A well-run call center requires a high-performing agent workforce able to handle customer inquiries quickly and efficiently. What’s more, call center leaders often have to manage agents spread out across the globe making it even more challenging to monitor for performance and engagement.
This is where call center workforce optimization (WFO) software enters the equation.
At a high level, workforce optimization software is an integral part of every contact center. With the right tools in place, workforce optimization can help agents be more successful and productive, enabling organizations to improve business results while also bolstering agent morale.
And that’s a pretty big deal because happy, engaged agents give your business a competitive advantage. In fact, Gallup reports that more than 70% of employees are engaged at top-performing organizations. Since engaged employees accomplish more, this helps these companies create extremely productive work environments.
Workforce optimization software helps employees collaborate effectively. According to Gartner, this increases individual employee performance by as much as 20.6%. According to a recent Metrigy study that surveyed 524 companies, using WFO applications can increase an organization’s revenue by 30.1%.
Add it all up, and the benefits of workforce optimization solutions speak for themselves. But with so many workforce optimization solutions in the marketplace, it can be difficult to choose the best option for your business.
To make your search easier, we’ve compiled a list of the best workforce optimization software on the market today. Read on to learn more about each to determine which one can meet your needs the best..
1. Nice CXone
NICE CXone is a cloud-based workforce optimization software that helps businesses manage an effective workforce and multiple customer channels, such as inbound and outbound calls, email, social media, and chat. The solution also quickly processes inbound support requests so businesses can easily connect with customers.
NiceCXone’s solutions merge contact center capabilities with a country-wide phone and internet connectivity network. With this call center workforce management solution, you get optimized forecasts and schedules and automated processes so users can focus on more high-value tasks. What’s more, the user-friendly interface makes it easy for employees to keep track of their schedules and performance.
Nice CXone gives contact center managers a reliable way to connect with agents in every state. Its many features make work more convenient. The supervisor console works quite well, giving managers all the options they need to monitor agents’ progress effectively. With Nice CXone, managing calls is easy, enabling each agent to handle a high volume of calls every day. Additionally, the system makes it very easy to run reports and extract information with its simplified yet powerful capabilities.
Overall, the tool is self-organized and provides users with easy access to whatever they need. Plus, all channels are integrated. Whether agents are handling calls or chats, everything is automatic and fast. Nice CXone also shows you the call volume in the queue, along with options to create custom dashboards for your team’s stats and performance. A favorite feature for many users is automatic dead time removal based on call tone analysis.
Here’s a rundown of the software’s key features:
- Use AI to predict employee schedules more accurately.
- Help agents stay productive on the go with mobile optimization features.
- Develop a workforce management (WFM) strategy that includes automated employee reports and intraday management tools.
- Manage forecasts and schedules with ease with its easy-to-use user interface.
- Use workflow automation to see where your team is struggling, which employees are best suited for a particular task, and automatically make changes to your call center operation schedule.
2. Verint
Verint is a cloud-based contact center application that makes forecasting and scheduling staff much easier by automating the process. It offers an array of features, such as request automation, real-time agent coaching, compliance tools, quality assurance capabilities, knowledge management, and support for multiple channels and schedule types.
The solution can be scaled to meet the needs of organizations of varying sizes, making it a suitable solution for midsize-to-enterprise organizations. With Verint, contact centers get access to a mobile app that lets agents use their smartphones to swap shifts, manage schedules, and request time off, among other things.
The main advantages of this call center workforce management software are real-time coaching, forecasting features, simple UI speech analytics, and customizability. In particular, its speech analytics feature — which records and analyzes customer conversations to provide actionable insights — is pretty powerful. Unfortunately, the feature doesn’t include the ability to benchmark search results with other datasets. You must export data to compare two datasets (e.g., metadata and category characteristics).
Verint has a user-friendly UI with different methodological approaches to analyses, and its category-building tool is pretty fine-tuned. However, those in charge of implementing the software may have some trouble integrating its different microservices, and there isn’t much room for customization when it comes to KPIs. Making matters worse, it’s not very easy to learn; you’ll need professional help to use the platform effectively. That said, Verint does provide its experts to facilitate easy implementation.
