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Portage Communications Releases AgentTime™ |
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Seattle, WA - Portage Communications has announced the release of its much-anticipated AgentTime Scheduler for call centers. This affordable new agent scheduling solution is designed specifically for small and medium sized call centers.
This affordable new agent scheduling solution is designed specifically for small and medium sized call centers. AgentTime creates agent employee schedules from a database of agents, shift definitions, agent availabilities, agent preferences and agent priorities entered by the call center manager. It uses the agent level requirements for each time period in a call center's workweek determined by Portage's current Call Center Designer™ and SimACD™ staffing software.
An intuitive user interface allows the call center manager to create optimum weekly schedules, and to easily modify them based on personal knowledge and ongoing day-to-day changes in operations. A key goal in the design of AgentTime has been to make sure the user is not locked into blindly accepting any given schedule created by the system. They can modify shifts and activities such as breaks, lunches, meetings, and training periods on the fly to immediately see the effects on required vs. scheduled agents for all time periods of the workday.
Initial pricing for AgentTime is $4,900.00 regardless of the number of agents to be scheduled. Stuart Harris, President of Portage Communications, explained how the new software is to be positioned in the call center industry: "The growth of small and medium sized centers with less than a hundred agents has been phenomenal in the last ten years. Determining the right number of agents and scheduling them quickly and optimally actually becomes more critical the smaller a call center is. The major workforce management system vendors have ignored this segment of the market and continue to focus on offering software that usually starts at $50,000.00. Such prices tags are simply out of the question for many call centers: AgentTime provides an affordable and realistic off-the-shelf scheduling solution for them."
AgentTime includes Portage's existing Call Center Designer and SimACD staffing software. These two modules are used to calculate optimal agent levels for each time period for each workday within a workweek. Call Center Designer tells managers how many staffed agents and inbound lines they need for each time period in the workday as well as predicting various performance statistics. SimACD allows managers to test and try out different numbers of agents and inbound lines in a computer simulated automatic call distributor (ACD) before actually implementing them in the call center. AgentTime accepts the optimal agent requirements created from either of these modules to then assign agents to work shifts based on their availability, priority and preferences.
"We have an installed base of several hundred customers with thousands of copies of our Call Center Designer and SimACD software. Our initial push will be to market AgentTime at a discount to these sites." said Trina Olson, VP of Marketing at Portage. "We are confident that we will quickly acquire a leading share of the call center workforce management market for scheduling systems."
AgentTime is a stand-alone product without the traditional interface to the call center's ACD used for creating call data history to forecast future call demand. Ms. Olson states that "predicting future call volumes from an historical database is the 'smoke and mirrors' of existing workforce management systems. It's simply not relevant for small call centers, or for any call center that has a dynamically changing call demand from year to year. Also, most of the cost in maintaining and installing these systems is a result of trying to keep a call history database of very dubious value." AgentTime users can copy and paste call volumes along with talk and wrap-up times into the system from their ACD reports and modify them as they see fit.
Ms. Olson believes that it's "much more critical to have an accurate calculation of the number of agents needed by using statistical equations and refined simulations based on call volumes pasted in from ACD reports and modified according by the manager's personal knowledge. That's just what our suite of products does. The new AgentTime Scheduler, combined with our existing Call Center Designer and SimACD staffing engines, provides the first off-the-shelf workforce management system that requires no special training or complex installation and maintenance costs."
Portage Communications, Inc., founded in 1994, creates and markets call center workforce management software for maximum productivity. Call Center Designer is used to calculate optimum agent levels based on desired service levels. SimACD is the industry's best simulation software of ACD dynamics that simulates call handling, queuing, abandonment, caller re-try, overflow and blockage. The AgentTime Scheduler fills out this product line to create a complete and affordable call center workforce management solution. |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 15 February 2007 )
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