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InVision's New Offering For Multi-Tasking Agents
[August 25, 2005]

InVision's New Offering For Multi-Tasking Agents


How many tasks can you handle all at once? If you’re a contact center agent, InVision believes it’s probably not enough. The company now offers enterprise WFM multi-skill scheduling to ensure multi-skill efficiencies are fully realized, building on strong support for the work/life balance. 
 
By DAVID R. BUTCHER, Assistant Editor, Customer Interaction Solutions
 
InVision Software today announced the company’s showcasing of its new Multi-Activity Scheduling (MAS) solution, what the company calls a “revolutionary new approach to workforce management (WFM),” which aims to deliver productivity and efficiency improvements for multiple-skill contact centers in a fraction of both time and effort required by previous-generation systems. 


 

Announced from Germany, InVision offers its MAS solution for optimizing staffing requirements via advanced, patent-pending optimization techniques. The MAS approach to skills scheduling, according to the company, offers certain significant advantages over traditional, adapted single-skill or simulation-based scheduling: MAS is designed to overcome 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 at any given time.
 
With MAS, InVision aims to ensure that multi-skill efficiencies are fully realized by generating individual-skills-based schedules, therefore maximizing service-level achievement and minimizing burnout. (Often difficult without skills-based scheduling, employees can further gain through additional job variety.)
 
From the planner’s point of view, MAS is intended to ensure that employees with multiple skills remain occupied for greater periods during their shifts, helping to increase productivity and other key performance indicators (KPIs). Noted by InVision in its corporate announcement, this can be achieved “without the complexity and overhead in setup and maintenance associated with earlier, simulation-based systems.” The time required to generate skills-based schedules using MAS, according to InVision, is also a fraction of that required with earlier systems. 
 
The company also offers an Interactive Scheduling feature, which allows employees to make shift-related choices, including the ability of employees to make requests for shifts based on business requirements, a capability for influencing motivation and retention. (InVision customers report that “upwards of 80 percent of shift requests are granted, thus fulfilling the needs of both employee and employer.”)
 
“[Contact Center] operators are increasingly looking for ways to improve employee retention and satisfaction by promoting good work/life balance and taking employee work preferences into account,” said Chris Dealy, InVision Account Manager for the UK and Ireland, in a company statement. “While these are important considerations, before now [contact centers] have found it hard to integrate these objectives with the conflicting drivers of increasing efficiency and improving customer service.” 
 
InVision’s new offering is one route to all three requirements, presenting a “strong and tangible payoff” for contact center employers and employees.
 
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David R. Butcher is Assistant Editor of Customer Interaction Solutions. To see more articles by David Butcher, please visit:
 

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