Contact Center and CX
Workforce Engagement Management
Workforce engagement management is software that helps a contact center schedule the right number of agents and coach them to do better work. The short name is WEM. It groups several tools that used to be bought separately.
- 6 companies on the shelf
- Coverage
Buyer's checklist
Eight questions that decide this purchase
Think these through before you buy. Answer what you can and your quote comes back faster. Skip what you cannot, and we will work through it with you.
- 01
Which half do you need first: scheduling and forecasting, quality and coaching, or both?
- 02
Will quality review keep sampling interactions, or cover all of them automatically?
- 03
Do supervisors need to see sentiment live and step into a call, or is coaching after the fact enough?
- 04
Which channels must scoring and coaching cover: voice only, or chat and email as well?
- 05
What mix of shifts do you run: fixed, flexible, rotating, bid?
- 06
How much control over their own schedules will agents get?
- 07
Does the staffing plan cover only your own team, or outsourced capacity too?
- 08
Must the tool sit inside your contact center, customer or service desk platform, and can it be bought alone or only with that platform?
No company matches every box you checked
That usually means the combination is rare, not impossible. Clear a filter, or add the service and we will go find who can do it.
Capabilities come from published supplier material. We confirm them for your addresses before anything is quoted.
More on what it is
The first half is workforce management, or WFM. It closes a loop. It forecasts how much contact volume is coming, builds a schedule that covers it, and then watches the day unfold to see whether people are where the schedule says they should be, which is called adherence. Good forecasting engines run several statistical models against your history and pick the one that fits best. The forecast is what a planner uses to work out how many people are needed and when.
The second half is quality. Supervisors have always reviewed a small sample of calls by hand, because reviewing all of them does not scale. Automated quality tools read every conversation for meaning, score it against your rubric, and attach the exact moment that justifies each score, so a reviewer can check the machine's reasoning instead of taking it on faith. A conversation can be sent to a human reviewer automatically by topic, sentiment, score or agent.
Coaching sits on top of both. The software points a supervisor to the calls most worth their time. Some tools show sentiment while a call is still under way and let a supervisor listen in, join or take over when it turns bad. Speech analytics underlies much of this by turning recordings into searchable text, with alerts for things such as a long silence.
Most suites also give agents some say. Within limits a manager sets, an agent can move a break, bid on a shift, trade one or request time off without going through a planner.
These tools connect to whatever platform already handles your calls and chats, and some are built into one specific platform. If you are choosing that platform too, start at Contact Center.
Who needs it
- You run a contact center or a support team large enough that scheduling and coaching cannot be done from memory.
- Your agents work partly on site and partly from home.
- You blend your own team with an outsourced one and need one staffing plan that covers both.
- You serve customers over chat and email as well as voice, and your quality reviews only cover calls.
- Your team lives inside one customer or service desk system and wants scheduling and coaching there too.
A team of ten that a supervisor can hear across the room does not need this. It earns its place when nobody can see the whole operation any more.
Signs you need it
- Supervisors review a small share of interactions, and choosing which ones is close to random.
- Moments that matter, such as a customer about to leave, are caught only if someone happens to be listening.
- Schedules are built in spreadsheets, and flexible shifts are breaking them.
- Nobody sees an agent drifting off schedule until service levels for the day have already slipped.
- Agent turnover is high, and schedules are one of the reasons people give.
How IT Raven helps
Add Workforce Engagement Management to your quote list and tell us how many agents you have, which platform handles your contacts and which half of the problem hurts more. A person takes that to the workforce and quality providers in our 500+ partner network and sorts them on fit: whether they work with your platform, whether they can be bought alone, the channels and languages they cover, and whether hours flow to your payroll system.
We check your existing platform first. Some contact center platforms include their own coaching, quality or scheduling tools, and some workforce tools are sold only alongside the platform they belong to. Knowing what you already have narrows the list.
We stay on one thread through setup, the first forecast cycle and the first round of automated scoring, and the same team is here as your headcount changes.
How buying works
The store is the easy part. Staying on the account is the job.
Anyone can show you logos. The reason to buy here is what happens on install night, and on the ticket you open nine months later.
- 01
Build your quote list
Add services and companies as you shop. No form stands between you and the shelf.
- 02
We bring back real options
A person shops the bench against your addresses, then walks you through what fits and what does not.
- 03
We handle the order and install
Paperwork, site survey, install dates, cutover night. You get one thread, not five vendors.
- 04
We stay on your account
Same team for moves, adds, tickets and the next renewal. That is the part everyone else drops.