Balancing Contact Center Chaos with Real-Time WFM
Traditional workforce management forecasts demand and schedules employees 2 to 4+ weeks in advance. Real-time WFM, the engine behind Verint Workforce Excellence, adapts to the contact center you actually have today.
Contact center leaders are always balancing quality of service against cost, and traditional WFM, built for static two-to-four-week planning cycles, can't keep pace with real-time change.
Verint Workforce Excellence is AI-powered, real-time WFM that continuously adapts forecasts, schedules, and intraday workloads as conditions change — at the speed of life and business.
The art of balancing the work of the hybrid workforce of AI bots and humans is constantly changing, and it requires your forecasts to incorporate emerging trends in channel shift, increasing AI interaction containment, and the types of interactions handled by agents.
WFM planners also need to balance the agents’ need for scheduling flexibility and manageable workloads that mitigate burnout.
Every contact center leader plays the same balancing act: deliver great service without blowing the budget, and do it without burning out the people who deliver that service. Sounds simple, but it’s extremely hard to achieve, because just as soon as you think you have a plan that works for everyone (your company, your customers, your employees), life happens. Call volumes spike without warning, agents call out, and AI bots can’t resolve all customer inquiries.
Traditional workforce management (WFM) tools were built for a more static world, where two-to-four -week planning cycles were pretty accurate. Today’s contact centers, however, change by the minute.
In a four-part video interview, Florian Garnier, Senior Manager, GTM Strategy, at Verint, breaks down why traditional workforce management can’t keep up and how Verint Workforce Excellence, built on real-time WFM, helps contact centers manage cost, service, and employee experience all at once, at the speed of life.
Balance contact center costs and service at the speed of life with Verint Workforce Excellence
Running a contact center comes down to a balancing act, and Florian Garnier knows it firsthand. Before joining Verint, he ran contact centers himself. “You’re trying to always balance, at its core, the quality of service you provide for your customers, and the cost that it takes to operate your contact center,” he says.
That balance isn’t a single dial. It’s dozens of KPIs: service level, occupancy, adherence, forecast accuracy, cost per contact, all pulling on each other. As Garnier puts it, “all of those KPIs that you’re managing […] have a symbiotic relationship to each other,” which means workforce management can’t optimize one metric in isolation without risking the rest.
What is Verint Workforce Excellence?
Workforce Excellence is AI-powered, real-time WFM that builds on your existing WFM foundation, giving contact centers the ability to continuously adapt forecasts, schedules, and intraday workloads as conditions change, not just when the next planning cycle rolls around.
That distinction matters because traditional workforce management forecasts and schedules are snapshots. They’re accurate the moment they’re built, then start drifting the second real life intervenes: a marketing campaign overperforms, a storm knocks out a call center, three agents call in sick on the same Tuesday. Verint’s real-time WFM continuously analyzes workforce performance and operational signals to catch these deviations early, predict the downstream impact on service levels, and recommend a fix before customers ever notice a problem.
The goal, as Garnier puts it, is to ensure “all those KPIs stay at a good equilibrium,” and that takes tools built to work at the speed business actually moves. Workforce Excellence, he says, is about “making your contact center more efficient, but also balancing the employee experience that exists that is so important to avoid the burnout of agents.”
Managing the hybrid workforce of AI bots and humans
AI agents and bots are now part of the contact center workforce — but forecasting for a mixed team of humans and bots is a different problem than forecasting and scheduling for humans alone.
Thankfully, you don’t have to schedule breaks and lunches for AI bots. 😉
The real challenge is forecasting containment, i.e., how much volume the bot actually resolves and how much “bleeds over” to human agents.
What is AI interaction containment?
“AI can’t solve every single contact that it gets,” Garnier explains. Containment rates in AI deployments are still relatively low, which means a meaningful share of volume ends up back in the human queue. “That’s what you’ve got to focus on: building a forecast for human agents that accounts for what the bots hand back, not just total volume.”
Traditional forecasting struggles here because it wasn’t designed for a channel mix that shifts by the week, let alone the hour. Every 1% of forecast error can cost a contact center roughly $400,000, and the industry average forecast is only accurate to within plus-or-minus 10% to 12%. Add a bot into the mix and the variables multiply.
Why Verint CX Automation Platform improves WFM forecasting
Verint’s answer is a portfolio approach. We have intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) to handle contacts directly on the same platform as our WFM solution. Real-time data on IVA volumes, trends, and KPIs are continually monitored, and if spikes or drops in volumes occur, this data is immediately reflected in the WFM intraday dashboards. Capabilities like AI-powered Operations Assist can alert managers early to changes in containment that might impact SLAs and provide recommendations on actions to take to mitigate the impact.
That real-time adaptability, paired with AI-powered long-term capacity planning that accounts for channel shift, changing work types, and evolving agent roles, is “really the nimbleness of the platform,” as Garnier puts it, “that allows you to better handle AI and human agents in one platform.”
What contact center agents want: scheduling flexibility
Richard Branson said it decades ago: “Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your customers.” Garnier agrees and points to employee experience as what he calls a “bellwether metric… a leading indicator that’s going to impact both your cost and your quality when you’re trying to balance that out.”
As WFM folks, we can’t really influence the pay of agents in the contact center,” Garnier says. “But we can influence the second thing that matters most to them, which is schedule flexibility.
The contact center schedule flexibility perception gap
Verint recently surveyed both contact center agents and operational leaders. In the report, The Perception Gap: Scheduling Flexibility in Contact Centers, we share findings that 70% of agents rank schedule flexibility as their #1 or #2 job requirement, and nearly half (46%) of agents cite a lack of schedule flexibility as one of the two biggest challenges in their current role. Yet 81% of contact center leaders believe they already deliver schedules that employees prefer and meet their needs.
That’s the perception gap: leaders think shift swaps and bidding have solved for flexibility; agents disagree.
How Verint TimeFlex Bot delivers real-time schedule changes
What agents want now goes well beyond swapping a shift with a coworker. They want to change a start time same day, split a shift, or shorten a day, and get an answer instantly, not after a manager review cycle. Verint TimeFlex Bot delivers exactly that: agents can make unlimited schedule changes in real time, within guardrails that automatically protect coverage and service levels. The results speak for themselves
- One multinational insurer reduced attrition by 30% and absenteeism by 23%, saving $4.5 million.
- A telco cut both attrition and unplanned absences by 24%.
As Garnier puts it, “We can provide better tools for [agents] to […] build their schedules, but also then change their schedule as life happens. This is the beauty of what we can deliver as part of Workforce Excellence.”
Related reading: How to Bridge the Contact Center Scheduling Flexibility Gap Now
Agent burnout and the contact center attrition spiral
The contact center industry suffers from high attrition: on average 32% turnover every year. This can put an enormous burden on the contact center financially, and emotionally on the agents that remain. High attrition and the subsequent understaffing can lead to what Garnier calls the downward spiral, sometimes called the “spiral of doom,” and once a contact center falls into it, it’s brutally hard to climb out.
What is the contact center “spiral of doom?”
Here’s how it starts, in Garnier’s words: “when a center is understaffed, agents run back-to-back calls with no recovery time, stress rises, and attrition climbs. Every departure triggers backfilling — recruiting, training, and ramp-up that can take anywhere from two weeks to six months. New hires are slower on the phone while they learn the ropes, which pushes average handle time up. Higher handle time means fewer contacts get resolved, so customers wait longer, hang up, and call back, adding volume on top of volume, and stress on top of stress.
And it’s not just costing you stressed out agents and poor CX. It’s costing your hard dollars. Replacing a single agent costs $10,000 to $20,000, and the average contact center attrition rate sits around 32%, with some centers running as high as 65%. For a 1,000-seat operation, that’s $3 million to $6 million a year spent just replacing people who walked out the door.
How to reverse the attrition spiral
The way out, according to Garnier, isn’t a hiring surge. It’s investment in employee engagement. “The best way to get out of that downward spiral is to invest heavily in employee engagement,” he says. Engaged agents stay longer and are “more curious to know about your product and happy to help your customers,” which lowers backfill pressure, which lowers handle time, which protects service levels. The spiral, reversed.
Garnier’s advice for leaders who feel understaffed right now: Don’t wait for headcount to fix itself. “Attack employee experience with force.”
Related reading: Stop Contact Center Attrition: 5 Proven Fixes
See Verint Workforce Excellence in action: join the live webinar
Cost vs. service. Humans vs. bots. Flexibility vs. control. Every contact center is negotiating these trade-offs right now, and life doesn’t pause for the next planning cycle.
Join Verint’s live webinar, “Life Happens. Can Your WFM Software Keep Up?” on Wednesday, July 29, at 11 a.m. ET, to see how Verint Workforce Excellence helps contact centers forecast smarter, adapt faster, and keep agents engaged — no matter what life throws at them.
Frequently asked questions
Workforce Excellence is AI-powered, real-time WFM that builds on your existing workforce management foundation. It continuously adapts forecasts, schedules, assigned activity, and intraday workloads as conditions change, at the speed of life and business.
Traditional Workforce Management plans on a fixed cycle, typically two to four weeks, and reports on deviations after they’ve already affected service. Real-time WFM continuously monitors operations against plan, flags deviations as they emerge, predicts the impact on service levels, and recommends corrective action before customers feel it.
Yes, but the forecasting problem changes. Instead of scheduling bots directly, contact centers need to forecast containment (how much volume the bot resolves) and the volume that bleeds over to human agents, then build agent schedules around that number.
Verint research shows 70% of agents rank schedule flexibility as their #1 or #2 job requirement. Giving agents real-time, self-service control over their schedules, within automated guardrails that protect coverage, has helped Verint customers reduce attrition by 24–30% and cut costly unplanned absences.