Although pricing for Verint’s services is not publicly available, you may be able to get a quote by contacting one of their partners.
Here’s a rundown of the software’s key features:
- Includes robust employee scheduling features so that you can easily plan and adjust your staffing to meet the demands of your business.
- Provides various features vital to a contact center’s success, such as the capability to record screens, analyze interactions and manage performance.
- Delivers optimization tools explicitly created for branch offices and back-office operations for improved workflow efficiency
- Includes robotic process automation (RPA) solutions to increase consistency and compliance while reducing errors.
- Uses AI-based virtual assistants to provide a modern, convenient customer experience.
3. Genesys
Genesys is a cloud-based workforce optimization solution designed for the enterprise. The solution is perfect for businesses that have a lot of employees working out of many locations across multiple countries. With a customer base of over 4,700 and counting, Genesys is the go-to choice for many contact center companies. Customers from 120 countries trust them to provide reliable workforce optimization software solutions year after year.
Genesys strives to make customer and employee experience management more seamless by uniting all channels with artificial intelligence and machine learning. By integrating systems, users can get more value out of existing investments by creating a smoother journey for customers and employees.
Further, this call center workforce management software offers multiple deployment options, including cloud, perpetual on-premises licensing, or on-premises subscription. And if you need further customization, the vendor has web standards and open APIs that make it easy to tune the system to your specific needs.
The things that users like most about Genesys are its single system for all customer interactions and the UI and built-in mean opinion scores. You’ll also love the detailed reports of the integrations you configure. With Genesys, employees can sign in and actively monitor their adherence. Additionally, its forecasting feature allows you to predict employee schedules on particular days.
Unfortunately, many users share the same major complaint about Genesys: its incessant software glitches often result in call crashes and errors.
Here’s a rundown of the software’s key features:
- For a streamlined workflow, users can connect their CRM to the forecasting tool.
- Based on data from week-to-week agent performance, you can create more effective schedules for vacation, overtime, and training.
- Uses past data to help determine how many staff members you’ll need and then schedule those workers based on the number of incoming calls.
- Its what-if feature allows you to compare the cost of an employee vis-à-vis their performance.
- You can use it to encourage employee productivity and engagement by using gamified leaderboards and scorecards.
4. Five9
Five9 is a cloud-based contact center software that handles outbound, inbound, blended, and multi-channel operations effortlessly. It promises to make life easier for contact centers by taking the strain off of physical, on-premises infrastructure. With Five9, agents can log in and work from anywhere as long as they have a computer, headset, and high-speed internet connection.
Five9 empowers agents to handle contacts from multiple channels, all from one desktop, so that users can communicate with customers through the channel they prefer: phone, chat, web, video, email, or social media. To provide the best customer experience possible, Five9 Engagement Workflow uses natural language processing (NLP) and intelligent routing to get customers to the right agent quickly.
With Five9 Genius, agents have next-step guidance available before they even pick up the phone. This way, you can be sure your customers always speak to a knowledgeable agent who can help them resolve their issues quickly. By doing this, the workforce optimization software vendor promises better customer engagement and faster response times.
Five9 features help streamline productivity by forecasting and scheduling, as well as analytics that can detect trends, improve quality monitoring and share operational metrics for performance management. The WebRTC component of the software allows users to use various platforms, including ChromeOS, Windows, and Mac, making employee engagement possible for more accounts and users.
For many users, this call center workforce management software is uncomplicated and efficient, qualities that make it perfect for small businesses. With Five9, performance reports are readily available, and the platform seamlessly syncs with Salesforce. That being said, some users find automation difficult while others struggle to navigate its reporting features.
Utilizing processes and workflows that Five9 offers can be challenging to automate if you’re not already familiar with CRMs and other contact center software applications. To get the most out of Five9, you might need an internal team that’s comfortable working with various operating systems and knows how to use all the product features. If you don’t take the time to learn how to make the most of the features, Five9 might disappoint you.
