We want you to make the best and most informed decision possible when selecting the workforce management system for your contact center. Contained in this document, you will find questions that will help you to evaluate workforce management systems.
User Interface
1. On which operating system platforms does your software run? Is it available as a desktop application as well as a client-server application?
2. Are schedules and schedule exceptions represented graphically with icons in your software?
3. Does your system allow drag-and-drop editing of schedules in real time?
4. Does the software allow the user to swap an exception code for another on a particular set of schedules, or must this task be performed manually?
5. Does your software provide context-sensitive help?
6. What features does your software offer to facilitate navigation through the system?
7. What level of expertise does the average user of the system require? Do the interface and its components follow standard format rules?
8. How many screens may a user have open (active) at one time?
Architecture
1. Describe the architecture for single-site and multi-site configurations of your company's workforce management solution.
2. Does the software allow other applications to run on the computer simultaneously, or is the computer dedicated to the workforce management application?
3. Does the system have an automated interface for payroll?
4. Does the system have an interface for quality monitoring software?
5. Does your software have the ability to track agent activity across multiple time zones?
6. Based on your customer support experiences, how would you rate the reliability of your system hardware and software?
7. Is the system expandable? Can additional features be added later? Are the features fully integrated?
8. Is the system password protected? What levels of system security are available?
9. How does your software communicate changes made by one user to other users?
10. Does the system have an interface for desktop learning systems?
11. Does the system have an interface for email, web chat, and other multimedia systems?
12. Does your software have the ability for any user, regardless of location, to view real-time adherence data for any site?
13. Describe the process used to back up the system's database for single and multisite configurations.
Forecasting
1. Describe your forecasting functionality and how it is utilized to estimate call volume, AHT (Average Handle Time), and agents required.
2. Does your system have any virtual contact center capabilities (i.e., the means to forecast and allocate workload to sites that share contacts)? If so, please describe in detail.
3. How does your system account for holidays, non-operational days, and special days in the forecast?
4. Does your system store original and revised copies of forecast data?
5. Can the forecast automatically include adjustment for seasonal trends?
6. Does your software maintain history in periodic interval increments (such as 15- or 30-minutes), or are statistics stored on a daily basis?
7. Does your product have the ability to provide "what if" forecasting scenarios for 15- or 30-minute intervals, days, weeks, months, and for multiple years?
8. Can the weighting of the history data that is used for forecasting be user-defined?
9. Does the system accommodate trends within each month? If so, please describe how this is done.
10. What assumptions are made in cases where limited or no historical data are available?
11. Are historical growth rates used when forecasting?
12. Can the user define a growth rate that is different from the historical growth rate?
13. For long-range planning and budgeting purposes, describe how your system forecasts staff requirements.
14. Does your system allow the user to specify any day of the week as the first day of the week?
15. Can a forecast be modified? How is this performed?
16. How long is historical information stored? How far back in history will your forecasting software reference data?
17. Does your system have the ability to determine peak staffing requirements for a specific month, week, or day?
18. Does your system store original and revised copies of forecast data?
19. How can the user influence the forecast for external events?
20. For long range planning and budget purposes, can the user define their own FTE for days, weeks and months? If so, can these be defined differently for various work groups?
Scheduling
1. To what level of granularity (in minutes) may schedules be edited and stored?
2. Describe how work shifts are assigned to employees.
3. Does your system allow for cross-midnight scheduling (schedules that cross the midnight hour)?
4. How is non-phone related work scheduled?
5. How many agents can be scheduled at a time?
6. Does your system have the capability of allowing for 5-,10-, or 20-minute break periods, instead of the standard 15-?
7. Is there a way that your system can automatically ensure that there is a schedule for full and part timers and that the shifts meet the forecast staffing requirements by time of day?
8. Can the system create schedules in order to ensure that the service level is met in every increment of the week?
9. Can schedules be edited or changed for future periods, including the day of the schedule?
10. How are part-time, full-time, and temporary employees scheduled?
11. List the different ways schedules can be sorted on screen.
12. How are known exceptions to the schedule incorporated before the scheduled week?
13. How is a schedule created for an agent dedicated to outbound calls or other, non-phone activities?
14. For how many weeks can schedules be created at one time?
15. How does the system handle different schedule start times?
16. Can the system prevent breaks from being scheduled too closely together?
17. What is the maximum number of schedules that can be created?
18. How many breaks (paid or unpaid) can be defined in a shift?
19. Can employees trade schedules? What entries are required to accomplish the trade?
20. Does the system accommodate employees who work split shifts?
21. What long-range planning tools are available to determine the numbers and types of schedules needed for future requirements such as seasonal demand, or special marketing promotions?
