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Aspect Announces General Availability of Version 7.3 of Its Workforce Management Offering

eWFM Brand Name Retired With Release of Unified Communications-Powered Aspect Workforce Management 7.3; Provides New Scheduling and Productivity Improvement Capabilities

Aspect, a global provider of unified communications and collaboration services and software, today announced general availability of Aspect® Workforce Management 7.3, based on their PerformanceEdge platform. This latest workforce management release includes improved scheduling and enhanced productivity through its unified communications-enabled collaboration capabilities. This new functionality enables organizations to optimize the use of enterprise knowledge workers, including the back office, to provide better customer service. Aspect has retired 'eWFM' as the new unified communications features broaden the capabilities of its industry-leading offering.

Aspect Workforce Management is tightly integrated with complimentary workforce optimization capabilities on the PerformanceEdge platform, and can be delivered as a stand-alone solution or as part of a synchronized offering.

"Aspect's new enterprise workforce optimization solution demonstrates the company's focus on aligning communications to the fundamental needs of the business. By developing new unified communications capabilities within the workforce management solution, this release will help companies to accelerate extended business processes and give hundreds of administration hours back to overburdened contact center and back office personnel," said Hyoun Park, research analyst, Aberdeen Group. "These enhancements in core workforce management capabilities will help to minimize and automate manual and time-consuming tasks that threaten agent productivity and high customer service levels."

This latest release of Aspect Workforce Management provides unified communications capabilities that communications-enable business processes to enhance the customer experience. Utilizing embedded user presence to determine the identity and availability of experts through Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2, analysts or supervisors can quickly find the appropriate resources to solve specific problems. They can then make contact via instant message (IM), email or via a voice call with a few simple clicks. This enables supervisors, managers and staff to collaborate on topics like service level attainment and other staffing topics, obtain schedule adherence for experts and back office employees, and seamlessly coordinate schedule bids.

In addition, contact center agents, back office employees, and knowledge workers can now synchronize their schedule in Microsoft Exchange Server to receive Microsoft Outlook appointment reminders to improve schedule adherence.

Customer Response
"High customer satisfaction is a key focus in ICE's business strategy. Because of this, we are constantly striving to identify strategies to improve our communication flow between our workforce management team and front line supervisors and agents," said Adelina Petrov, executive director, operations & sales analysis, International Cruise & Excursions, Inc. (ICE). "Aspect Workforce Management 7.3 and Microsoft Office Communications Server did just that. Once we started using the click to communicate functionality, our efficiencies improved tremendously. The time saved in generating the communications, and the instant delivery to recipients resulted in higher service levels that have positively impacted the organization and our overall customer experience."

Added Petrov, "Another functionality we find immensely useful is the Microsoft Exchange 2007 Integration, as it allows agents to receive Outlook reminders for team meetings, training and coaching sessions. We observed an immediate increase in our schedule adherence resulting from this improved communication tool. In addition to the valuable cost savings to ICE, Aspect Workforce Management 7.3 helped ICE increase the speed of communication across all levels of the call center, perfectly aligning the workforce management practices with our business objectives."

"With the available functionality in Aspect Workforce Management 7.3, we knew we could address the ongoing issues that were tying up our workforce," said Louise Andrew, manager of workforce planning, Fairmont, Raffles, Swissôtel Hotels & Resorts. "The cross-reference data tool has allowed us to save several hours of time and labor. Cleaning data space, which had taken up a few hours every six months, now takes less than one hour and most importantly the overall performance has improved."

New Features
The latest functionality now available within Aspect Workforce Management enables contact centers to:

• Improve long-term planning - helps users evaluate multiple long-term staffing scenarios to choose the right staffing profile for areas including seasonal peaks, adding a business unit, and automating additional business processes
• Optimize service level agreements (SLAs) - reduces the total number of required employees in scenarios, such as fluctuating task volumes and productivity disruptions including employee meetings and training
• Automate tasks - enhances the ability to plan for and record unavoidable tasks that take employees away from productive work time, like vacations and training by tracking and deducting such time from individual employee balances to ensure entitlements are met, but not exceeded
• Enhance seat planning and utilization - ensures employees are placed in desks that allow them to be the most productive and potentially reducing facility physical footprints as a result of increased seat utilization

"This release is focused on using unified communications capabilities to enhance the scheduling of knowledge experts to gain efficiencies and reduce costs," said Andy Bezaitis, senior vice president of product management at Aspect. "Aspect Workforce Management 7.3 streamlines the whole scheduling process, helps increase adherence, and gives supervisors and managers a unified view of staff availability and service level attainment, ultimately elevating the customer experience an organization is able to deliver."

About PerformanceEdge
PerformanceEdge is a Microsoft .Net Web services platform product that synchronizes workforce optimization capabilities including workforce management, recording and quality management, performance management, campaign management, and coaching and eLearning to help organizations execute on their unified communications strategies

About Aspect
Aspect is a global software and IT services firm specializing in applying Microsoft® unified communications and collaboration to help customers achieve optimal results through enhanced business processes across the enterprise and in the contact center. Aspect provides IT consulting, integration services and business applications. For more information, visit www.aspect.com.

Follow Aspect on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/AspectUC.

Aspect, PerformanceEdge, and Aspect Software are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Aspect Software, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. The names of other companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.