The workforce optimization market is a mature one for which organic growth is “sluggish,” according to the 2015 Workforce Optimization Mid-Year Market Share Report from DMG Consulting LLC.
“Total company GAAP revenue for the 45 WFO competitors lost momentum during the first half of 2015, decreasing by $8.6 million, from $1,713.6 million in the first half of 2014 to $1,705.0 million in the same period in 2015,” according to DMG Consulting, which attributed that decrease in part to a change in the treatment of Enghouse, whose total company GAAP revenue was excluded in 2015. “The slowdown in the overall WFO market carried over to the contact center segment which contracted by 1.1 percent ($7.6 million) between the first half of 2015 and the same period in 2014. Total contact center WFO revenue for the first six months of 2015 was $712.7 million, as compared to $720.3 million in the first half of 2014.”
Recording and quality assurance are two core WFO applications, but newer applications like contact center performance management, customer journey analytics, desktop analytics, and speech and text analytics have more upside, DMG Consulting commented.
ASC, Aspect, Avaya, Cacti (News - Alert), Calabrio, ComputerTel, Coordinated Systems Inc., CTI Group, dvsAnalytics, Enghouse, Envision, Genesys, HP WFO Software, HigherGround, inContact (which acquired Uptivity), Interactive Intelligence, KnoahSoft, Magnetic North, Mitel (which acquired OAISYS), NICE, OnviSource, TelStrat, TantaComm, Verint (News - Alert), VirtualLogger, VPI, Xarios, and ZOOM International are the top players in the WFO arena, according to DMG Consulting, which noted that Verint and NICE remain the dominant players in this product category. However, it adds that a handful of WFO players, including Interactive Intelligence, Calabrio, inContact, HP WFO Software, and ZOOM International (News - Alert), are gaining market share and momentum in the WFO arena.
Here’s a look at what some of the WFO players have to offer.
Aspect Software
Aspect EQ Workforce Management forecasts, schedules, and tracks adherence of employee schedules to ensure the right number of people with the right skills at the right time. Aspect EQ Quality Monitoring draws on all important sources of quality when gauging the quality of voice and text-based customer interactions. Aspect EQ Performance Management brings together multiple sources of data for analysis that reveal employee and contact center operational challenges and achievements and helps inform corrective action. Aspect EQ eLearning assigns packaged training sessions to agents and teams based on performance evaluations. Aspect EQ Desktop Analytics enables contact centers to unlock information that exists on the agent desktop to understand the how, what, and when of agent activity. Aspect EQ Recording keeps a continuous record of all agent interactions from popular ACDs using AES 256 bit encryption to secure transmission and storage. Aspect EQ Surveys measure consumer feedback in an efficient and effective way that leads to happier outcomes. Aspect EQ Coaching identifies performance issues and directly verifies problems via call recordings to recommend coaching actions. Aspect EQ Speech Analytics transform agent conversations into a rich repository of actionable insights that fuels performance improvements. Aspect EQ Back Office optimizes the workforce across the enterprise by making the most of critical back office operations that help keep the front office honest.
Calabrio Inc.
Calabrio is a customer engagement software company that provides analytic insights to catalyze growth through customer service contact centers. Making work easier for agents and driving company growth are equally important. That’s why Calabrio built Calabrio ONE, which includes call recording, quality management, comprehensive analytics, and an easy and intuitive workforce optimization suite. A leader in Gartner’s (News - Alert) Magic Quadrant for Customer Engagement Center Workforce Optimization in 2015, Calabrio puts more valuable information into the hands of more decision makers – within the contact center and company-wide. Calabrio ONE has revolutionized the way organizations work by empowering them to move faster, and make better, more informed decisions. Calabrio ONE is built on a web-based architecture, so agents, supervisors, schedulers, and managers can access vital information from anywhere at any time. And exporting reports (HTML, PDF, CSV and XLS) for performance management or business analytics is a breeze. With Calabrio ONE, every agent interaction yields insights that can expand customer-consciousness, which is how leading companies now drive growth and long-term corporate prosperity.
ComputerTel Ltd.