22. Can your system schedule group activities, such as training or meetings?
Scheduling and Agent Preferences
1. What employee preferences other than seniority are used and how many preferences may be used to create a schedule?
2. Does your system have any way of allowing agents to prioritize which of their preferences are the most important?
3. How does your system allow for agent scheduling fairness for working weekends?
4. Does your system allow agents to prioritize their day off preferences?
Skills-Based Planning and Scheduling
1. Does your product provide the functionality to forecast for an environment where skills-based routing is in place? Describe your method in detail.
2. What method of skills-based scheduling does your system use?
3. Does your system allow simulation of actual network and call-routing rules when allocating workload to multiple sites?
4. Does your system support advanced ACD features like Least Occupied Agent, Service Level Supervisor, and Reserve Agent?
5. Does your system allow the user to specify skill levels for each agent, as is done on the ACD?
6. Does your system allow the user to specify position-limited skills?
7. Does your system allow skills to be defined by date range so that future skills (like those acquired in scheduled training) can be entered into the system at any time?
8. Can your system consider agents in terms of the fractional values of their various skills (e.g. 50% sales, 25% technical, 25% foreign language)?
9. Can agents be scheduled by queue/skill?
10. Are agent requirements calculated by call type, and is the data provided with two decimal places of accuracy?
11. Does your system allow agents to be listed as having multiple skills?
12. Does your system utilize a call routing simulator and actual call routing rules when creating skill schedules?
13. Does your system calculate multi-skill efficiency to adjust the agent requirements to account for the increased efficiency of your skills-based call routing?
14. Does your system forecast and schedule to agent requirements that include service level and maximum occupancy goals?
15. Does your system allow skills to be defined by date range so that future skills (like those acquired in training) can be entered into the system at any time?
Multimedia Workforce Management
1. Describe the software's capabilities to forecast and schedule multimedia contacts such as: mail, email, fax, web chat, web requests, web voice calls (VoIP), web video calls, voice mail, etc.
2. Does the forecasting and scheduling solution account for the technology used in the contact center and/or how work is assigned to agents? If so, describe how.
3. How does the system take advantage of unproductive time when planning and scheduling multimedia work?
4. How are multimedia agent requirements calculated?
5. What range of service level goals is supported by the system?
6. Are multi-site configurations supported? How?
7. Are multi-skilled, multimedia agents supported? How?
Intraday Management
1. Describe the software's capabilities to track staff and performance within a day and forecast into the future, as schedule changes become known.
2. Does your software have the ability to re-forecast automatically throughout the day, using actual ACD data?
3. Can the intraday data be viewed at different levels? That is, can the user examine data for the call type across multiple sites, multiple call types, or for a single call type?
4. Are users able to create graphical representations of forecast data?
5. Does the software provide a means of indicating when data falls outside an acceptable range, for example, if the number of actual staff deviates from the required number of staff?
6. Does the software provide a means of indicating when there are not enough agents scheduled?
ACD/MIS
1. Is your system compatible with all ACDs? Do you have co-market and/or technical agreements in place with major ACD producers?
2. Describe how data from the ACD is transferred to your system. What hardware or software is required in the ACD?
3. How many ACD groups can be scheduled?
Analysis and Reporting
1. Describe your system's reporting capabilities. What customizing features are included in your report package? Which standard reports are provided?
2. Is it possible to archive reports?
3. In what time increments are reports generated?
Vacation Planning and Tracking
1. Does your system have a vacation planning and tracking program available?
2. Can every agent have access to the vacation software, even if those agents don't have their own PCs?
3. How does the vacation software manage employee vacation accrual?
4. Are schedules automatically updated when employees enter vacation time?
5. How does the vacation software accommodate employees who apply for vacation time that is not available?
6. Does the vacation software have a process for allowing agents to bid for vacation time fairly?
7. Is the vacation program flexible? How are the program's parameters configured?
8. How does the system handle schedule trades between agents where vacation is involved, and with one or both of the agents using vacation time that may or may not be for the same dates?
