The Best Workforce Management (WFM)/Workforce Engagement Management (WEM): The 2026 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Workforce management (WFM) and workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions are transforming faster than ever. Technological innovation, shifting employee expectations, and business pressures are driving organizations to rethink how they manage, engage, and optimize their teams, which are also changing.

Research firm Metrigy valued the global contact center WEM market at approximately $3.5 billion this year and says it is on pace to reach $9.1 billion by 2033, growing at a compound annual rate of 12.5 percent. That growth, it says, is being driven by a rapid shift from basic workforce optimization (WFO) to holistic, artificial intelligence- and analytics-driven engagement platforms.

Other industry trends include the demand for systems that can forecast, schedule, and monitor mixed workforces composed of both humans and autonomous AI agents, the incorporation of mobile and collaboration tools that let agents self-serve, and the use of AI to predict multichannel contact volume and dynamically address staffing gaps in real time without manual supervisor oversight.

The Top Five

Assembled has only been around since March 2020, but already it has differentiated itself in the workforce management market. While most customer support teams manage their in-house agents, business process outsourcers, and AI assistants on separate tools, Assembled WFM is the only platform that unifies all three. Derek Top, a vice president and research director at Opus Research, calls it “the modern, support ops-native challenger, offering AI-native forecasting, omnichannel and BPO visibility, and deployment speed that legacy WFM can’t match.”

Genesys continues to invest heavily in its WFM portfolio, and that focus has paid off, according to analysts. The Genesys WEM portfolio “connects forecasting and scheduling with quality management, coaching, performance analytics, and employee self-service. It recently added tools like assisted time-off management and improved real-time monitoring, which make scheduling and daily operation more efficient and less tedious,” says Ian Jacobs, a vice president and lead analyst at Opus Research. “And since these tools are integrated with its routing, interaction data, quality, and AI, workforce decisions are better aligned with customer needs.” Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, observes that “a large proportion of its customers choose to move to Genesys WEM when they move to the vendor for its [contact center-as-a-service] solution.”

NiCE has been called the de facto leader in the WFM space, and with good reason. “NiCE has one of the broadest integrated workforce propositions, covering WFM, quality, performance management, recording, coaching, and employee engagement,” Jacobs says. “There are no real gaps there at all, and it connects all of those capabilities directly to the rest of its CXone platform, which becomes increasingly important as brands manage humans, copilots, and AI agents together.” Top agrees, saying NiCE has “the deepest forecasting, scheduling, and quality tooling, increasingly extended to plan human and AI agent capacity as one workforce.”

While most of the other vendors on this list offer a wide range of contact center technologies, SuccessKPI is strictly a cloud-native WFM provider. And it is very good at what it does. SuccessKPI has been recognized across the industry for bringing WFM, analytics, quality management, and AI into a single operational intelligence environment. “SuccessKPI continues to shine. In 2025, they reported over 50 percent revenue growth, and by expanding the company’s operational footprint…CEO Dave Rennyson is looking to keep the growth trajectory going,” McGee-Smith says.

Verint’s acquisition by Thoma Bravo and merger with Calabrio dominated the CRM news cycle over the past few months, and with good reason. In the WFM space, the result was a “combining of Verint’s enterprise forecasting and scheduling depth with Calabrio’s engagement capabilities under a two-tier strategy,” Top says. Jacobs agrees, saying the combination “gives the company unusual breadth,” adding that “Verint WFM addresses complex global enterprises, while Calabrio offers a quicker and more approachable path for less complicated contact centers.” Though there is some overlap that needs to be worked out, Jacobs says, “the combined customer base, product depth, and AI automation capabilities make it impossible to omit Verint from any shortlist.”

Ones to Watch

8x8, Aspect, Cisco, Cisne, Five9, RingCentral, Zoom