ComputerTel’s CARiNA range of call recording and associated solutions is designed and implemented to assist and support effective workforce optimization. By using the solution in a modular way, you can use some or all of the tools to obtain an impartial, holistic view of how your business operates. Call recording offers an independent analysis of how a customer experience unfolds, and if you add screen capture too, you can simultaneously watch screen activity and listen to conversations, to check that CRM processes and wrap up controls are effective and are understood. Speech analytics searches the call database to find specific words and phrases that can verify corporate adherence, identify market trends, and/or highlight repetition; however, you need to find the calls quickly and easily, so by integrating your call records to your CRM database, they can be tagged and filed more effectively. Assessing training needs is also covered with the use of a call evaluation tool that lets you conduct on-line assessments using actual calls from that member of staff. Creating reports and visual displays is also easy to achieve through the click of a button, providing you with the complete picture of how effective your workforce is.
Coordinated Systems Inc.
Virtual Observer is an enterprise-class workforce optimization solution for contact centers. VO supports call recording via most telephony platforms, including Avaya, Cisco, SIP, etc. VO also connects to many contact center platforms, including Clarity Connect in Skype for Business environments, Five9 (News - Alert) cloud contact centers, Salesforce CRM, Zendesk, and more. VO offers a number of included WFO features such as agent evaluation and scoring, agent portal with e-learning, media encryption, performance and trending reports, and more. VO is the only system that offers a distinctive real-time agent webcam recording and monitoring feature, which both prevents smartphone abuse as well as provides information about body language or behavior that may indicate where performance improvements are needed. VO’s Dashboard Analytics features real-time drill-down reporting. VO can also be extended to include rules-based screen capture, workforce management and speech analytics, and LightsOut! triggering for assistance with PCI and HIPAA compliance. VO differentiates itself from other suites in the industry based on a tremendous value to price, number of included features, and overall lowest cost of ownership in the industry.
Enghouse Interactive
Enghouse Interactive’s Quality Management Suite empowers organizations to observe business processes and SLAs to improve customer service. Included in the suite are Call Recording – interaction recording and live monitoring; Computer Recording – desktop recording and live monitoring and Agent Evaluation – call scoring and agent coaching for the contact center. QMS modules are available within Enghouse’s contact center platforms or independently in a single web-based user interface. QMS captures a customer interaction in its entirety. As well as the call, desktop activity can be recorded, enabling supervisors to easily identify broken processes and improve the customer experience. Supervisors can monitor in real time to coach and fix issues immediately. With Enghouse Interactive’s Real-Time Speech Analytics, QMS provides practical information to help agents while on calls or in post-call batch analysis. RTSA is a speech analysis technology that allows organizations to monitor and improve conversations in real time, through soft evaluators and speech recognition. It can detect good and bad phrases, crosstalk, volume, stress level, and speech ratio, among many other measurements. Agents can then correct mistakes while on the call to ensure successful interactions.
Envision
For more than 20 years, Envision has been providing award-winning solutions that optimize customer experience by turning data from customer interactions into action, making an intelligent impact on your business that leads to exceptional customer experiences. Data from phone, e-mail, web chat, and social media interactions can help quickly identify patterns and trends, optimize operations, and transform customer relationships. Envision delivers software solutions, in the cloud or on premises, to optimize your workforce. With its integrated line of Click2Coach products, customers get voice of the customer analysis, automated scorecards, performance management, desktop analytics, speech analytics, interaction and compliance recording, quality management, workforce management and coaching, and e-learning.
GamEffective
GamEffective is a workforce performance management platform. First, managers set goals and benchmarks, based on employee performance, level, role, and more, providing each employee with personalized goals and KPIs. The goals and KPIs are presented to employees using a gamified environment. The data comes from enterprise apps – the relevant KPIs for the employees – and shows them to employees in real time. This gives employees a running snapshot of their performance (as well as past performance) to keep them focused. It transforms performance through awareness and real-time feedback – a fitness tracker of sorts for work, which is personalized for each employee. Game elements increase motivation and focus. Additionally, managers can set learning, onboarding, or training sequences that are served to employees for on-the-job micro-learning, helping them correct their course at work. Managers can select KPIs and weight them, creating an overall score and showing employees what the score is made of and how they are performing on each metric/KPI versus their targets, their past performance, their peers, and more.
