The Unsung Heroes of CX: Contact Center Workforce Planners and Quality Analysts
October 6, 2025
Reka Sarudi also contributed to this blog.
It’s Customer Service Week! It’s a time we take a moment to thank all the customer service representatives for their hard work in responding to customer inquiries with speed, accuracy and empathy.
But behind those front-line employees are a team of workforce management (WFM) and quality professionals who are making sure organizations have the right number of employees, at the right time, and with the right skills to serve the customers. These are some of the unsung heroes of customer service.
WFM/Workforce Planners and CX
Workforce Planners are continually walking a tightrope between cost and service. The organization wants to maximize utilization and limit overstaffing and overtime. But they also want to meet their service goals for wait times/speed to answer. To succeed they need to create:
- Accurate demand forecasts for all channels and work types
- Capacity plans that identify how many resources are needed to meet the demand
- Optimized schedules that align resources with expected arrival patterns AND accommodate employee scheduling preferences AND local and national labor laws.
That’s a lot, and it only gets more complicated if you are in a cyclical/seasonal industry where you have to staff up and staff down at different times of the year, or if you are a global company that offers 24/7 support and need to schedule resources across time zones, or if… You get the picture.
Luckily, there are some very talented WFM professionals who embrace the challenge. In fact, some of our power users of Verint WFM have been nominees and winners of the Society of Workforce Planning Professional’s (SWPP’s) WFM Professional of the Year Award.
- Cooper Taylor, Senior Workforce Management Analyst for 8×8 (2025 winner!)
- Eric Bigelow, Workforce & Systems Support Manager for Qualfon (2024 finalist)
- Brandon Emms, Manager of Workforce Management (in 2023) for GreenShield (2023 winner!)
- Jeffrey Bretana, Assistant Manager, Workforce Optimization for Navy Federal Credit Union (2022 finalist)
We celebrate these individuals and all the WFM planners who keep our customer support centers staffed and agents at the ready to serve the customers.
Quality Managers, Quality Analysts, and CX
If frontline agents are the voice of customer service, quality managers and analysts are its conscience. These professionals work tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure every interaction meets the highest standards of compliance and customer service.
Their role is both strategic and meticulous, spanning reviewing calls, chats, emails, and other interaction channels to identify coaching opportunities, uncover process gaps, and elevate the overall customer experience (CX).
Quality managers don’t just monitor performance, they shape it.
They collaborate with supervisors to help them provide actionable employee feedback and set agents up for success. Their insights often lead to smarter workflows, clearer communication, and more consistent service delivery.
They work hand in hand with quality analysts, who dive deep into performance metrics, customer sentiment, and compliance trends to uncover what’s working and what’s not. Quality reports guide leadership decisions and ensure that customer service evolves with changing expectations and buyer behaviors.
In some contact centers, these two roles are combined, with one person balancing both the strategic oversight of quality management and the practical analysis of performance evaluation.
Together, these roles contribute by:
- Safeguarding brand reputation and ensuring compliance
- Making customers feel heard, valued, and respected—even during complex issues
- Promoting agent appreciation and growth through objective, data-driven feedback.
The dedication of these quality professionals drives exceptional CX and fosters long-term employee and customer loyalty. By enabling supervisors to provide their teams with timely and objective performance insights, the quality team also helps shape a positive workplace culture.
WFM Planners and Quality Managers and Analysts are the unsung heroes of customer service. We applaud their efforts to improve not only customer experience, but the employee experience as well.
Verint is honored to support these individuals with CX Automation and Workforce Engagement solutions that automate manual workflows and help make the jobs of these critical roles easier.
To learn more about our market-leading Workforce Engagement solutions, click here.