Behind Your Business

Ensuring that the right contact center staff are there when and where they are needed to maintain customer attracting and retain quality is made much easier with workforce management (WFM) solutions. WFM automates processes that have traditionally been laboriously managed via spreadsheets.

With the strategic importance of WFM to contact centers it is critical that the right tools are purchased. Customer Interaction Solutions sought advice from leading firms on how effectively to evaluate and purchase them. We asked questions on:

This article has excerpted responses from selected companies. The complete responses from all of the participants will appear on TMCnet.com.

Envision Telephony (www.envisioninc.com)

Jim Shulkin, Director of Marketing

The conventional mentality of buying point WFM solutions because they are 'best of breed' has really taken a hit in the last decade. That's because the suite providers have not only acquired and/or built best of breed point solutions in the market, but have made significant investments in tightly integrating them into the WFO suites while continuing to advance the point technologies. We believe buying point solutions in this space, such as WFM, puts companies at a real disadvantage because of the many benefits of the suite approach, including reduced total cost of ownership, integration, economies of scale, and simplified vendor relationship management.

SaaS is compelling simply because it seems to be a hot topic with analysts, but we haven't been asked for it by our market much yet. Some of the core functionalities of WFM require data transfer and delivery capabilities that are simultaneously massive and needed in virtual real time. This presents challenges for a true SaaS model or even simply an entirely Web-based solution delivery model.

As it did for CRM, both the technology and market appetite for SaaS solutions in this space will evolve, but are extremely immature right now. SaaS WFM will likely start...