The Complete Buyer’s Guide to Contact Center Workforce Management

What is Workforce Management?

Workforce management (WFM) is a practice of bringing together people, processes, and technology to optimize resource utilization, ensuring the right number of employees with the right skills are aligned to customer and workload demand across all support functions and channels (in-person, voice, digital, and self-service). WFM teams partner with HR, contact center operations leaders, supervisors and agents to forecast demand, determine staffing needs, build optimized schedules, and make intraday adjustments to balance workload and staffing in real time to meet cost and service goals while supporting a positive employee experience through flexibility and manageable workloads.

Modern, cloud-based WFM software enables companies to meet growing customer expectations for fast, efficient service while minimizing costs and accommodating the needs of their contact center agents. In this WFM buyers guide, we’ll explore seven key capabilities for WFM:

When it comes to WFM, good isn’t good enough

Workforce Management software has been around for decades. As the contact center has grown, some WFM solutions have evolved along with it, to varying degrees. But will these solutions be able to meet your cost and service goals in the future?

Let’s use Brett as an example of what an outdated WFM solution could cost you.

Brett manages a call center for a BPO specializing in processing healthcare claims. He has 500 agents across two centers and about 30 percent of the agents work remotely. His legacy WFM solution is on-premises and was designed for the voice channel, but his organization has been using it to try to manage resources across channels, with limited success. Brett is struggling with:

• Poor customer service – The growing number of channels and complexity of interactions is making it harder for Brett to ensure he has the right number of people, at the right time, to meet service goals. His slow response times, high abandonment rates, and low CSAT/NPS scores are impacting the bottom line.
  

  Every 1-point decrease in NPS costs his company about $2 million dollars annually.

• High costs – Sometimes, Brett pads his forecasts to ensure he has enough resources to meet demand, but this can result in overstaffing and poor resource utilization.
  

  Every 1 percent error in Brett’s forecast accuracy costs his company $400,000 annually.

• Employee attrition – Having limited scheduling flexibility makes it harder for Brett’s agents to achieve the work/life balance they want. As a result, many leave after only 3 to 6 months. This not only wastes time spent training agents but also drives up costs. Brett’s turnover rate is currently average for the industry—about 32 percent.
  

  At a cost of $30,000 to $40,000 to find, hire, and train a new agent , it’s costing him $4.8 million per year—a figure that could be significantly reduced with a more agent-centric approach to scheduling.

If you’ve been keeping track, that totals about $7 million per year in lost opportunities to improve CX and operational efficiency.

Why is WFM important in the contact center?

As a process, workforce management is as old as contact centers themselves. However, as contact centers continue to grow in size and complexity, effective workforce management practices—and software—have only grown in importance.

In the modern contact center, WFM is critical to driving 4 key values, among many more.

Consistent customer experiences

When customers contact an organization, they want the same level of service regardless of who answers the call. Their expectation for each interaction is that the information they receive is accurate and helpful. They also expect to be helped quickly, without long hold or wait times. Call centers can directly influence these expectations with accurate staffing levels.

Agents job satisfaction/engagement

Employees are happy when they feel supported and capable on the job. As self-service customer support features become the standard, Agents are increasingly relied upon to handle more complex contacts. This requires additional training to execute successfully. Yet under-staffed call centers often choose to cancel these sessions in order to keep up with demand. Agents pushed to the brink get frustrated and frustrated agents are more likely to quit. The true cost to hire and train an agent can be upwards of 1.5 times their annual wage and take up to 12 months to fully onboard.

When agent attrition is high, it can be a clear sign that agents aren’t happy. Contact leaders can reduce attrition and improve the agent experience by offering scheduling flexibility, so employees can maximize work/life balance, prioritizing performance feedback and grown, and ongoing support in the call center.

Operational efficiency

One of senior management’s top goals is to deliver top-notch customer experiences, as cost effectively as possible. Modern WFM solutions can forecast demand with up to 95% accuracy, reducing over and under staffing situations. And AI-powered intraday optimization capabilities can help leaders efficiently rebalance work and adjust schedules to meet the unpredictable changes and operational volatility of contact center operations.

