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Blue Pumpkin Launches New Innovations That Enable Contact Centers To "Manage to Excellence" Blue Pumpkin, a provider in enterprise workforce optimization solutions, introduced its next-generation suite of technology solutions, driven by extensive customer input to solve the most pressing challenges facing customer contact centers today. The new innovations and improvements are designed to accelerate customer success with significant new functionalities, enhanced usability and lower total cost of ownership.The new release introduces innovative capabilities to form a more powerful, simple and extensible Blue Pumpkin Workforce Optimization Suite and underscores the company¹s distinctive point that managing a workforce goes far beyond the scheduling process. By infusing performance-oriented capabilities into existing and new operational processes, Blue Pumpkin empowers customer service representatives to be more performance-minded, improving overall effectiveness. This novel approach enables contact centers to avoid constant crises, stop driving towards averages and, instead, Manage to Excellence. "With this next-generation suite of integrated solutions, Blue Pumpkin further differentiates itself and reinforces its reputation for easy-to-use solutions that directly address the real-world problems of the contemporary contact center," said Paul Stockford, chief analyst for Saddletree Research. "Blue Pumpkin again demonstrates a clear understanding of the practical solutions required today as well as its commitment to providing the technology that enables businesses to more effectively manage their people." The increasing complexity of contact centers today demands new ways to optimize operations in particular, solving the persistent challenge of managing costs, customer service and employee satisfaction. Answering that urgent need, Blue Pumpkin¹s new workforce optimization solutions help each business, unique in their needs and goals, to strike and maintain a delicate balance among those often-conflicting priorities. "We cannot overstate the importance of our customer contact center: it is one of the major ways our customers sign up for new services and is the main touchpoint for existing customers," said Steve Harrison, contact center director for Knology. "Our investment in the Blue Pumpkin Workforce Optimization Suite is therefore one of our most important investments in our future helping us deliver on our commitment to excellent customer service." New features and customer-driven improvements Available together or as standalone solutions, each enhanced component of the next generation suite Activity Manager, Advisor Enterprise, Advisor Express, Director Enterprise and Planner builds upon a best-of-breed offering, winning "Product of the Year" awards from various industry publications since their first release in 2002. Together, they now form an even more dynamic system that manages both individual and team performance and is designed to drive customer satisfaction and business growth. Blue Pumpkin actively solicited input from hundreds of experts across the contact center industry, including power-users, industry analysts, competitor customers and the Blue Pumpkin Customer Advisory Board, to design into the new solutions a full slate of upgrades that address real customer needs. As a result, customer service agents now benefit from appropriate recognition and input into their schedules, while management knows exactly where improvement is attainable, with the clear action plan for evolving the contact center¹s performance. New functionalities include: … Industry benchmarking to measure performance against that of peers and competitors, giving greater context in decision-making and pinpointing areas of improvement; … More informed decision-making a richer, more meaningful set of information delivered through a standard browser as well as additional pre-packaged key performance indicators (KPIs) endorsed by Gartner Measurement; … An emphasis on employee satisfaction and performance through fully-automated and flexible shift bidding, team scheduling and optimized scheduling of coaching and training sessions; and … Simplified use role-appropriate user interfaces that ensure the right people are accessing only the functionality they need and in the most intuitive way. "Blue Pumpkin enables us to continually monitor and improve the many processes impacting our people and success," said Doug Charles, vice president of operations for Access Integrated Networks. "Efficiently deploying our people is still important, but that¹s just one piece of the puzzle. The new Blue Pumpkin Workforce Optimization Suite also lets us manage their performance with targeted KPIs, simplify global reporting, integrate into payroll functions, and improve many other related areas to streamline our operations." Running on an open-standards-based platform capable of running on a single server, the new Blue Pumpkin Workforce Optimization Suite lowers the total cost of ownership by avoiding the complexities, costs and effort involved with fitting together disparate applications from a myriad of point-solution vendors. Blue Pumpkin customers worldwide have reported return-on-investments of 400% and greater. |