Genesys
Genesys provides a robust workforce optimization portfolio that includes capabilities like interaction recording, quality management, workforce planning, and speech and text analytics. These capabilities and others create Genesys Workforce Optimization, a solution that allows organizations to improve service level achievement and first contact resolution as well as improve sales conversion, compliance, and increase customer and employee satisfaction. Built on the Genesys Customer Experience Platform, Genesys Workforce Optimization offers high levels of automation through the use of shared application services for central employee administration and skill administration as well as the automated collection of statistics for all customer interactions and work items and real-time adherence across activities. The platform’s skills management solution assesses employee knowledge through web-based assessments and automates the process of training employees, while its employee and manager dashboards provide business managers with key performance indicators for real-time and intraday management. Also, the Genesys real-time and historical reporting tool collects key performance indicators to generate reports in real time or to analyze and report on past performance trends.
The integrated solutions of both contact center infrastructure and workforce optimization from a single vendor delivers highly engaged agents, quality customer interactions, and consistent customer experiences, all at lower operational costs.
Interactive Intelligence
The Interactive Intelligence Workforce Optimization solution helps contact centers monitor, manage, and improve contact center performance and customer experience based on long- and short-term organizational goals. The Interactive Intelligence WFO solution is an inherit part of the company’s cloud and on-premises customer engagement suites. PureCloud Engage offers a distributed, microservice cloud architecture using Amazon Web Services. It offers built-in WFO capabilities that are licensed per agent on a month-to-month basis. Customer Interaction Center is an on-premises, single-platform, all-in-one solution that includes built-in, comprehensive WFO functionality. Its customization capabilities also enable organizations to forecast and adjust outcomes based on service levels and cost factors. Both PureCloud Engage WFO and Customer Interaction Center WFO solutions offer a single point of configuration for all applications, which simplifies administration and maintenance for lower total cost of ownership. Interactive Intelligence WFO functionality includes the following: omnichannel recording, real-time quality monitoring/management, workforce management, strategic planning, speech analytics, and customer feedback management.
Knoah Solutions
Knoah Solutions offers a workforce optimization application called KnoahsARK. It is a modular, web-based application that enables the various roles that exist in an organization to capture, import, share, and report on data in a variety of areas within day-to-day operations. Knoah clients also have a key role and are provided access into KnoahsARK, which enables them to have visibility into operations in real-time and also to provide direct feedback, raise alerts, and information that helps to speed communication on issues before they become potential customer-facing problems. KnoahsARK tracks quality metrics for multiple clients and multiple criteria across multiple channels of customer interaction. Because it records every transaction, it can do things like review transactions that were associated with poor CSAT surveys to quickly identify problem areas with specific agents or groups of agents and provide specific and near real-time feedback that leads to re-training and improvement plans that make a difference. The QA component improves agent performance and the customer experience by calibrating evaluators, creating a collaborative QA environment by allowing agents to provide feedback or appeal evaluations, and assigning corrective actions, including training courses, define quality plans, and associate criteria scores to specific metrics and key performance indicators.
NICE
The NICE Workforce Optimization solution is comprised of tightly integrated solutions, enabling organizations to improve agent productivity, identify performance gaps, deliver targeted coaching and training, and effectively forecast workloads and scheduling of staff. NICE has recently launched the Adaptive WFO vision that fosters performance-driven operations and culture, leverages the power of advanced analytics, and adapts the employee journey to operational processes to excel in providing successful customer engagements. The WFO solution connects systems across an organization and can be implemented on premises, as a hosted solution, or via software as a service. The NICE WFO solution helps align employees around clear objectives and goals, based on the right performance data, to foster organizational empowerment to increase productivity and revenue generation, and provide accountability to accelerate performance metrics across time. Each employee and manager is given the tools to identify potential root causes to problems and provided with options to understand how they can improve. Speech and text analytics also introduce real-time guidance to insure each agent provides the best experience at every engagement. In addition, clear performance data lets supervisors target their energy toward the people and topics that will benefit most from training and assistance.
