Aspect eWFM Wish List at ACE

I had the opportunity to sit in the coveted customer feedback forum for Aspect eWFM this year at the ACE (Aspect Customer Experience) convention.  As always, Eric Hagaman (Product Manager, eWFM) did an amazing job handling the multitudes of comments coming from the crowd.

The software industry is interesting.  What we must remember as customers is that our requests for enhancements are actually competing against two other stakeholder groups A) Potential New Customers and B) Technical Support.  The way that the enhancements lists work is that three lists are generated.  The first comes from existing customers requesting tweaks.  The second comes from potential customers in RFP's, or sales that were lost because of required features.  The final list comes from requests from the help desk, based on continued cases they have experienced.  The three lists are combined and whittled down until a decision is reached (every request must be defended).  The take-away is that the more customers that request a certain feature, the higher it gets on the list and receives priority.  For this reason, it's a good idea to join a user group, such as ASUGA (Aspect Software Users Group Association) where ideas can be discussed, and then each customer request the enhancement directly to Aspect.

With that said, here are a list of the Aspect eWFM Enhancement requests from this years 2014 ACE Customer Input Forum:

*Streamlined Superstate Association Configuration.  Make it easier to edit these as well as reassign to Group Allowance Accounts.
*Streamline Security Profiles and edits (Good news, Eric says that significant improvements have been made in Aspect eWFM 8.0!
*Improve Autorun and system logging.  Some customers have as many as 900 jobs, and many times the jobs will lock up or crash.  They are dependent on these reports/jobs, and there is no easy log or notification to view which informs them if a job crashed.  Request some sort of notification if it fails. *Eric says the solution now is to increase the number of threads anywhere from 4 to 6.  I also want to add there is an additional solution.  If you have multiple servers, you can always add the Autorun Service to a second machine and setup an additional Autorun login account.  You just need to configure eWFM for the new server (that's another blog post...but it's fairly easy to do).
*Improve skill based scheduling.  Some companies want better predictions of how many FTE's of a staff group are dedicated to a skill so they can utilize low occupancy intervals.  The closest thing we have now is the "View Interactive Statistics in IDP" when calculating stats.  A very overlooked feature by the way!
*Improve Configuration Auditing information.  Only shows edit times, but isn't always accurate if something was changed, or what was changed.
*More flexibility with reporting tools.
*Allow more flexibility in the forecasting modeling behavior.  Instead of a growth based model, being able to switch to a consumer base model (We have X number of customers and a subset of that base calls each month, we expect the customer base to grow X% each month....).
*More Work Rules for Preference Based Scheduler.

Of course, I have my OWN wish list--which all surround feature tweaks in forecaster (one of my passions).

I know Eric will carefully consider each of these, and we can only look forward to more good things in the future.

How to finagle display sets to show Occupancy in IDP

Occupancy is one of those squishy statistics that seems to depend on what your ACD is calculating as "occupied."  For the typical Call Center Manager, occupancy is a measure of how busy agents are handling calls versus their down time.  One of the misconceptions is that if an agent is unoccupied then they are unproductive.  I wanted to point this out because it isn't necessarily the case.  In the example I'm about to provide, the Aspect Unified IP does not count Auxiliary (Not Ready) time on the Workgroup report.  It only shows the amount of time logged on, and the talk/wrap times.  So a low occupancy score might be misleading if agents are busy performing backoffice tasks such as customer follow up, or emails. Nevertheless, the number does give an indicator of how busy the group is with the inbound volume.

Perhaps the ease of which we could calculate Occupancy is made frustrating by the fact that Aspect has not yet built a customized display field in IDP for Occupancy to display.  There was talk in the PRD and in some rumblings in senior support of having some extra customizable IDP fields.  Presumably, it would be easy to for development to build a blank field and you could enter any formula you desired; however, this request has somehow fallen by the wayside.  To Aspect's credit, they do a remarkable job staying ahead of the market trends and developing innovative tools.  Small things like this are easy to get lost in the greater interest of capturing future RFP's.  I think it is time to remind Aspect that this is something the customer base wants.  

So let's say you really really want to see occupancy in IDP.  Well, the good news is there is a way!  There is one limitation; although occupancy is something we think of at a staff group level, the only way we can get it into IDP is to associate it with a Forecast Group.  The Staff Group level pulls the APS values and there is only one field available. So, if you are using APS then you wouldn't want to lose that metric to pull Occupancy.  In fact, if you aren't pulling APS, then you likely won't want occupancy metrics, since both pieces of data come from the same data points on the Unified IP Workgroup report.  It's possible that isn't the case with other ACD vendors.  

So, how can we maximize all of our displayed metrics for IDP?  In my solution, I chose to pull Occupancy at a Forecast Group level.  At the company I'm consulting for now, their forecast and staff groups line up pretty well.  They are multiskill for sharing Service and Sales calls.  But we typically think of them as "service" or "sales" agents.  

