Solutions
Strategic Planning | Print |
Achieving your day-to-day performance goals for the contact center requires a sound approach for strategic planning, budgeting and operational analysis. You need to understand future requirements in detail, be able to quickly evaluate and choose between alternative plans and produce thorough budgetary reports and backup documents to secure the needed resources.

Strategic planning solutions from IEX provide tools to help you accurately predict and plan for the long-term operation of your contact center.

TotalView Workforce Management

A Solid Foundation for Strategic Planning

TotalView’s Planning and Analysis features provide a sound basis for extending the horizon of your planning process from months to years. Assess the potential impact to your operation of changes in contact volumes, service goals, staffing levels or other parameters. Then quickly determine the best way to handle these changes by using ‘what-if’ analysis tools to explore the trade-offs involved with different strategic approaches.

Once you’ve charted a course, the integrated TotalView Personnel Planner helps you produce effective hiring plans and staffing budgets to ensure your future needs are met.

CenterBridge

An Advanced Strategic Planning Solution

IEX partners with Bay Bridge Decision Technologies to offer the industry's most advanced strategic planning and budgeting system for contact centers, CenterBridge. CenterBridge is the only strategic planning solution available with built-in support for TotalView, IEX's industry-leading workforce management system.

With CenterBridge, you can quickly develop and easily distribute weekly, monthly, annual, and multi-year planning scenarios that accurately forecast the impact of changes in key performance drivers on your contact center's service quality, staffing requirements and financial results. For each scenario, CenterBridge delivers budget-ready hiring plans, financial forecasts, service quality projections, and detailed risk analyses.

Getting the right answer to complex operational questions is quick and easy with the CenterBridge solution, questions such as:

  • How will a hiring freeze affect our service levels?
  • What is the cost saving associated with a reduction in handle time?
  • Is a cross-sell program worthwhile?
  • What is my profit-maximizing service level?
  • How sensitive is our contact center to fluctuations in call volume, staff availability or handle time?
  • How will adding or consolidating centers affect my center's network?
  • What is the true cost of shrinkage?

Powerful Simulation Technology

CenterBridge is based on sophisticated, patent-pending simulation technology that accurately models the real-world behavior of you contact center. Simulating the arrival and handling of every contact in your center, based on your unique queuing, routing and workflow strategies, allows the CenterBridge system to deliver unsurpassed accuracy and performance compared to Erlang-based spreadsheets, mathematical analysis tools and standalone simulation systems.

Develop Budgets and Plans Quickly

The CenterBridge Scenario Viewer lets you conduct interactive analysis of budgeting and operating plans. A single, easy to use display instantly shows the effects of a change in any metric on the performance of your contact center. Graphical comparisons of new scenarios, prior scenarios and actual operating results are available with the CenterBridge Trend Analysis feature.

Determine Operational Tradeoffs

Using the CenterBridge Tradeoff Analysis feature you can easily determine the exact relationships between staff levels, cost, service quality, sales results and other interdependent performance metrics for your contact center. An in-depth understanding of the risks associated with changes in key performance drivers for your center positions you to proactively plan for and anticipate potentially damaging events.

Optimize Hiring and Staffing Plans

The CenterBridge system includes a powerful Staff Optimization wizard that automatically determines either your lowest cost or profit maximizing hiring and staffing plans. The wizard shows you exactly when to hire new employees based on your contact volumes and service goals. If your contact center deals with large seasonal swings in contact volumes, the wizard also helps you develop optimal termination plans. As an alternative to changing staff headcount, the wizard also determines the best way to utilize overtime or time off without pay to meet your staffing needs.

Generate Confidence in Your Results

CenterBridge streamlines your planning and analysis efforts while working to create confidence in the results. Information is automatically imported into the system, eliminating the risk of data entry errors. Because CenterBridge is designed as a multi-user analysis system, it produces internally consistent staff plans, budgets, forecasts, and historical performance reporting across your entire organization.

An investment in CenterBridge pays back quickly through a more efficient strategic planning and budgeting process, reduced staffing and analyst costs, better service quality, and higher revenue and profit.