Support.com
Support.com offers cloud software and professional services programs designed to optimize a company’s support interactions with its customers. Optimized interactions result in more effective support teams, happier customers, increased brand loyalty, and additional revenues. Support.com Cloud applications provide live interaction guidance to support representatives and self-service guidance to customers. Support.com helps its customers build a bridge from the old style, product-focused, fix it support to the new paradigm of customer satisfaction focused support. The unique benefits of the three Support.com Cloud applications – agent support, self-support, and embedded support – include intuitive, on-screen guided paths that show both the agent representative and the self-support user the next best step to resolve any particular issue; a lifeline to professional guidance for self-support users so that, when they exhaust their own resources and press get help, a time- and frustration-saving record of all their steps is available to the support representative; and interaction analytics that provide management with complete context-based records of customer interactions, for continual improvement of support services and the products being supported.
TelStrat International
Engage WFO is a comprehensive call recording and workforce optimization solution including tightly integrated components with one unified interface. Engage Record provides rock-solid call recording to support an organization’s needs for service excellence, policy adherence, and regulatory compliance. Engage Record enables staff to monitor quality, better understand customers, improve performance, resolve disputes quicker, support legal defense, and mine business intelligence. Engage Capture saves video recordings of agents’ desktop activity (including email and chat sessions) synchronized with each voice recording to create a complete view of customer interactions. Engage Quality equips supervisors to perform agent evaluations and immediate coaching, as well as providing e-learning to improve agent call handling practices. Engage Speech Analytics applies phonetic and large vocabulary index analysis to locate selected words and phrases in call recordings, helping to uncover fresh insights for improving products and services, reducing risks and increasing customer satisfaction. Engage Desktop Analytics extracts key data from agent desktop activities and stores it with customer calls for easy retrieval. Engage Workforce Management combines powerful forecasting and scheduling with easy usability to schedule the right agents with the right skills at the right time to meet service levels. Engage WFO deploys in premises, hosted, or hybrid environments.
Verint
Verint Workforce Optimization, part of the company's Customer Engagement Optimization suite, provides unprecedented visibility into people, processes, and work across multiple functional areas of the enterprise. Verint WFO offers powerful capabilities for driving smarter engagement with customers, enhancing employee and manager productivity across front- and back-office operations, and delivering real-time guidance and analytics for identifying and addressing potential threats to consumer privacy and security. Recent upgrades include innovations in performance management so organizations can gain greater insight into how employees are performing, how well goals are being met, and how to better engage and take action on these insights. With this intelligence, organizations can understand what's happening in their businesses and why – and make better, faster, and easier decisions. Verint's WFO suite of solutions works across enterprise interaction channels that impact the customer experience and delivers omnichannel customer service at a reduced cost of ownership. It offers unprecedented customer intelligence, helping to improve internal processes, compliance, and workforce performance, enhance the quality and security of customer interactions, uncover business trends and areas of opportunity, and develop customer-centric strategies to enhance loyalty and retention.
VPI
VPI EMPOWER is VPI’s flagship sixth generation contact center workforce optimization software suite. Every module within the VPI EMPOWER suite – from call recording, speech analytics and quality assurance to business intelligence, workforce management, and e-learning – leverages advanced analytics, workflow automation and an open, Web 2.0 architecture to capture, share, and act on real-time insights and automate hundreds of manual tasks performed within contact centers today. The solution can be rapidly integrated into any communications environment and tap into any number of CRM, ERP, and other servicing application databases for consolidated reporting and alerts. Through intelligent processes and personalization of just-in-time intervention, VPI EMPOWER marries efficiency with effectiveness to drive excellence in employee engagement and loyalty. Whether deployed at single-site centers or multi-site enterprises, the solution’s mobile-friendly dashboards, scorecards, and desktop tickers align and empower every employee – from agents to executives – to self manage and quickly address customer experience, operational, and compliance issues and opportunities. VPI EMPOWER has earned high accolades from clients and industry analysts for its ease of deployment, ease of use and customization, advanced capabilities delivered out-of-the-box for contact centers of all sizes, and low total cost of ownership – resulting in a significant return on investment.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
