The Best Workforce Engagement Management (WEM): The 2025 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Mordor Intelligence values the current global workforce management software market at $9.4 billion and expects it to reach $11.7 billion by 2030, expanding at a 7.1 percent compound annual growth rate. Growth, it says, stems from clear gains in labor-cost visibility, automated compliance, and the infusion of artificial intelligence into time-and-attendance cores.

Vendors that link predictive scheduling, real-time payroll, and analytics in one platform are capitalizing on demand for connected employee-experience ecosystems, it says further.

Cloud deployment dominates new spending because hybrid and remote work require anytime access, and mobile interfaces unlock adoption in frontline sectors, ranging from on-site retail to healthcare, according to Mordor.

Moving forward, look for a greater integration of biometric authentication and predictive analytics to help companies cut overtime by double-digit percentages, convincing chief financial officers that streamlined labor orchestration could be a direct profit lever, the firm says.

The Top Five

Aspect Software merged with Noble Systems in 2021 and changed its name to Alvaria, but in the past year it returned its flagship workforce engagement management products to the Aspect name. It also relaunched the Alvaria WEM product suite as Aspect Workforce Enterprise Suite. These moves are more than a change of logos, says Ian Jacobs, vice president and lead analyst at Opus Research. “It is a renewed strategic focus and bold industry stance,” he says. Around the same time, Aspect launched WorkforceOS, a workforce engagement platform powered by predictive analytics. Jacobs says that WorkforceOS “elevates forecasting and intraday optimization, leveraging more accurate data modelling for predictive planning and what-if scenario analysis.”

Calabrio promotes itself exclusively as a workforce performance company, and its Calabrio ONE WFM suite is there to help contact center operators streamline operations, improve agent engagement, and remove friction from daily workflows through automation. The product underwent a massive upgrade recently, as Calabrio added quality management, trending topics, interaction summaries, real-time alerts, vacation bidding, real-time desktop analytics, self-scheduling, and periodization. The company also acquired Echo AI, giving it an AI-powered conversation intelligence platform, and launched Performance Management, a unified platform to help contact center leaders reduce attrition, increase productivity, and optimize customer outcomes. And its value comes from other sources as well. “Calabrio remains strong because of its strong relationship with Cisco,” observes Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics.

For McGee-Smith, Genesys joins NiCE and Verint as the top three providers of WFM for contact centers with 1,000 seats or more, having “taken the time and spent the R&D dollars to address the complex requirements of large, global centers.” Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir, agrees, noting that Genesys in particular “focuses on optimizing agent and customer experiences, and it continues to invest in expanding its WFM capabilities.”

NiCE, another WFM powerhouse, “continues to serve organizations with the most complex needs with its robust WFM solution,” Wettemann says. But for Jacobs, it’s more than that. “NiCE excels at intraday management with live reforecasting, queue-level staffing insights, and automated schedule corrections,” he says. “And somewhat uniquely, it offers a true-to-interval engine that gives teams a more honest view of service-level performance by drilling down to what exactly happens in each interval, not just daily or weekly averages that hide problem spikes.”

Though Verint has branched into several other areas of contact center technologies, its strong suit continues to be WFM, with Wettemann pointing out that it “has some of the most robust WFM capabilities in the market.” Jacobs agrees, noting that Verint “shines in offering a full-featured WFM solution,” complete with forecasting, scheduling, deep reporting, adherence, and performance within a modular CX automation and analytics platform.

Niche Player

Unlike the bigger vendors whose workforce management products are built for sprawling enterprises, CommunityWFM has found its “sweet spot” with small and midsize contact centers with fewer than 250 agents, according to Jacobs. “It’s built to be straightforward to roll out, easy for supervisors to pick up, and practical for teams that don’t have a dedicated WFM guru on staff,” he says.