CENTENNIAL, Colo. — Peak5 announced today that it has named a senior vice president of national sales. Accepting this position with the company is Thomas Richards.

Richards has been working within the auto industry for almost 15 years, according to officials. Mostly recently, he served as vice president of sales for vAuto.

Officials indicated that he has been "extremely successful" in building strong sales and service teams for companies in early or start-up modes and establishing long-term successful strategies.

In his new role with Peak5, Richards will be responsible for managing the sales and marketing of Peak5's service offerings and will ultimately be building a successful national sales team.

Richards will be working directly with current as well as prospective clients to improve Peak5's processes and bring prospective clients into a partnership with Peak5.

"Tom has a wide range of expertise within the automotive industry from loan originations to technology and system sales. His expertise in sales management and the building of successful sales organizations is of great value to our company," explained Kevin Barry, chief executive officer of Peak5.

"Tom has demonstrated he is a hands-on leader with strong enthusiasm about growing our loan servicing organization," he added.

Peak5 Reduces Call Abandonment

In other recent news, the PerformanceEdge Group of Aspect Software, a company solely focused on unified communications for the contact center, announced that Peak5 has reduced call abandonment from 10 to 3 percent and improved overall customer satisfaction by implementing PerformanceEdge workforce management in its contact center.

"Loan servicing is a competitive industry where customer care and collections initiatives are critical to success. Aspect understands this and has helped us manage our contact center for improved productivity and job satisfaction. Aspect eWorkforce Management has made a huge impact throughout our contact center," explained Bill Heep, assistant vice president of loan servicing at Peak5.

"Everything has been working smoothly down to the agent training on the new applications, which only takes a short half-day, as well as the follow-on service," he continued.

Peak5 is utilizing the capabilities of Aspect eWorkforce Management and the Empower and Perform enhancement packages to help their multi-skill and multi-channel contact centers accurately plan, manage and optimize performance.

The company also is leveraging the Real-Time Adherence capability of the solution to help contact center managers and supervisors monitor agents' schedule adherence in real time, officials indicated.

In addition, with PerformanceEdge, Peak5 is automating the schedule change and notification process, enabling agents to view their work schedules and easily request shift changes, vacations and other schedule adjustments.

"Workforce management applications can make a big difference in an organization's customer service and its overall business processes. The results that Peak5 has seen are a great example of the value that workforce management can provide," said Bob Kelly, vice president of the PerformanceEdge group at Aspect Software.

"We look forward to continuing to support Peak5's efforts and business objectives by providing enhanced capabilities and services that will make a positive impact on the bottom line and provide its customers with a truly unique experience," he concluded.