TrustRadius Insights for Alvaria Workforce are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Aspect Workforce Management is a versatile solution that addresses various business problems related to workforce management in call centers. Users have found the platform to be powerful and easy to use, with customizable capabilities that meet their specific needs. The software's collaboration and communication features are particularly commendable, allowing project managers to easily interact with their teams and generate progress reports. This has been beneficial for both end users and consultants in multiple implementations across companies of different sizes and industries.
One of the primary use cases of Aspect Workforce Management is its ability to forecast call volumes and analyze trends in customer service departments. This enables the generation of schedules that best align with the demands throughout the day, optimizing resource allocation. Moreover, the software provides real-time adherence monitoring, ensuring that agents adhere to their schedules effectively. This reduces unnecessary overtime and costs.
By replacing manual scheduling processes, Aspect Workforce Management offers detailed reports that can be shared with upper management. These reports help address issues related to overstaffing, understaffing, and employee morale. The software is also widely utilized within organizations for scheduling breaks, lunches, and time off based on business needs.
Additionally, the availability of a mobile app adds convenience by allowing users to manage their schedules even when they are not in the office. However, some users have expressed a desire for improvements in the user interface of the app.
Overall, Aspect Workforce Management facilitates communication and synchronization among employees within large companies with multiple sites, enhancing operational efficiency in various workforce management scenarios.
Nice and very powerful and easy management platform and the interface is quite easy for all users to easily custom all the necessary capabilities and get ready to work. The capability offered to the project managers on easy team communication and faster on multiple progress reports creation and very excellent collaboration solution.
Pros
Easy to present clean project reports.
Excellent tool on task management.
Easy management of multiple project documents.
Cons
To the user with no experience with similar tools its not that easy to get started.
Support needs improvement.
Multiple project reporting is very tricky.
Likelihood to Recommend
Easy workforce management tool and the dashboard is well designed with multiple accessible functionalities. This platform allows easy data collection across other project management systems and the analytics which the tool provides are excellent and very reliable project planning and easy scheduling with effective and excellent management functionalities and initial implementing is also an easy process.
Aspect Workforce Management is used across the company by both employees and their supervisors as a way to schedule breaks and lunches around business needs, as well as schedule time off for employees. There is an app as well which makes it easy to arrange your schedule even when you're not in the office. The app could use some updating, as far as the user interface is concerned, but it's still convenient to have. Aspect WFM is an excellent way for all employees to stay in sync, especially with large companies where it can be challenging to communicate with other sites.
Pros
easy and quick to use- you don't have to waste hours explaining how to use WFM with your employees
reliable- multiple employees can be making changes and testing staffing changes without the site crashing
easy to balance employee scheduling with your business needs
Cons
workforce app seems a little outdated and could be improved
more room for customization- not necessary but employees like to have a little creative outlet so it could be good to allow changes to the dashboard look
removing the requests from the inbox is a little time consuming- you have to delete each request manually one by one, there isn't a way to batch delete them
Likelihood to Recommend
I would say Aspect is less appropriate with smaller businesses or businesses with a smaller amount of clients. Aspect is really useful if you have a lot of customers and employees as you have to schedule the employee breaks and time off around the business needs. A lot of smaller businesses don't need that ability since they might not have the demanding customers like a lot of larger companies would have.
VU
Verified User
Representative in Customer Service (10,001+ employees)
We are currently using it for forecasting/staffing models, and as a scheduler.
Pros
Great user interface, easy to maneuver
The support/help functionality integrated into the application is very easy to use. From every function, overlaying support to website accessibility - very easy for users
The in depth details you can get from eworkforce, for forecasting you can predict and include so much detail. Makes it extremely simple to build very intricate models
Cons
I'm big on visuals, so I think the color scheme/font could be better - with all the money that went in to this application, a few more dollars could be used to make it look more appealing
Quick access, instead of launching x y z to get in. If it was easier on click to get in, it would have been great.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited to call centers, where it is extremely needed and can save so much money on overstaffing and getting the staff you currently have optimized.