Some users also complain about how long it takes to reconnect a disconnected call due to an unstable internet connection. And since there are no built-in features for reducing or amplifying sound, the audio quality of each call varies.
Here’s a rundown of the software’s key features:
- Generate precise predictions for employee productivity and output with its forecast and schedule features.
- Integrate this call center workforce optimization software with Salesforce, Oracle, Zendesk, and ServiceNow.
- Keep track of your employees’ work by monitoring them across multiple channels, in real-time, and with automated scoring.
- Share service-level agreement (SLA) and KPI statistics with agents to help them become more productive. By doing so, agents will better understand their performance and where they need to improve.
- Keep your customer interactions private and secure by recording and storing them in encrypted storage.
5. Level AI
Level AI is a cloud-based workforce optimization platform that leverages artificial intelligence to help businesses monitor agent performance through quality assurance processes. It leverages artificial intelligence and natural language processing to help QA teams auto-monitor and evaluate agent-customer conversations. The workforce optimization software manages omnichannel performance and guarantees a cohesive customer experience across channels. In other words, no matter how customers reach out to the contact center, they will have the same great experience.
Level AI offers one of the most advanced artificial intelligence engines available today, with the ability to monitor 100% of conversations. The call center workforce management software also scores those conversations in real time against a company’s custom quality assurance scorecard, making it one of the best quality management systems on the market for contact centers.
Level AI gives call center agents and managers access to real-time and historical data to see how individual agent performance stacks up against KPIs. The platform provides valuable insights that help organizations decide where to focus their efforts to develop and engage agents. It improves agent productivity and encourages engagement with coaching tools, statistics, self-evaluations, and accessible information.
The Level AI conversation analytics engine essentially transforms mountains of unstructured data into useful, structured information that can be queried in numerous ways to provide insights about customers or KPIs for contact centers. This workforce optimization software uses live data to monitor agent performance, identify areas for improvement, and construct a personal coaching plan. Agents can use the comprehensive performance management suite to improve their FCR, AHT, and CSAT scores.
This call center workforce optimization software solution automatically records, saves, and classifies all customer interactions — including phone calls, chats, emails, and text messages. You can easily query and generate reports based on topics and conversation tags. It also creates for you a summary of each interaction.
When it comes to WFO software, Level AI is the clear choice for enterprises looking to streamline efficiency, maximize productivity (crucial for remote workforces), understand why customers frequently call their center, and otherwise improve customer service operations.
Here’s a rundown of the software’s key features:
- Level AI automates the monitoring and evaluation of contact center agent conversations, making quality assurance teams 5x as efficient with 2x the accuracy of legacy systems.
- It’s easy to track how your agents perform with this unified interface, which lets you create custom reports from data collected externally and internally.
- Its Real-time Agent Assist feature uses data from an enterprise’s best resources to guide agents and increase customer satisfaction by accurately understanding intent.
- The software’s coaching module is an all-inclusive agent coaching experience. Contact center quality coaches can identify performance gaps and customer review needs and set up action plans, schedule coaching sessions, and track progress from a single location.
- The agent screen-recording feature records customer-agent interactions so call center managers can better understand how to improve their processes and ensure agents follow protocol. Session playback gives a holistic view of the customer experience, leading to more successful coaching sessions, agent development, and job satisfaction.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, workforce optimization solutions can save your company time and money by creating more efficient ways to schedule shifts, track time, and submit requests. By using a best-of-breed system, you can be sure your organization is getting the latest and integrated technologies on the market.
Unfortunately, you can’t pick any workforce optimization solution and expect great results. Instead, you need to be sure that the workforce optimization software solution you choose fits in snugly with your needs and goals as a company.
The list above contains excellent options that each offer something unique to its users; we recommend requesting demos or trying free trials before taking any formal steps towards investing in one specific tool. By doing so, you’ll be able to understand if a tool is compatible with your team and see if the vendor can make customizations to suit your organization better.
To learn more about Level AI and how it can transform your contact center operations, request a demo today.
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