Alvaria Workforce vs. Zoom Contact Center

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.

The Contact Centre is fantastic for our festival environment; these systems are rarely accessible to an arts organisation without a significant premium. However, that's not the case with Zoom Contact Centre. It may be tricky initially if you don't have an IT Company to help you with the integration, but they have a great Professional Services Team (PSO) to guide you through the process. Be prepared for the transition to take a few months; I wouldn't recommend it if you need something set up today. Moving phone numbers from other Telcos takes time, and the PSO can provide a custom solution that takes time to develop.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Easy to change behavior of a call queue
• Easy to modify call flow (normally this is very difficult and cumbersome in other contact centers)
• Language that is not esoteric to phone technicians (e.g., no "Hunt Group" or other inside baseball terms)
• Easy to see the overview of what is currently going on in the phone system and what people are doing right now
• Easy to add licenese, change changes, add phone numbers, change p#s, etc.

• 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.

• Go deeper into a true separation of parameters, reporting, management, etc. so you could have multiple business units with very different needs, independently work. Some sort of "Multi-Tenant-Like" capabilities like the one seen in Zoom Phone Locations. In situations like these where you need "location/team isolation" is challenging, if not impossible to implement with Zoom Contact Center.
• More pre-canned integrations and ready-to-go examples to implement thins like the "InApp-Chat" channel for the Zoom Client Itself. This could be a great addition, especially when you use the ZCC to service your own company.
• ZCC is meant to be an independent solution that could interact with Zoom and non-Zoom products, but the capability to allow a tight-integration with Zoom Phone is really missing: Having the capability to make/receive calls between ZP and ZCC using just extension numbers should have been a given from the get-go; it really limits the use cases of Zoom Contact Center with its other star product Zoom Phone. I heard something is coming to address this, for lack of a better word I call "shortcoming", so I am really looking forward to see what is "being cooked" on this regard.
• Licensing Tiers: ZCC is really missing an Admin-Only Role from the licensing perspective; you have to "waste" a license to add Administrators, which is particularly bad when you have a fairly large organization with multiple admins.

While I support other customers who utilize the software, the response from our customers is over-whelmingly positive. Many customers who have not had any type of workforce management software in the past use spreadsheets to schedule and forecast agents. This can be extremely complicated and a nightmare to control. The time saved by having a product that can quickly complete these functions for you is worth the investment. Also, we have several customers who had no way to track what their agents are doing and have found many problems in their call-center with the software. After rolling out a program where their adherence was tracked and actually 'mattered', they were able to see increased efficency from their agents.

Once the initial set up of the software is complete and/or you are familiar with the software, it is easy to use and runs like a dream. However, if you are unfamiliar with the software or have used a competitor's product, some features can seem difficult to learn or get used to.

First and foremost for our results, the omnichannel approach and ease of use on the internal side (agents, supervisors and administrators) have made adoption very simple, we have managed to reduce response times (SLA) and internal communication has become very fluid. We get good feedback from our clients for having implemented ZCC in the company to serve them.

Incentivized

I was impressed with the support I received. There were never any long delays when I had issues and the representatives that I worked with were always patient and eager to fully understand not only my problem but our business processes surrounding the problem.

Implementation of the software was not difficult but it was tedious for us due to the fact that our processes had not kept up with the times and we had to make a large number of process changes along with setting up the software.

I have used NICE IEX Workforce Management in addition to Aspect Workforce Management, both tools are great at what they do. Aspect however builds its forecast model continuously, adding more information to the model everyday, where are with IEX, the model has to be built each and every time from used selections each week. IEX does not have a historical base model to reference, where Aspect does.

There are options and ways to get to specific feature sets that are similar to what Zoom can offer. Many of the Zoom included features are add-ons for the RingCentral offering. So cost goes up and can also be an add-on difficulties/deployment costs as well. When we reviewed the features needed and the cost comparison, Zoom was less than half the cost with many of the features baked in as opposed to add-ons

• The workforce management team was able to decrease the cycle time forecasting, staffing and scheduling staff; resulted in higher employee engagement
• The scenario based planning enabled us to develop a more accurate call volume forecast thus staffing the contact centers appropriately; approximately $500k savings realized in labor expenses (reduced FTE headcount, while meeting the same level of service level measures)
• Improved customer experience due to staffing the call center properly (answered 80 percent of our calls within 20 seconds)

• We migrated away from a telephony system that was antiquated and almost unusable for what we wanted to do, so Zoom has been a huge improvement for us!
• We're continuing to roll out new channels of contact for customers -- Calls, chat, video, email, etc.
• We're still getting our sea legs from a reporting perspective, and that could always be better, but so far the biggest improvement was for our staff actually using the software. They really enjoy the simplicity and robustness of the software.