Aspect Workforce Management was used to Forecast Call Volumes and Trend Analysis for the Customer Service Departments. With the forecasts, Schedules would be generated that would best fit the requirements needed throughout a given day, while Agent Monitoring also took place to make sure that agents were adhering to the schedules provided through real-time adherence. By improving staffing alignment with requirements, we were able to reduce unnecessary overtime and costs.
Pros
Long range forecasting as well as forecasting using multiple models.
Schedule Testing - Being able to test your current or proposed schedules against various forecasts.
Real-Time Tracking, a lot of insight is given around if an agent was available and when.
Cons
Easier usability. Aspect has been working with Microsoft to make the platform look and feel more like any other MS Office Product, but there is much room for improvement.
Drag and Drop features would be a useful option. Allowing schedules to be modified by drag and drop segments, would improve the speed at which changes occur.
MS Outlook integration, where schedule changes can be emailed automatically to agents.
Likelihood to Recommend
Aspect Workforce Management works well in both small and large contact center environments. Administration of the product is relatively simple and straight forward, allowing for less downtime and improved system issue turnaround time.
<span class="wysiwyg-color-black"> Aspect Workforce Management was being used to schedule call center representatives at a 24 hour center with approximately 50-60 phone reps. Before using Aspect all scheduling was done manually and there were many problems with being over and under staffed as well as issues with employee morale. The Aspect program offered many solutions to these problems including very detailed reports that could be passed along to upper management.</span>
Pros
Aspect does a great job of projecting call volume and the number of employees required for each shift of the day.
The level of detail provided in the reports was outstanding.
I really liked the ability to schedule breaks and lunch based on call volume.
Cons
Due to the level of detail offered via statistics this program can become overwhelming for new users and especially upper management who just needs to see the highlights.
Likelihood to Recommend
This software is best suited for medium to larger call centers. In my particular experience, the software did amazing things but the culture of the company was not ready for the shift required to let the software guide the decisions.
It is being used across the organization. My department replaced the IEX workforce management system. The region I managed wee had over 1500 call center associates. Aspect WFM enabled us to create scenario based forecasting and staffing model, then select the best scenario for staffing and scheduling purposes.
Pros
Scenario based forecasting and staffing models (one of the primary reason why we replaced IEX tool)
Communication, alerts to end users; ability to set up text message functions when end users schedule is impacted
Ease of use
Cons
Back office support. Aspect needs to expand its product offerings to back office (processing) integration (forecasting and staffing)
Ability to combine forecasting and staffing capabilities for front office (call centers) and back office (processing) units.
Seamless integration with non-aspect phone systems (such as Avaya, Cisco, ...), call recording systems (Nice, Etalk...etc) and other non-Aspect solutions
Likelihood to Recommend
- The solution is well suited for front office contact center operations. It's ability to do scenario based planning is a big benefit
- If you are implementing it for back office (processing) or a combination of front and back office solutions you may want to consider other solutions
- The reason I rated high is because we used it for front office, call center operations
Prior to being a consultant, I was an end user of Aspect eWFM products. I have been using the Aspect WFM products since the product was known as TCS. I have participated in approximately a dozen implementations of the solution for my own WFM department and as a consultant. I currently support clients with training and process improvements of their WFM departments. The size of the companies I support range in size, complexity and industry.
Pros
The tool offers a great deal of flexibility in forecasting approaches. It allows you to track seasonality, growth, day of week factors, arrival patterns, store information on holidays and special events. You have the flexibility to forecast based on historical data or user defined data or a combination.
Although somewhat complex to configure initially, the scheduling features are also quite flexible allow you to create schedule scenarios for the most unique situations.
There are a great number of reports available in the tool and the tools offers you a variety of different options for pulling the same data making it much easier to analyze and trend. You can also set up routine reports to automatically run and export in a variety of different formats and save to shared drives or even email to specific users.
