Blue Pumpkin Extends Leadership Throughout Europe With the Release of PrimeTime 3.0.

Business Editors/Technology Writers

Communications Solutions Europe

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 31, 2000

New Product Offering Features Innovative Scheduling Solution for Work

Rule Compliance and the Industry's First Interactive User Assistance

Technology

Blue Pumpkin Software, a leading provider of workforce management solutions, today announced the availability of the European version of PrimeTime 3.0, the latest release of the company's innovative workforce management solution for contact center forecasting and scheduling.

This new release of Blue Pumpkin's award-winning flagship product addresses the challenges of effectively managing European work rules and features the industry's first interactive user assistance technology. These enhancements are designed to help users successfully transition from manual scheduling processes to a fully-automated solution that balances fairness and labor law requirements with customer service needs.

"Unique work rules and labor conditions in the European market make staffing and scheduling the contact center a challenging task for even the most experienced manager," said Paul Stockford, principal analyst at Saddletree Research. "In addition, staffing requirements of multilingual and multi-skilled agents often add to the complexity of the scheduling process. PrimeTime 3.0 simplifies agent scheduling and brings an unprecedented ease-of-use to a highly sophisticated scheduling package designed for the unique requirements of the European industry." An Easy, Yet Robust Solution Solves Complex Scheduling Requirements

As agent retention becomes a more critical issue in Europe, PrimeTime 3.0 incorporates a number of advanced scheduling and management features intended to increase agent retention, eliminate fairness objections, and satisfy labor and union requirements, all with the same easy to use, cost effective solution and include:

-- Rotation -- allows users to rotate through weekly schedules over a fixed
period of time.

-- Team Scheduling -- here users can ensure that members of the same teams can
be scheduled to start and/or end at the same time. This feature facilitates
cooperation among users needing to work together for various reasons such as
carpooling.

-- Scheduling 0ff-Phone Periods in 5-minute increments, enabling users to more
accurately model how they want to schedule their contact center

-- Advanced Off-Phone Period handling -- allows users to specify the minimum
amount of time between off-phone periods and specific times for off-phone
periods to be scheduled.

-- Inter-week Maximum Consecutive Days Scheduled, allowing users to define the
number of shift assignments employees can be assigned, within the week and
across week boundaries

The Next Generation of Easy to Use Workforce Management

In addition to automating some of the most difficult tasks that surround European work rule compliance, PrimeTime 3.0 also features the addition of Sage, a new interactive user assistance tool designed to extend the product's ease-of-use. Sage helps contact center managers better optimize their use of PrimeTime by providing interactive guidance and advice about potential scheduling issues that arise while performing day-to-day workforce management activities. By providing instant feedback, Sage ensures the process of creating optimal schedules runs smoothly and efficiently every time. It also helps novice users quickly progress to advanced user levels by teaching them how to resolve problems and avoid future mistakes. This innovation is designed to allow customers to experience a more rapid benefit from service-level improvements within their contact center environments.

"With Sage, Blue Pumpkin is clearly raising the bar on workforce management solutions, providing our customers with the tools they need to be successful as they automate their workforce management practices," said Blue Pumpkin Chief Technical Officer, Dr. Ofer Matan. "This innovative tool is a significant step towards empowering contact centers to be more self sufficient and to more rapidly see the customer service benefits of a well scheduled, well managed contact center."

Pricing and Availability

PrimeTime 3.0 is available now and is priced on a per agent basis.

About the Blue Pumpkin PrimeTime Product Line

The Blue Pumpkin PrimeTime family of products helps contact centers of all sizes incorporate skill-based forecasting, scheduling, analysis and workflow into their contact center operations. PrimeTime and PrimeTime Enterprise serve businesses with small centers managing customer interactions over a single channel as well as multi-site, multi-channel operations. PrimeTime Exchange, Blue Pumpkin's open integration platform, based on Java and XML technologies, provides a foundation for both PrimeTime and PrimeTime Enterprise to communicate with other contact center technologies. Together with pre-packaged software integration plug-ins, PrimeTime Exchange allows contact centers to consolidate information and operations by integrating customer and agent data seamlessly with ACD, CTI, CRM and eCRM applications.

About Blue Pumpkin Software

Blue Pumpkin Software is a leader in workforce management solutions designed to help customer contact centers leverage their skilled resources to provide excellent customer service. Blue Pumpkin provides the tools necessary to efficiently schedule and manage contact center personnel, ensuring that the right person with the right skills handles customer interactions. These solutions help maximize the human potential to guarantee superior customer service across a variety of contact channels, including phone and email. With a family of flexible applications integrated with leading contact center technology partners, Blue Pumpkin gives contact centers the freedom to choose how to run their business.

Blue Pumpkin Software is headquartered in the Silicon Valley, with European headquarters in London, and offices and distributors throughout the world. Blue Pumpkin's customers span a number of industries and include AOL/CompuServe, Apple Computer, Eircom, Going Places, Nationwide Building Society, PPP Healthcare & Sykes. For more information about Blue Pumpkin and its products, please visit the Blue Pumpkin web site at www.blue-pumpkin.com or call the International headquarters at [phone].