Budget savings

Resource-related costs account for approximately three quarters of a contact center’s full operating budget. How you plan, schedule and manage those resources can make or break your budget. WFM prevents labor resources from being wasted due to overstaffing, while also maintaining adequate levels to deliver quality interactions.

Modern WFM benefits: Why spreadsheets can’t meet the needs of today’s contact centers

While automated workforce management solutions have been around since the 1980s, many organizations are still struggling with outdated, inefficient spreadsheets to manage their workforce. Not only is the manual nature of spreadsheets limiting, spreadsheets fail miserably at achieving the above mentioned goals of delivering consistent customer experiences, increasing agent job satisfaction, improving operational efficiencies and capturing budget savings.

Increased accuracy in scheduling and forecasting

Manually re-keying and manipulating spreadsheet data is time-consuming and error-prone. Even when using the utmost care to ensure data integrity, confirming the accuracy of spreadsheet-created schedules is difficult.

Also, using spreadsheets forces analysts and supervisors to guess the optimal timeframes for off-phone activities, such as meetings and trainings. As a result, the average spreadsheet-reliant workforce analyst creates forecasts and runs schedules only 1-4 times per year—leaving the contact center vulnerable to over- or understaffing the rest of the time.

Workforce management software overcomes these common accuracy challenges by:

• Enabling forecasts and schedules to be run more frequently and easily—in much less time—so the contact center can respond more quickly to seasonality and staffing fluctuations.
• Offering the option to reschedule easily, without having to start from scratch as would need to be done with a spreadsheet
• Helping contact center leaders to better assess forecast accuracy via visual reporting and rectify situations where the center is over- or understaffed.
• Empowering intraday managers to immediately improve the service level by making on-the-fly adjustments, such as optimizing breaks and lunches.
• Making it possible for supervisors and analysts to identify at a glance the best times to schedule off-phone activities to minimize the potential negative impact on customer service levels.
• Providing built-in communication services such as app notifications or SMS alerts to agents if schedules change. Excel planning doesn’t include these integrated systems that create instant alerts.

Less time spent managing the contact center

Workforce management software streamlines and automates many administrative, helping contact centers reduce the amount of time it takes to forecast, schedule and manage service levels for multiple channels and multiple locations. For example, managing time-off requests through spreadsheets and emails can be incredibly time-consuming. Modern WFM technology automates this process. In fact, contact centers that use WFM to automate such tasks save—on average—25% of the time they currently devote to manually performing them. Time savings are even greater for larger, more complex contact centers.

With WFM automation, analysts are able to automate the majority of day-to-day requests, leaving them free to focus attention on ad hoc requests. Automation is set based on your business rules and can approve or deny agent requests for time off, meetings, trainings, mentoring or even schedule swaps with another agent. In addition, with automation, agents are all evaluated by the same set of rules—eliminating any perceptions that analysts are “playing favorites.”

Greater insight into contact center KPIs

Modern WFM software solutions help contact center managers monitor schedule adherence to minimize negative impact on service levels—universally affording them greater visibility to staffing with the ability to scale up or down to meet demand.
When it comes to meeting KPIs, WFM:

• Presents a one-stop shop view of adherence data, rather than requiring managers to manually compare spreadsheets to the automatic call distribution’s (ACD) real-time reporting screens.
• Alerts supervisors to non-adherence via easy visual indicators on dashboards, so they quickly can address issues.
• Empowers agents to self-manage by letting them view and monitor their own adherence status.

Easier reporting and analysis

Organizations must be able to accurately and expediently measure and report on call center performance. Call centers that do not have a WFM system find this job to be time-consuming, as they need to pull data from many different systems and compile it in a single format for analysis and consumption.

By using WFM software tools, organizations can experience vast improvements in day-to-day contact center operations driven by accurate reports that can be generated as needed with a click of a mouse. Reports can also be set up to autorun at preferred intervals—whether that be hourly, daily, week or even monthly.

With WFM automation, contact centers can create dashboards without help from IT, and without needing a degree in statistics or math. They gain real-time, visual reporting capabilities that reveal trends in volumes, staffing levels and adherence—and easy access to data that extends to the agent as well.

And modern WFM technology doesn’t just automate workflows. Today, AI is powering WFM functionality to derive insights faster and enable managers to take real-time actions to improve customer and agent experience while lowering costs.

Now let’s look at what modern WFM technology can do for you. Following is an in-depth look at the seven areas of key functionality, including standard, advanced, and AI-powered WFM features.

Must have capabilities to effectively manage today’s contact center workforce

Accurate forecasting

Often, workforce planners and contact center managers like Brett use their historical forecasts to model a future time period and scale up or down based on their previous experience or best guesstimate. The problem is, each time you manually adjust your forecast, you degrade the statistical accuracy of the forecast. This approach to building a tactical, time-series forecast can lead to overstaffing and high costs or understaffing and poor service.

Standard forecasting capabilities

To be statistically accurate, contact center demand forecasts need automated workflows that capture not just historical volumes but also automatically factor in:

• Omnichannel workforce management reflecting the work types for all your channels (voice, chat, email, social, web inquiries, inbound and outbound, etc.), for both real-time and asynchronous work
• Handle times for these different work types
• Attributes of the time period being forecasted (time of year, day of month/week, time of day)
• Daily shrinkage rates (the percentage of time agents are scheduled but are not available to handle interactions)

Advanced forecasting capabilities

Legacy workforce management software can create a basic forecast based on the datapoints above. However, WFM planners would then need to manually modify the forecast to account for other external events that could impact the forecast. Modern WFM solutions can automatically include these events and external data sources, creating a more statistically accurate forecast. These events and data sources include, but are not limited to:

• Upcoming events such as marketing campaigns, product launches, etc.
• Internal business changes and trends, handle-time fluctuations, systems upgrades, or changes to IVR prompts
• External changes that can impact the forecast, such as new regulations, power outages, etc.

AI-Powered forecasting capabilities

Modern WFM solutions can apply multiple AI models to real-time workforce forecasting, depending on the different channels and work forecasted, to find the best model—or combination of AI models—needed to create the most accurate forecast possible.

Capacity planning

Forecasting for specific time periods is tactical. But long-term forecasting is more strategic. Workforce planners work with HR, finance, and contact center leaders to determine the future staffing needs of the contact center. Creating an accurate, holistic capacity plan is key to ensuring you have the right number of resources, with the right skill sets, to meet your cost and service goals.

Standard capacity planning software capabilities

Long-term capacity plans can help you:

• Analyze budgeted costs, including salary/hourly wages along with fully burdened benefits.
• Balance overtime with hiring new agents, comparing the cost of each scenario.
• Justify the need to hire more FTE and gain insights into what that employee profile might look like.
• Decide when you need to schedule onboarding training and determine if the training curriculum needs any changes to reflect the skills and roles needed.
• Identify where and when, due to budget constraints, you might have shortcomings and begin to make plans on how to mitigate the challenges they present.

Advanced capacity planning software capabilities

Intelligent workforce planning tools enable you to test the financial impact of market or staffing changes on your capacity plans without impacting current forecasts and adjust as needed. You can see the results of these “what if” scenarios to either validate or decide against a change.

AI-powered capacity planning software capabilities

The latest generation of AI workforce management tools is enabling the contact center and HR to collaborate more closely to ensure the resources hired have the skills and aptitude needed to thrive in the contact center environment. Using the WFM profiles of successful agents, HR can create more tailored skill tests, both written and auditory. Then, using AI, they can automatically score candidate evaluations for energy, empathy, knowledge, and more to quickly identify the candidates that best match the profile and are likely to be high performers. What once took hours, the system does in minutes, saving recruiters time and helping them focus on, and hire, the best candidates.

Employee-centric approach to scheduling

Forecasting tells you the anticipated workload. Capacity planning tells you how many people you need. Scheduling tells you when you need those resources to serve customers. Automated scheduling software optimizes schedules to cost effectively meet both customer demand and employee scheduling preferences.

Standard scheduling capabilities

Most automated WFM systems include the ability to:

• Optimize schedule creation to align with work volumes and service goals.
• Indicate location for shift or day, whether in office or remote.
• Ensure schedules comply with local and national labor laws as well as unique organizational rules and parameters.
• Centralize employee request management with automated workflows and rules-based automation so employees can self-serve for:
  • Time off management and balance tracking
  • Changes to breaks, lunches, coaching, and learning
  • Shift swapping or shift bidding
  • Voluntary time off or voluntary overtime
• Provide employees and managers with access to schedules and self-service request management as well as performance metrics on the desktop and mobile application with full functional parity. This gives them 24/7 access, can speed up request handling, and can increase employee engagement through WFM.

Advanced scheduling capabilities

Modern WFM technology builds on this foundation and provides enhanced capabilities to accommodate the dynamic and complex nature of contact centers, today and beyond. Next-generation WFM enables organizations to maximize pockets of availability across the enterprise to increase utilization, reduce costs, and develop skills and new career paths for contact center agents. To do so, the WFM system needs to:

• Leverage employee profiles that include their skills and proficiencies by channel and work type.
• Schedule not just shifts, but tasks as well, including task switching in high volume, high demand environments and between contact center and back-office customer support functions.
• Enable auto-breaking to ensure regulatory break and meal rules continue to be met, even when switching between teams and managers.

AI-powered scheduling capabilities

AI is transforming the change request process. AI-powered specialized bots are putting scheduling into the hands of the employee. Agents now have their own AI-powered assistant that they can ask schedule-related questions and get instant, compliant, and context-aware answers based on pre-defined rules. The capability helps agents with things like time-off requests, shift inquiries, and overtime volunteering, and more, which increases agent engagement.

Still, in today’s gig economy, employees want even greater scheduling flexibility. Shift swaps and bidding can’t help with in-the-moment changes needed to accommodate life’s unpredictable events like sick children, burst pipes, etc. Requests to change a start time or to leave early are manual and, depending on how busy the manager is, can take hours to approve. Often agents will simply not show for a shift or call out rather than deal with the hassle of requesting a schedule change.

AI-powered bots can transform and automate the schedule change request process. The bot uses the existing WFM solution data and visually shows the employee their schedule as well as when the business is overstaffed or understaffed in 15-minute intervals. Employees can adjust their scheduled start and end times, schedule split shifts, or move a shift to another day as long as the change helps the company, adheres to labor and business rules, and meets the employee’s needs. The AI bot automatically approves the changes without manager intervention while maintaining or improving overall schedule quality. Employees are happy, managers are happy, and attrition and unplanned absences go down.

Intraday management

And just as employee scheduling needs often change, so can work volumes, types, and resource availability. Perhaps the flu goes through your contact center, and you have five unexpected call outs. Or marketing launches a last-minute promotion that increases inquiries. Intraday management provides analysts with a comparative view of forecasted, required, and actual volumes and statistics at an intra-daily and weekly level to facilitate reforecasting and schedule re-optimization to ensure agents are in place to manage customer interactions even during demand fluctuations.

Standard intraday management

Managers can use this data and insights to proactively address variations to their plan.

• Quickly compare forecasted vs. actual volumes and staffing (track forecasted, required, and actual data for key metrics from all sources).
  • If interactions are below projected, managers can offer voluntary time off to employees.
  • If volumes are high, they can offer overtime, extra shifts, or turn on a call-back feature to reduce wait times and call abandonment.
• Monitor employee schedule adherence on a single screen for both phone and desktop activities, and for in-house and remote employees, so you can proactively adjust to ensure service levels are met.
• Use real-time queue analytics capabilities to view each queue and how many interactions there are per queue and per hour to determine if enough resources are available to handle queue volumes.

Advanced intraday management

Modern WFM technology continuously analyzes intraday performance and recalculates demand and resource availability. The solution identifies differences between published schedules and real-time staffing needs and automatically:

• Sends alerts to impacted managers.
• Offers qualified agents overtime or voluntary time off based on how the center is performing. Organizations can set the rules and parameters to resolve intraday over or understaffing scenarios.

AI-powered intraday management

New, AI-powered predictive capabilities can alert Real-time Analysts to deviations in in intraday metrics, anomalies, and performance trends instantly. The AI is continuously analyzing the data from the day’s preceding intervals and running algorithms against each remaining interval to calculate the predicted, end of day service level. When that predicted service level drops below target, an alert is created and Real-time Analysts are given an AI-Generated summary of why the anomaly is occurring, and recommendations for actions to take. Contact centers now have the insights they need to move from reactive monitoring to proactive action.

Performance tracking

To ensure continuous improvement and goal achievement, contact centers need a way of measuring performance. Most automated WFM solutions include built-in, role-based scorecards and dashboards that provide real-time and intraday visibility into key performance metrics, enabling timely feedback and course correction, helping staff close skill gaps efficiently without manual oversight.

Standard performance tracking

Key performance tracking and management capabilities enable you to:

• Automate the capture, calculation, and presentation of key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Centralize performance tracking and management of WFM-related metrics, including schedule adherence, hold times, handle times, shrinkage, etc.
• Identify performance issues and, through integrated workflows, assign targeted coaching and education, fostering continuous professional growth and skill enhancement for employees.
• Support a continuous, data-driven feedback loop where goals are set, measured, and recalibrated regularly across the organization.

Advanced performance tracking

Advanced performance management includes the use of external data to build fully customizable KPIs, performance scorecards, and dashboards, expanding the metrics measured to include things like quality scores, CSAT, NPS, sales/cross sell rates, and more.

Reporting and real-time dashboards

Automated WFM solutions provide a breadth of robust reporting and customizable dashboards that include:

• Historical reporting and trend analysis across all interaction channels
• Drill-down capabilities
• Adherence and performance tracking
• Forecasting and scheduling analytics
• Real-time intraday workload monitoring
• Service level alerts, and more.

Visibility into performance extends beyond the manager to the agents themselves with access to personalized, real-time performance scorecards, promoting transparency and employee engagement.

Advanced reporting

Advanced workforce management software enables workforce and performance management across functions, consolidating data from the contact center, back-office, and branch to create an enterprise view of performance to promote efficiency, resource sharing, and process improvement. Users of all types can review personalized, curated, automatically generated dashboards. With unlimited dashboards, users can see any data, in any format, at any time.

AI-powered reporting

Modern AI workforce management tools help you move beyond limited, pre-defined reports to get a holistic view of your interaction data. AI can proactively mine your interaction data and surface anomalies, trends, and correlations you didn’t know to look for. These tools also include conversational AI capabilities, enabling you to query your data, search for insights, and drill down into granular details using natural language. This helps deliver real-time insights that can dramatically shorten the time to discover and fix new issues within your business.

Integrations and scalability

WFM solutions need to be able to grow and flex with your organization, from small 50-person contact centers to global enterprises with thousands of agents across different sites, countries, and time zones. But scaling up isn’t always what’s needed. Best-in-class WFM solutions let you scale up and down in near real time, ensuring you’re ready for rapid growth—and able to handle the ups, and downs, of seasonal swings.
Enterprise-grade WFM solutions are open, enabling you to easily integrate with different telephony providers, channels, and your existing HR, CRM, and ACD workflow systems. These solutions have flexible deployment models, from on-premises to hybrid to single-tenant or multi-tenant cloud environments.

Advanced enterprise capabilities

While WFM grew up in the contact center, modern WFM technologies have purpose-built functionality that enables them to expand beyond the contact center into back-office, customer support functions and branch/distributed locations. Examples of functionality and unique attributes that need to be factored into the effective management of resources in these areas include:

• Back-office, customer support functions
  • Backlog/inventory volumes and aging
  • Extended SLAs
  • End-to-end process and work-item tracking for complex, multi-step processes
  • Hundreds of work types, each with different handle times and turnaround goals.
• Branches
  • Dual controls: Instances when two people are needed for opening/closing the branch, open/closing the vault, etc.
  • Physical attributes, such as drive-up windows, ATMs, and safe deposit boxes.
  • Open hours by day-of-week, which can be different from branch to branch.
  • A mix of lower volume, high duration sales interactions and higher volume, lower duration service interactions.

Finding the best WFM solution: Questions to ask

When selecting an automated, contact center WFM solution, there are questions you should ask to ensure the solution can grow with your organization, continuing to modernize and harness the latest AI models to help you increase operational efficiency, maximize resource utilization, improve employee experience, and meet your CX and service goals. Here’s a list of some suggested questions.

Key capabilities

• Can the solution manage an omnichannel contact center workforce, creating forecasts and staffing plans that include all channels and work types, factoring in handle times for both immediate and asynchronous work?
• How flexible are the scheduling capabilities? Can the solution give agents the power to make changes while still protecting your service levels and adhering to business rules and labor laws?
• Does the solution enable profiling of agent and employee skills and proficiencies to support alignment of interaction types to available agents—and the sharing of resources across teams and functions to help manage volume fluctuations?
• Can the solution automatically alert you when there are deviations between forecasted and actual volumes during the day and automatically take actions to mitigate either an overstaffing or understaffing situation?
• Does the WFM solution include performance tracking and customizable dashboards for real-time visualization of achievement vs. goals across WFM and other performance KPIs?
• Can you search the WFM data using natural language querying?

Technology and deployment

• Are the key components of WFM (forecasting, planning, scheduling, intraday management, performance management, and reporting) included in the WFM pricing, or are any of these components add-ons?
• Can the WFM solution grow and scale with my organization, across the contact center, with BPO partners, and into the rest of the enterprise?
• Is the solution open and able to function across different telephony providers and channels—and within my existing ecosystem?
• Do I have deployment options, including on-premises, hybrid, or full cloud, both single and multi-tenant?

Business outcomes and ROI of modern WFM technology

By deploying modern WFM technology and leveraging AI-powered specialized bots, contact centers can maximize utilization, drive down costs, and improve service levels all while elevating the customer and employee experience. Organizations using Verint Enterprise Workforce Management have benefited from:

The Verint difference

Contact centers realize that hiring more workers and increasing labor expenses is no longer a sustainable solution. To achieve your strategic goals, you need a new approach to managing the workforce that increases agent capacity and utilization while still meeting your service goals.

Verint, the CX Automation Company™, has been a leading provider of workforce management software for over 20 years. We are a true enterprise solution that enables you to scale as you grow and expand beyond the contact center with purpose-built functionality for the contact center, back-office, and branch.

• DMG Consulting LLC has named Verint a leader in the enterprise WFM market for over a decade (2025 Workforce Management for the Enterprise, DMG Consulting LLC).
• Verint received top customer satisfaction scores (5.0 out of 5.0) on all 35 criteria spanning WFM vendor satisfaction, suite modules, and product capabilities in DMG Consulting’s 2024 Workforce Management for the Enterprise in the Digital Era report.
• Verint customers rank Verint Enterprise Workforce Management a Buyer’s Choice 2026 on TrustRadius and Top Rated 2025 and WFM Leader, Winter 2025, on G2.
• Verint TimeFlex Bot was voted Product of the Year 2024 by TMCnet.com and received a Gold 2025 Stevie Award for Sales & Customer Service.

“The software is very user friendly and straightforward. Agent and manager processes are easy to teach and understand. Request Management is easy to update.”

Configuration Analyst, Major Online Retailer, G2

At the core of Verint Open Platform is Verint Da Vinci™ AI and the Verint Engagement Data Hub. Leveraging Verint Da Vinci AI, which combines the best generative AI and commercial, customer-provided, and proprietary AI models, Verint has built specialized, AI-powered bots that automate workflows, increasing speed, accuracy, and capacity of your agents and managers. Verint Engagement Data Hub ensures you have the most comprehensive, real-time interaction, workforce performance, and customer experience data to drive faster, stronger decision making.

In addition to our automated workflows and AI forecasting algorithms, we’ve launched Verint TimeFlex Bot™ and Verint Interviewing Bot™ to drive business outcomes, now, and more AI WFM tools are currently in development.

Contact centers will continue to face increasing challenges. With Verint’s modern WFM solutions, your organization can harness the power of AI to deliver better customer and employee experiences at a lower cost.