9. Does the vacation program allow agents to be grouped by seniority, name, shift, or location? What about by some other parameters?
10. Does the vacation program allow vacation to carry over from year to year automatically? Is the carryover vacation time necessarily prorated, or is that customizable?
11. Does the system provide any type of automatic tiebreaker for more senior agents?
12. Can agents log in to the system themselves? What sorts of restrictions are in place governing access to the vacation software?
13. Does the interface allow novice computer users (agents) to enter information intuitively?
Database Connectivity
1. Does your system provide ODBC (Open Database Connectivity)?
2. Can ODBC interface with all of the major software reporting packages, such as Crystal Reports, FoxPro, MS Access, Excel, and others?
3. Can ODBC data be viewed without accessing the WFM software?
Historical Adherence
1. Does your system offer information not only on how much an agent deviated from the schedule, but when during the day those deviations occurred?
2. Are your adherence parameters customizable so that they can suit the needs of very different types of contact centers?
Real-Time Adherence
1. Can the system compare individual agent status to respective individual schedules on a real-time basis?
2. How does your real-time package notify supervisors when an agent is not adhering to schedule?
3. Does the program differentiate between different types of adherence violations?
4. Can the user define the adherence parameters?
5. With which ACDs is the real-time package compatible?
6. Are sort options available for sorting agents? If so, please describe.
7. Does your system provide an at-a-glance summary of the agent states?
8. Does your real-time adherence allow the user to focus on the highest priority issues first?
Web-Enabled Processes
1. Does your software provide web-enabled access to schedules or other agent-related information, such as statistics?
2. Does the software provide any motivational tools? How?
3. Does your software provide real-time schedule change notifications?
Move Agents
1. Describe the move agent capabilities (move from one work group to another) on your system.
2. When agents are moved, can the agents' preferences stay with those agents?
Multi-Site Management
1. For multi-site configurations, does your software forecast and schedule for configurations with network routers that have the ability to consider all remote contact center locations as one virtual contact center?
2. Can your system accurately calculate agent requirements for, regardless of the networking technology used?
3. Can your system allocate call data and/or requirements from a virtual contact center based upon agent availability? Agent availability should include agent work rules, pre-planned schedule exceptions, agent skills, site hours, and site time zones.
4. Does your system allow for entering network routing rules, so that the software can allocate workload based on a contact center's specific call routing rules?
5. Does your system have flexible start of day increments for the different contact center entities in a multi-site configuration?
6. Does your system support all time zones and daylight saving times rules?
Implementation and Installation
1. Describe the hardware required to run the proposed system, and provide a listing of the hardware components required. Will your company provide this hardware?
2. Does the hardware configuration allow for continuous use of desktop applications while performing backups?
3. How frequently should backups take place, and can your system allow backups to be automated?
4. How many workstations does your system support?
5. Does your product operate in a LAN / WAN environment in such a way that all workstations on an existing LAN / WAN can access the software?
6. How many users can access the system concurrently?
7. Describe the recommended approach to installation. Include steps and time necessary to install the system from beginning to end.
8. What assistance is provided at the time of installation?
Training and Documentation
1. Describe the training that is provided.
2. Is training conducted on our site or your site?
3. How many users are included in your standard training package?
4. Is additional training available?
5. Describe the system and end user documentation available with the purchase of the system, indicating the number of manuals and the intended audience and purpose of each.
6. Describe the on-line help documentation.
7. Describe methods of on-going communication with customers regarding new releases, additional training, and user meetings.
8. Do you provide updates for the manuals?
Maintenance and Support
1. Describe the warranty provided by your company.
2. What is the process of interaction required if the ACD hardware or software is changed or upgraded after installation of the system proposed?
3. Describe your support and maintenance program. What features are included in the maintenance fee?
4. Can users get online support from help desk personnel?
5. Is 7x 24 support available?
6. What is your upgrade policy? How often is software upgraded?
7. Are new releases compatible with previous releases?
8. Is support provided by your company or by a third party?
9. Does a sub-contractor develop any portion of the software?
10. Does your company have a fully trained, full-time support staff dedicated only to the task of supporting workforce management software?
Pricing
Please include the itemized costs for the following components:
- Application software
- Packaged applications
- Custom applications
- Modification charges
- Development cost for system requirements that are not currently available
- Warranty, maintenance, and support fees
- Itemized hardware
- Installation charges
- Maintenance prices