Constellation ShortList™ Contact Center Workforce Engagement Management (WEM)
Executive Summary
About This ShortList
Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) represents a suite of tools curated to empower, encourage, engage and manage the workforce across the customer service spectrum from contact center agents to supervisors and management. These tools sit squarely at the intersection of performance optimization suites focused on traning, quality and recording and employee experience solutions that bring engagement analytics, voice of customer and voice of employee tools, speech analytics, gamification and training, scheduling, time management, task management and employee recognition. Increasingly these solutions have also included capabilities or integrations for employee wellness, onboarding and team building as the connection between employee well-being improved customer experience delivery has been celebrated and emphasized.
WEM has evolved from two critical toolsets in the contact center and customer service, specifically Workforce Optimization (WFO) and Workforce Management (WFM). Separately, these two modules continue to deliver results. Yet increasingly organizations are looking to have both performance and engagement in a single dashboard that is directly integrated into larger contact and service engagement center workspaces as organizations look to simplify the dashboards and workspaces needed to optimize engagement across the employee to customer continuum.
From the capacity to give real time recommendations for optimized self-service and scheduling, to robst analytics connecting well-being, time management and quality of engagement tying to improvements in voice of customer feedback, AI, and specifically generative AI models, have the potential to open new avenues of efficiencies and effectiveness. Expect 2026 to be the year of intentional quality of life improvements thanks to automations as AI supercharges engagements. While consolidation in the market is seeing independent WEM players be scooped up by larger platforms, don’t be shocked if non-traditional contact center platforms start to investigate the agentic innovations in the WEM space and like what they see for more cross-functional work. Within the contact center WEM is now an expectation in capabilities in any contact center stack, with many CCaaS platforms looking to own that relationship instead of partnering. As far as innovations in capabilities, expect more voice AI innovations that place speech as a primary interface and bringing more hands-free-work beyond mobile environments.
Threshold Criteria
Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:
- Fully integrated quality assurance to ensure consistency and accuracy of customer engagements
- Call recording, monitoring, transcription and analysis of conversation and interaction
- Alerting capabilities to proactively uplevel real-time issues
- Flexible AI-powered scheduling tools to accommodate hybrid work
- Robust analytics into call quality, call time, handling, resolution sentiment, agent performance
- AI powered recommendations for employee onboarding, training, scheduling, well being and upskilling opportunities
- Employee empowerment and training tools including self-service bots for self-guided training and skills reinforcement, schedule flexibility and self-service schedule swapping within organization guidelines
- Dashboards and employee portals build to optimize employee experience and provide visibility into skills, performance, and scheduling while also tracking employee wellbeing in an effort to track and prevent burnout and agent churn
- Catalog of agent and supervisor assist capabilities, powered by AI and delivered within dedicated native workspaces
- Collaboration tools enabling cross functional problem solving around customer needs and questions
- Cross channel engagement capabilities including voice, video and mobile connectivity
- Rich integrations with CCaaS, hybrid contact center, CRM, Data management and ERP solutions • Integrations with HR and HCM Software suites
- Automated coaching presented to agents with alerts and automated reminders for supervisors to optimize skills, training and “improvement” opportunities
- Agent onboarding and training modules
- Ability to scale workforce (both expansion and contraction) quickly without schedule or workflow disruption
- Solutions geared for smaller to midsize enterprise contact centers may also include payroll and agent compensation management capabilities or integrations for a more comprehensive one-stop employee management shop
- Industry specific capabilities often include additional connections into compliance assistance, enabling agents to freely engage while also ensuring compliance with complex regulatory environments
- Rule based / Role based gonvernance and compliance guiderails established by administrators
The Constellation ShortList
Constellation evaluates more than 21 solutions categorized in this market. This Constellation ShortList is determined by client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects market share and internal research.
- 8x8
- Alvaria
- Calabrio
- Five9
- Genesys
- NICE
- Playvox
- Sprinklr
- Verint
- Vonage Workforce Management
- Zendesk
Frequency of Evaluation
Each Constellation ShortList is updated at least once per year. Updates may occur after six months if deemed necessary.
Evaluation Services
Constellation clients can work with the analyst and research team to conduct a more thorough discussion of this Constellation ShortList. Constellation can also provide guidance in vendor selection and contract negotiation.