Verint Announces Enhancements to Impact 360 Workforce Management Solution

Contact center software maker Verint Systems Inc. today announced enhancements to its Impact 360 Workforce Management solution, which it acquired when it purchased Witness Systems (News - Alert) earlier this year. The company considers Impact 360 Workforce Management “one of the two anchor segments” of its workforce optimization suite. The software simplifies the task of forecasting and scheduling call center agents across multiple locations and helps companies predict when spikes in call volume might occur. As such, it helps companies cut costs by having just the right number of agents available at the right time based on call volume.

According to the company, Impact 360 Workforce Management now has even more powerful forecasting capabilities. Using regression analysis techniques, the software delivers strategic planning based on daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, seasonal and annual growth trends. It also flags outliers in forecast data due to special events, days and queue reconfigurations, giving users the ability to either exclude or include the outlier data. Verint (News - Alert) claims this enhancement enables organizations to combine their long-term strategic forecasts with their daily tactical forecasts to increase forecast accuracy.

The software also has new outbound forecasting and scheduling features which enable users to forecast on five new metrics and set and meet outbound service goals. Using new algorithms, the software enables managers to meet the differentiated needs of outbound scheduling, while still providing reporting, adherence and agent self-service functionality. In addition, the solution works to meet inbound and outbound service goals and thus cam be used top balance and adjust staffing levels at times when connect rates and right-party connect rates are the highest.

Impact 360 Workforce Management also now has the ability to track and display agent desktop activity. Managers and supervisors can now monitor desktop, phone and non-phone activity from a single screen, enabling them to see which applications are being used by staff in real time. As a result, supervisors can take immediate action when an agent isn’t adhering to proper procedure, such as sending a training clip or module to the agent’s desktop that must be taken before the agent can move on to other work.

The software has also been enhanced with new features to supporting the needs of both contact centers and back-office operations in industries such as finance, banking, brokerage and insurance. This includes the ability to capture and forecast for non-ACD based activities, accept and normalize the batch arrival of workload, set different service level deadline goals, track adherence to schedule using desktop application adherence, plan for capacity and analyze employee productivity.

Impact 360 Workforce Management has also been strengthened with extended workflow capabilities, including new screen pop-up alerts, additional alert rules and ad-hoc notification capabilities. These enhance the software’s intra-day management capabilities.

With these enhancements, organizations can reduce costs by staffing appropriately to meet their workloads, drive business growth, heighten customer satisfaction, and improve employee effectiveness and retention – both in the contact center and through to the enterprise from branch- to back-office operations.

“By continuing our investment in and support of our complete workforce optimization and actionable intelligence portfolio, we’re advancing our solution set to meet customer needs and drive competitive advantage – including offering the most robust workforce management solution available today,” said Nancy Treaster, senior vice president and general manager, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions, in a press release. “These new features are designed to help customers better meet service goals, lower operating costs, gain visibility into contact center and operations performance, increase customer and staff satisfaction, and tighten the link between strategic planning and tactical daily and weekly forecasting and scheduling.”

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Patrick Barnard is Associate Editor for Customer Interaction Solutions magazine and Assignment Editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.