The contact center has, since its inception, been tasked with delivering effective communications while also meeting business goals. To achieve this, contact centers have constantly sought solutions to streamline and enhance their operations.

Some vendors offer solutions that schedule and plan to increase efficiency and productivity — some offer solutions to enhance training and quality.

Today, as the contact center increases in significance for business success, a more streamlined approach to incorporating these solutions has emerged.

Bringing together traditional technologies to unify systems and processes is workforce optimization.

Workforce optimization typically combines the offerings call centers have leveraged to achieve success, and integrates them to work seamlessly with one another to effectively deliver on their goals.

Through workforce optimization solutions, contact centers have a better view and more control over their workforce.

To aid contact centers in leveraging their full potential, workforce optimization solutions make use of workforce management, performance management, coaching and e-learning for enhanced productivity, effective scheduling and an empowered workforce as well as workforce analytics, call recording and quality monitoring to improve the processes and overall quality of their entire operations.

By bringing these functionalities together, synching business processes with management and reporting applications, and driving change while promoting success, workforce optimization solutions have fast become widely accepted.

The following is a “roundup” of companies offering workforce optimization solutions that deliver on the promise of harnessing a contact center’s full potential. For more information about the companies and their offerings, please visit their Web sites.

Altigen
www.altigen.com

Amcat
www.amcat.com

Aspect Software
www.aspect.com

Autonomy etalk
www.etalk.com

Calabrio
www.calabrio.com

Cambridge Technology Enterprises
www.ctepl.com

Celayix Software
www.celayix.com

Cisco
www.cisco.com

Cognos
www.cognos.com

Data Collection Resources
www.monitoringmadeeasy.com

Envision
www.envisioninc.com

Infor
www.infor.com

Interactive Intelligence
www.inin.com

InVision Software
www.invisionwfm.com

ISC
www.isc.com

Jacada
www.jacada.com

Kronos
www.kronos.com

Left Bank Solutions
www.leftbanksolutions.com

Merced Systems
www.merced.com

NICE Systems/IEX
www.nice.com and www.iex.com

Oaisys
www.oaisys.com

Oracle
www.oracle.com

Pipkins
www.pipkins.com

SAP
www.sap.com

Symon
www.symon.com

Taleo
www.taleo.com

TeleDirect
www.tdirect.com

Telrex
www.telrex.com

UCN
www.ucn.net

Verint Witness Actionable Solutions
www.verint.com

Voice Print International (VPI)
www.vpi.com