HotSchedules vs. Verint Workforce Management

HotSchedules can be implemented in any organization that has to staff a store with varying hours. I have recommended this to my colleague who has 8 employees, yet he has seen great results with the shift swaps and availability tracking/time off requests. I do wish we could see some more attention to general staffing and training VS. the heavy emphasis on restaurant businesses. It feels HotSchedules has grown into many more areas and should work away from marketing so directly to restaurant businesses. Some training programs for other business would be a welcome sight.

Incentivized

For workforce management, more so in the customer care department, Verint Workforce Management is the best as it makes matching resources with needs easy. It enhances scheduling, and thanks to the smooth match, handling customer issues becomes easy, and this enhances customer experience.

Incentivized

• All the information needed for your employees can all be found in one place. From the availability of an employee to their pay rate to their phone number. It's all just a click away. Before HotSchedules all of this information was kept in different places and the managers would need to open several documents and contact lists to find what they were looking for about a single employee.
• Control over how indepth you use the product. The possibilities of this service are seemingly endless. However if you are solely looking for a specific feature HotSchedules offers you have the ability to soley use that feature. HotSchedules can simply schedule, or it can automatically schedule, or you can assign a specific job to a specific person on a specific day. For us, we have employees who are doing a specific job/task one week and then they are needed for a different job/task the next week. HotSchedules allowed us to narrow down our options starting with department, moving to location, moving down to the job they would be preforming for that scheduled day.
• The ease of changing/releasing shifts. If an employee wants more hours they can go in and select shifts that are up for grabs or request to work on a specific day at a specific time. The opposite is also true. If an employee is worried they will have too many hours that week, they can release their shift and put it up for grabs by a different employee. And of course, all of this is fairly customizable to what you want your employees to have the ability to do, with or without your intervention and approval. In our case, if a shift lead releases a shift we only want other shift leads to be able to pick up the shift. HotSchedules allows us to do just that.

Incentivized

• Verint WFM does adherence very well. We were able to customize with our internal company goals which improved our productivity,
• Strategic planner (forecasting). Although there are challenges at times given my company's unique set up, strategic planner has allowed us to paint a more accurate picture of the future.
• Verint also processes PTO requests very smoothly and in a way that makes sense.

Incentivized

• I find that the system of assigning jobs and rates is a little tedious, but understand the need for it.
• I'm not familiar enough with the copy and setting the next week's schedule, but it's not necessarily hard to use.
• The whole assigning welcome letter and with log in and password is difficult with the Spanish speakers even though you have a Spanish version.
• Many of our employees do not have email or smart phones, so I find that HotSchedules is not as useful to them or us.

Incentivized

• It is very technical. It is not something that you can just jump into. It took me a while to train my other contact center managers on how to use it and I just actually recently got an employee who was helping me manage the workforce management variance system and it just takes a lot of time and patience in order to learn the full gamut of how shifts go together. And this goes into this and you have to do one piece right or nothing else works in the end and the activities. It is just a lot when you come from not doing anything close to that.

Incentivized

Ease of use, efficiently creating and posting staff schedules.

Incentivized

It still functions the way we need it to. But, I am also a person who is keen to the relationships that have been built and it is one of the best I have with any outside vendor. There is work on improvements and updates constantly and when or if I have an issue or problem that needs to be addressed, I know the team is there to help me.

Incentivized

6 Years of Experience provides me the insight on the upgrades and changes that HotSchedules has done to improve the experience of its users. There are so many features that we still have not started or used to the fullest, but we believe that we are currently getting a strong value out of the money that is paid for this product.

Incentivized

I have worked within the system for several years and have not found a separate WFM system that is comparable or has as many features as Verint. There are comparable systems for scheduling , forecasting and PTO allotment. however I have not been able to find one with all three

Incentivized

Always cheerful, informative, and educated staff. Each person seems to want to find a way to help us with any issues or questions we have. I love that all the staff is friendly and in a good mood when you call, I have never had a rep be unhelpful or short tempered, or ever less than accommodating to our needs!

Incentivized

Verint Support is exceptional. I've never had an issue where the Verint Support analyst was lacking knowledge, didn't take the issue seriously, or not tried working with us to fix our quirky setups. Realizing that each business is different, has different needs, and there isn't a cookie-cutter solution for everyone ... Verint Support always continues to shine for us and help us out when needed.

Incentivized

Training was covered in full day sessions that went very fast with no way of recording the information for later review. This made it hard to capture & retain all the details of information.

Incentivized

Training is more broad on specific use cases. It would be good to have training based on our current situations as we deal with so many unique setups & client needs.

Incentivized

The team helping us did a great job training our WFM leaders on how to use the tool from forecasting, to schedule updates to maintenance. They allowed us to be involved in implementation but also did a lot of the initial heavy lifting allowing us to stay focussed on the tasks at hand. It was a great experience and one I would hope occurs again should we ever need to implement a new tool again.

Incentivized

HotSchedules was the first to tie into a POS to control clocking in and out for employees compared to a canned product from major POS providers. HotSchedules is more widely used by hourly employees in the industry, so there is less of a training curve.

Incentivized

Verint Workforce Management is superior in many ways to other programs, though there are aspects of the others that may be a bit better. Overall, Verint has more pros than cons when compared to other scheduling software, it is simply in need of improvement in some areas.

Incentivized

• Saving time on scheduling means our managers can focus more on guest experience, managing the floor and other areas that contribute to the success of our business.

Incentivized

• We have been able to decrease our workforce staff from 5 users to 3 users due to the automation.
• We have also been able to decrease our staffing by 3% as our agents' time is scheduled so they are available for the correct calls that come into our contact center.

Incentivized