The Best Workforce Engagement Management (WEM): The 2024 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Precedence Research valued the global workforce engagement management (WEM) market at $9.4 billion in 2023 and expects it to hit $10.5 billion in 2024, topping out at $31.4 billion by 2034. This equates to an 11.6 percent compound annual growth rate. Though not limited to contact centers, the customer service arena has been among the largest users of these solutions for years as customer experience leaders look to optimize personnel allocation, ensuring that the most qualified agents with the appropriate skills are available at the right time and place to help customers resolve their issues. This framework underscores employee performance and competency, aiming to maximize employee productivity and provide guidance and training when needed. Today’s solutions also include forecasting, scheduling, analytics, reporting, time and attendance management, and a lot more.

“Workforce engagement management in 2024 is all about deploying artificial intelligence in quality management, workforce management, and performance management,” says Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics, pointing to industry veterans Genesys, NICE, and Verint as “hard at work delivering on this.”

The Top Five

Despite a slower start in the WEM market, Calabrio shows promise, according to McGee-Smith. A big focus for the company is its partner network, with its solutions this year alone being tied into Cisco’s Webex, Five9, and Avaya contact center products. The company is also pursuing a vertical focus, highlighted by its recent launch of the GovSuite workforce performance suite for government contact center operations. Other launches from Calabrio this year included Insights, an AI-powered contact center business intelligence tool; Bot Analytics, which provides access to all transcripts, with more than 200 metrics organized for discovery and analysis; and Interaction Summary, an add-on that uses AI to create recaps of each interaction and export them into CRM systems. Expect the company to expand even further into bot analytics following its acquisition of Wysdom earlier this year.

As Genesys continues its push beyond contact center infrastructure, one of the areas where it has chosen to plant its flag is the WEM space, with great success. “Genesys continues to expand its workforce engagement and workforce optimization capabilities to help optimize both agent and customer experiences,” says Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir. And where Genesys’ solutions are lacking, it gains needed functionality through an extensive partner network in its AppFoundry.

Wettemann calls NICE’s WEM capabilities “an attractive solution for organizations with very complex requirements.” And following a larger industry trend, NICE in the past few months added workforce management tools that enable organizations to manage their front- and back-office workstreams. NICE’s new Inventory Insights capability, coupled with True-to-Interval (TTI), merges omnichannel, contact center, and back-office features into a common planning interval, revealing cross-department efficiencies to drive improved bottom-line performance. TTI also enables organizations to consider the unique challenges of digital channels for forecasting and planning.

SuccessKPI is a relative newcomer in the WEM space, at least compared to the other vendors on this list. But as its name suggests, key performance indicators are core to its DNA, and as an early entry in the workforce engagement space, its appeal goes beyond that, McGee-Smith says. “WEM implies both [quality management and workforce management], and SuccessKPI has both,” she notes. Also new to its portfolio is the AI Traffic Forecasting capability, which predicts customer interaction volume and staffing needed, factoring in the contact center operator’s desired service levels, shrinkage, occupancy target, and staffing characteristics as well as agent experience, availability, and the working-hour preferences of individual agents.

Verint “has some of the most robust workforce optimization capabilities in the market and continues to invest in innovation,” Wettemann says, pointing to its TimeFlex bot as “a great example of leveraging AI to improve agent engagement while driving scheduling efficiencies.” The TimeFlex Bot leverages AI with WEM forecasts, giving agents self-service tools to automate shift swaps, split shifts, and schedule changes consistent with their newfound desire for a work-life balance.