The Best Workforce Engagement Management (WEM): The 2023 CRM Industry Leader Awards

THE MARKET

Research firm SNS Insider valued the worldwide market for workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions at $7.6 billion in 2022 and projects it to reach $15.2 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual rate of 9.2 percent.

The growth, it says, is being fueled by the ongoing trend of remote work and flexible work arrangements that began during COVID-19 lockdowns.

WEM includes everything from scheduling and tracking employee hours to forecasting and analyzing performance metrics. Though these solutions were originally built for the contact center, SNS Insider expects sales and marketing to dominate the WEM user market going forward. DMG Consulting found that sales to contact centers generated $2.4 billion in revenue for WEM vendors.

Largely deployed in the cloud, WEM suites today are taking on more artificial intelligence, real-time, and predictive capabilities, using past performance data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning to forecast staffing needs, create schedules, and shift employees throughout the organization as needs dictate.

THE TOP FIVE

In the world of WEM, the Calabrio ONE platform is the one to which many turn first. “Calabrio’s name is always on the lips of companies and [contact-center-as-a-service] partners,” observes Sheila McGee-Smith, founder and principal analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics. And its new CEO, Kevin Jones, who took the helm in January, has already committed to the WEM space, saying his company has an “obligation to augment the performance and experience of the frontline workforce and make contact centers more efficient and effective.”

Though not as long-standing as some of the top WEM vendors, Genesys could hardly be called an outsider or even an up-and-coming vendor anymore. “Genesys has focused on gaining a leadership position in WEM very seriously for the past few years,” McGee-Smith says, “and its success can be measured in the very high attach rate with Genesys Cloud CX customers.” Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir, says the beauty of Genesys’s solution is its bidirectionality. “Genesys is rapidly expanding its capabilities in WEM to provide customers with insights into how to increase both customer and employee engagement,” she says. “Its Employee Experience Index helps companies understand and optimize the employee experience to increase retention while improving customer outcomes.”

When it comes to WEM, NICE has checked all the boxes for years. “Integrated seamlessly with a CX platform? Check! Best-of-breed solution with any contact center solution? Check! Continually raising the bar? Check!” McGee-Smith says. But NICE is not just in it to check off boxes. Its solutions are the real deal, and the company keeps pushing the envelope as it more deeply integrates its Enlighten AI engine into the larger CXone platform, helping to simplify a very difficult process. “NICE continues to be one of the most attractive [WEM] vendors for customers with very complex requirements,” Wettemann says.

When Salesforce looked for a WEM vendor to include in its Service Cloud, it turned to Playvox. “With Salesforce Contact Center and Playvox, organizations are enabled to get the right people on the right channels at the right time to deliver new levels of service efficiency and effectiveness,” says Ryan Nichols, senior vice president and general manager of contact center at Salesforce. UJET and Dialpad also chose to partner with Playvox, which speaks volumes about the company. And its WEM portfolio only ballooned in the past year with the launch of AutoQA, which applies AI to contact center quality assurance efforts; and the expansion of its Capacity Planner to include more contact center staffing needs forecasting.

In many respects, employees are at the heart of everything Verint does, and that isn’t likely to change. “Verint continues to have one of the most robust sets of WEM capabilities and is focused on extending them beyond the agent to the back office, branch office, and other employees,” Wettemann says. McGee-Smith agrees, noting that Verint is on the cusp of one significant change: “With its open [contact center-as-a-service] story in 2023, Verint is looking to switch the narrative,” she says.