German Efficiency In Workforce Management

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Interaction Solutions

German call center software company InVision Software has announced that it will shortly introduce its "Multi-Activity Scheduling solution." It's a workforce management solution designed specifically to allow multiskill contact centers to drive efficiency improvements using less time and effort.

According to the company, "InVision’s  Multi-Activity  Scheduling  (MAS)  solution  optimizes staffing requirements  using an advanced patent-pending optimization techniques. The MAS  approach  to  skill  based  scheduling  offers  major  advantages over traditional  adapted-single-skill  or simulation based scheduling. InVision MAS  overcomes  the  inflexibility of alternative approaches by taking into account the full range of employee skills and applying them to the needs of the contact center dynamically."

The company calls it a very agent-friendly solution, citing that "Call center agents have actively chosen to work for the  company  instead  of  other  employers, simply because of the level of agent interaction available with the InVision solution."

Interesting.

InVision, a 10-year-old company, has a very strong presence with its WFM solution in Europe. Customers include BMW, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Sky and T-Mobile. The company has a U.S. office in Chicago, and appears to be very actively trying to break into the U.S. market now.

I wish them well, but I wonder if WFM solutions can be shifted from European call centers into North American call centers as easily as one would like to think. One, different labor laws and labor practices must mean quite a lot of alternation in the product to get it to jump markets successfully.

(Just the fact that the press release points out how "agent friendly" the product is, that agents have chosen to work for companies using it rather than competitors who don't, and that it allows agents to have a better "work/life balance" makes me wonder: do U.S. call centers care enough about those issues for it to be attractive to them?)

Read the full release at www.invisiononline.com

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