SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug. 23, 2004 -- Blue Pumpkin, an industry leader in enterprise workforce optimization solutions, today announced winning the "Best of Show" award for its newest performance management solution, Blue Pumpkin Advisor Express. The award validates the company's unique ability to weave performance improvement into existing processes and expand outside of traditional workforce management.

At the International Call Center Management (ICCM) Conference and Exposition in Chicago last week, an independent panel of industry experts evaluated and singled out Blue Pumpkin Advisor Express from a competitive field of performance management vendors. The award selection considered such items as ease of integration, implementation, return on investment, system quality and customer service features. In evaluating the performance management providers, ICCM awarded only one "Best of Show" award, its top honor.

"This industry recognition shows that there is a new best-practice in improving customer service delivery," said Steve Bernstein, Blue Pumpkin's vice president of solutions marketing. "Advisor Express, provides an easy way for contact centers to take important steps in performance management -- from identifying opportunities for development to instilling a performance-minded approach into the things contact centers are already doing, rather than adding separate processes or initiatives."

Blue Pumpkin Advisor Express is the industry's first and only quick-launch performance management solution, designed specifically for contact centers. The best-in-class solution is fully implemented in under one week with pre-configured key performance indicators (KPIs) developed with Gartner, the premier information technology analysis and benchmarking firm, and pre-integrations into the most popular IT systems. Gartner also helps provide the 360-degree benchmarking capabilities that look at both external and internal peer performance.

As part of the Blue Pumpkin Workforce Optimization Suite, Blue Pumpkin Advisor Express meets the single-vendor strategy adopted by an increasing number of contact centers to lower total cost of ownership, improve integration, streamline use and accelerate benefits. As a result, Blue Pumpkin enables contact centers to move beyond managing to aggregate averages, focus improvements down to the individual level and Manage to Excellence(TM).

Now in its 16th year, ICCM Chicago is the world's largest and most comprehensive industry event. The gathering brings together thousands of executives and managers from around the world to learn about new solutions and strategies for managing contact centers as well as examine critical issues facing the industry today in 60 conference sessions featuring over 90 experts, analysts and other speakers.

About Blue Pumpkin

Blue Pumpkin provides industry-leading workforce optimization solutions that improve the performance of a customer contact center's most important and valuable asset -- its people. Addressing critical business challenges and creating competitive advantage with both innovative technology and best-practices professional services, we help our customers Balance and Optimize(TM) three critical and often competing priorities: business growth through customer loyalty, employee satisfaction and retention, and operating costs. Blue Pumpkin solutions deliver proven value to more than 1,000 organizations worldwide such as ADP, AT&T, JetBlue Airways, Toyota, and Visa. http://www.bluepumpkin.com.

NOTE: Blue Pumpkin and the Blue Pumpkin logo are registered trademarks of Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE Blue Pumpkin Software, Inc.

Web Site: http://www.bluepumpkin.com