**DISCLAIMER--You need to know what you are doing with WFM before you attempt any of these steps.  You are responsible for your own testing and implementation.  I am merely providing suggestions, NOT professional services, and my steps are not warrantied or guaranteed.**

1)  Let's take a look at the workgroup report:

For occupancy, we are going to add Preview, Talk, Wrap, Hold, subtract WrpA and then divide by the total Login time in C1.

2)  Build a formula set and name it Occupancy.  I just duplicated my inbound formula set for Unified IP.

Notice a few important things about this display set.  I am going to pull occupancy in the field RPHT.  That's towards the bottom.  

      a)    There are some VERY important reasons to do it this way.  First, the RPC and RPHT fields are reserved for outbound forecasting.  Since Service is an inbound group not tied to an Outbound Dialer or back office system, that means I can use the NCA, RPC, RPHT, and Backlog fields however I please.  

     b)  The RPHT field is the only other field in IDP that will display a weighted Average instead of an aggregate!  Because I want to see Occupancy averaged, and not aggregated at the end of the day, I must choose RPHT.

     c)  In the RPC field, notice that I pulled Column 2--the number of Calls Handled by the Workgroup.  This is an important number as well for a couple of reasons.  

                     i.  The Occupancy (or RPHT) is going to be weighted by the NCH (or the RPC).  So in order to get a correct weighted average for occupancy, I want to be sure to pull the this statistic.

                     ii.  The NCH for the workgroup has proven very useful at my current client.  That's because we deal with two groups (service and sales) that share inbound volume.  At a glance, I can see that the Sales queue may have had 30 calls in the past interval, but that the Sales Team may have only handled 10 calls during that interval.  That likely means there was a huge shift/change of burdens across the groups as sales calls flowed to Service.  It's a nice statistic that helps weave the story I'm telling when monitoring IDP's throughout the day.  

         d)  Finally (and this is VERY important!) note the field for NCO and AHT, and how it is entered.  You cannot leave these fields blank in a formula set.  If you leave NCO or AHT blank, it will not pull any data.  So I simply built a formula telling it to grab the NCH value, then subtract (or zero out) that value.  That keeps my data correct at the NCO and AHT levels for my Forecast Group.  If you don't do this, you will mess up your Forecast Group Data.

Finally, edit (or create a new) Display Set.  You will choose the ARPHT column, and rename it to "occupancy."  I added it to my "actual" tab in IDP.  Next, I added the ARPC column and renamed it "Total Calls Handled in Group" and added it to my Actual Column.  Now I can see calculated Occupancy, and Group Calls Handled at a glance in IDP!

   

Voila!  I've got Agent Occupancy, and it's weighted by the Staff Groups NCH--exactly what I want!

Rock on~!!

-Dr. WFM.

Aspect Unified IP AHT values in eWFM

So the last several weeks when measuring SL forecasts, I noticed IDP consistently predicting high AHT's.  I beg a hunt for this mystery that has led me down a path of shrinkage forecasting and AHT values.

This post is about adjusting the formula set for Unified IP within Aspect eWFM.  Like the Avaya feed (see my previous post), the Unified IP file includes Hold time as a separate column.   However, the original formula does not include this hold time.  I included the hold time and that has trued up my AHT's, and given me more accurate SL predictions.  It seems that eWFM excludes hold time in its formulas out of the box, and these need to be added back into calculations.

Here is a sample Unified IP file.  (The values have been purposefully changed to mask the 'real' data -- companies are private about the types of calls and number they handle).

The Aspect formula takes the Talk Column, Wrap Column and subtracts WrpA column.  I checked into this with our ACD technician who says that WrpA appears to be "wrap active" which happens when you are in wrap but make a DID call.  That makes sense for calculating AHT.  However, Held is not included.

Here's what the new formula with Hold would look like:

Voila!

Remember, when counting columns, you do not count the Svc column.  Parser skips that column, then starts counting once it sees the first piece of data.

Is your Avaya AHT missing a few seconds in eWFM?

When I consulted for Aspect, I knew from experience that the default formula sets in Aspect eWFM excluded Hold Times for the Avaya ACD switch.  This wasn't on purpose, it is just how it came out of the box.  Maybe it is how the developers were told to code the formula sets a long time ago when building the Data Feed interface.

At any rate, during my work with Chase, we discovered that the handle times being captured were too low.  We looked at the Avaya file coming over and saw the hold times as a separate column.  When we added it into the formula set, the handle times trued up correctly.  Since then, I had suggested to other Avaya customers to add Hold time to the AHT Calculation in the Aspect eWFM Formula Sets.   It's Column 7 on the Split Summary report (I'm going off memory here, so double check the raw data file coming over, I'll try to pull a sample Avaya Split Report and verify--but I'm pretty sure it's right).

The formula will look like: