In our last Ask Aspect, we chatted with Kyle Pendleton about his experience in workforce management and his approach to developing solutions for unique customer challenges. Just a few weeks ago, we also explored product-led strategy with our Director of Product, Tina Ghanem.
Today, we're talking with Royce Haynes, a member of Aspect leadership and our VP of Product. Royce brings a wealth of SaaS product knowledge to Aspect, leading development as we innovate our product offerings, including Workforce Experience (WFX), our newest solution. Let’s explore Royce’s perspective on Aspect's product vision, development approach, and how the company is leveraging new technologies to create more engaging workforce experiences.
Q: What is the current vision for Aspect’s roadmap?
We’re focusing on three main things. The first thing is getting big on agency. Meaning we want to give agency to the employees who drive customer service interactions, while also providing agency to managers.
The second thing is leading on intelligence. We want to leverage usage data and content data to identify ways we can help our customers make better decisions.
The third thing is expanding beyond our current market. Everybody knows that Aspect's roots are in serving call centers and managing the workforce. We want to look beyond that and expand to shift-based workers. For example, there are companies that take mobile orders, but they also have people come in to place orders. How do they manage the forecasting of who can support the load of orders with quality customer service?
These three things enable our roadmap, ensuring we’re delivering tools that allow our customers to best serve their customers.
Q: What is the biggest workforce challenge that Aspect's product development team is addressing?
A big problem that we saw after talking to users and listening to our customers, is that most workforce management products aren’t easy to use. A lot of them are optimizing for efficiency and not for engagement of the folks that actually use the product.
So, we wanted to strike that balance between benefitting the company, that’s looking for efficiency, with the other side, which is giving employees the autonomy that they need. This means giving them a break when they want and having the ability to choose when and how they work.
Striking that balance allows companies to actually have a win-win partnership with their employees, who are the people out there serving customers at the end of the day. It’s not only important for us to score wins for businesses—although we do that with our forecasting algorithms and models—but also seeing how can we make a flexible product that incentivizes employees to work and rewarding them for doing so.
Q: Can you explain Aspect’s product development process?
Our product roadmap is split into workstreams. We have a workstream called “Easy” which is all about making our product easy for both admins and agents. We have a workstream called “Plug and Play” because we know that integrations are very important for customer success. We have a workstream called "Mobile" because we understand that while having a web application is useful, it's even better to let people edit schedules, call in sick, or request time off directly from their phones. Again, bringing more agency to agents and to folks that are supporting customer service. Our “Platform and AI,” workstream is where we're trying to understand what challenges legacy systems are creating for our customers, developing solutions that mean less admin time on workforce management and more autonomy for our end users.
Q: What gap does WFX fill?
WFX focuses on customers who are new to workforce management—users who started scheduling employees with Excel spreadsheets but find that method no longer scales with their needs. We're excited about this next-gen product, which gives customers intuitive tools to manage their workforce, reduces administrative burden, and increases autonomy for agents.
A key part of WFX is reducing administrative work for managers. Most people who use Excel for agent scheduling struggle to juggle 1:1 meetings, performance reviews, and training sessions—all while trying to determine if they have enough staff to properly support their customers. So we eliminate the complexity and use data to inform your decision making to ensure you have the right people to meet customer demand.
Q: What makes Aspect better than our competitors?
We listen to our customers, we listen to our users, and we make sure we take that feedback seriously. We prioritize what our customers need and deliver on that as fast as we can—I like to say at the speed of business.
The second thing is, we understand that it's important to not just make a functional product but make something that is also intuitive and easy-to-use. Most companies are looking at how many features can be built into a product. We're focused on providing the best and most relevant features that deliver on your workforce management needs.
Lastly, we're looking beyond call centers and seeing how we can help all shift workers with scheduling and forecasting. You don't have to be in a call center to benefit from Aspect—you can be at a grocery store or a coffee shop, looking to manage schedules across mobile orders or even orders of people walking in.
Q: How is Aspect incorporating AI into workforce solutions?
AI has been a big boom for a lot of businesses and it’s challenging the way we do ordinary things. But the core problems surrounding ease-of-use and accessible integrations are still there for our customers. We’re identifying problems that can be uniquely solved by AI.
We’re leveraging our set of workforce data—while carefully de-identifying it, so that way we are staying tried and true to customer privacy and safety—to deliver data-driven products to market that allow our customers to confidently make decisions. We want to take that forecasted data and recommend best plans of action to ease admin burdens.
Q: What drives you most in the product development process?
I think the opportunity we have to add value to our users’ work-lives with intuitive products. There’s so much value in being able to easily manage your own schedule. For example, we have a schedule preferences feature that allows agents to say “Here are my preferences. Recommend a schedule based off of my preferences and the needs of the business.”
Those types of features give folks autonomy that wouldn’t typically be possible. People are used to being told hours they must work and not really having a choice in the matter. Whenever we have this opportunity to improve employee well-being, it ends up being a win for both companies and their teams.
Thanks for tuning in for this installment of Ask Aspect. If you’re interested in learning more about how WFX can improve your business, contact our team to get a hands-on demo.
We’ll be back in a couple weeks discussing all things Aspect and WFM with one of our in-house experts. See you soon!
