory if you don't have it already - at it's most basic, you work it out on paper.