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.
