Alvaria Workforce (formerly Aspect Workforce Management), is a suite of software which combines call center workforce management with advanced analytics features like call recording, speech analytics, eLearning for training, data sharing for schedule optimization across call center or branch locations, and desktop analytics for monitoring and analyzing discrete actions like employee keystrokes and application usage. The Basic, Advanced, and Enterprise tiers include…
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Cisco Unified Contact Center
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Cisco Unified Contact Center is a contact center platform that can support up to 24,000 agents. It supports call routing, omnichannel integrations, and a management portal for creating customer profiles, segmentation, and resource monitoring.
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.
I would recommend it to other people in my contact and business circle, but if I recommend it to someone who has certain difficulties in accessing some tools within Cisco, he may have great difficulty in getting help because of the support that is lacking in most of the times.
Provides you with a solid routing engine that was built to handle Service Provider level throughput - if you need stability and a work horse this is the platform for you.
The core features on the whole are good, but where UCCE is very good is the eco-system of Solutions Plus partner integrations that expand on the core capabilities with the market leaders in areas such as WFO, Campaign Management, Biometrics and Natural Language.
The investment Cisco makes in the CC space means they are always improving the platform features, scale and reliability.
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.
After 25+ years, the product still requires experienced and highly skilled engineers to deploy the product properly per Cisco Best Practice guidelines.
Third-party integrations are also very cumbersome and require highly skilled and experienced engineers and significant time and financial investment to deploy.
Upgrading the product is cumbersome and requires Cisco ATP or Cisco AS which is time consuming and very expensive.
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.
To be honest, there are tools better than Cisco Unified Contact Center because it largely depends on third party integrations with better alternatives available now a days. However, Cisco Unified Contact Center has its own standards in terms of user experience and client satisfactions which serves every customers with a flawless experience.
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.
Cisco Unified Contact center is a very smart & reliable solution to go for. Its active-active sight base architecture and [customizable] features really help to deliver efficient customer service, enhanced next-gen experience, and uninterrupted operations. I believe every [organization] should opt for it if required.
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.
Similar I guess, however, I feel like Avaya was more suited for a contact center and allowed for all information to be in one place. The QA Forms were more flexible and easy to review. Predicative analysis was available to assist with scheduling and staffing. It was easier to manipulate and implement- I didn't need to go through 3 different parties to make a simply modification.
Licenses are very expensive. The customer has to buy IP telephony or Unified Communication and Collaboration Licenses and for Contact Center Solution licenses separately. There must be a price tone down as the competition is really high. New customers are willing to go for cloud-based solutions [that] are cheaper and easy to deploy.
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)