The agent interface "Empower" it also very intuitive making it easy for agents to view their schedules, request time off, participate in shift bids and view their own performance reports.
Cons
The configuration of the system is quite complex and very difficult to administer.
Initial training on the product is simply focused on the product and it typically not done using a customers real data. Since many customers do not have a strong background in WFM to begin with, the training should focus more on the fundamental of WFM before it dives into how to use the tool. You have to learn more about how it is best to use the tool for real world environments and not just how to click here and go there.
RTA has not been updated in years. It does not offer real-time schedule adherence scores and the reporting is terrible. Reporting is specific to each workspace and you lose data each time you close a workspace.
The shrinkage calculator feature that was added a few years ago is a great feature but very difficult to reconcile. If you are not an extreme expert with the very confusing superstate philosophy in eWFM it can be disastrous.
Likelihood to Recommend
If the center I am assisting is less than 200 seats, it is not likely Aspect would make the list because of price. If the contact center is multi-media, there are other products that do a much better job forecasting requirements for emails, outbound and chat. I also don't like that it has so many modules/add-ons that you have to pay extra for. This system is well suited for larger calls centers that are multi-site but not too complex with multi-skills or media types. It would also be a much more appealing product if there was a hosted or SaaS version. it were Hosted.
I work with a company that provides cloud computing services for multiple telephony/call center applications including Aspect Workforce Management. Aspect Workforce Management addresses many business problems such as administration, scheduling, forecasting, reporting, and adherence. It really is a one stop solution to managing the workforce of a company's call center. Not only does Aspect Workforce Management improve service level in a call center environment, it also increases efficiency of not only agents but also back office professionals.
Pros
Scheduling: The software not only provides ways to perform bulk scheduling and quick changes to hundreds (or thousands) of individuals at a time, it also provides optimizers for breaks, meetings, and projects; as well as shift and request bids, and a request management feature that allows automatic scheduling of vacation like segments without any user intervention after the initial setup.
Forecasting: The software provides many different ways to forecast. You can use user-supplied data or historical patterns. In addition, you can perform as many 'what-if' scenarios are you like to see how changes will affect your forecast and see how real-time schedule changes will impact the intra-day forecast before proceeding.
Adherence: The software provides several different adherence views. You can utilize RTA (Real-Time Adherence) to see what states your agents are in on the phone, as well as if they are adhering to their schedules. In addition, you can also access reports and a real-time comparison of schedules to ACD states in the core software. Agents are also able to see their historical adherence reports within a web based client, Empower.
Reporting: The software has a multitude of reports which can be set up with a feature called autorun to be automatically e-mailed or exported to a directory however often you need them to be. The filtering capabilities are vast, and if you have crystal reports you can create your own custom reports as well.
Security: The security features in the software are very detailed and advanced. Almost everything can be locked down, even the smallest of features. For example, if you do not want an agent to see bereavement in a schedule you can lock that. As many profiles can be created as are necessary.
Empower: The Empower module is a web-based application that provides wonderful functionality for agents and supervisors alike. Agents can view their schedules and make requests for schedule changes. They can also see their adherence, and even their personal account balances.
Cons
Some of the features can be difficult for a new user to learn. Once they have them down, the software functions wonderfully; however, the learning curve can be high.
While RTA is a great tool to utilize, the look has not changed in a long time. It has an 'old-school' software appearance that does not match the core system.
When dealing with huge sets of data (for example, changing schedules for an entire year for many agents), the software can hang for quite a while. While this is not a frequent occurence and can happen with any application, it can be frustrating for some users.
Likelihood to Recommend
While I think this software could provide value to any company, the value would be less for very small companies. If you have a call center with 50 agents or less, for example, the value just may not be worth the time and investment. Though this software can be utilized for off-phone employees, it is designed for the call center in mind. Therefore, if you just want software to manage back-office employees you would not need or benefit as greatly from having the entire Aspect Workforce Management suite.
