A Guide to Workforce Optimization in Contact Centers

Workforce optimization (WFO) takes a contact center from merely doing enough to get by efficiently running operations. It integrates multiple technologies and practices to increase your team’s efficiency and improve service quality.

WFO means having the right people with the right skill sets in the right place at the right time.

This is important because the expectations of modern customers are no longer limited to specific channels or time zones. Inquiries come through diverse channels around the clock, making it tricky to plan and forecast staffing to ensure operational efficiency.

WFO addresses this difficulty by providing an effective setup that enables contact centers to operate at their best. The result is a win-win situation for all stakeholders, where you can control costs and increase employee engagement while your customers enjoy a delightful experience.

Core Components of Workforce Optimization

A suite of coordinated capabilities allows a contact center to achieve its peak performance. These capabilities are enabled by a few key contact center WFO components, including:

Quality management

Quality management evolved from quality monitoring, which involves a supervisor silently listening to a few calls per agent. Quality management occurs across various channels, including calls, chats, texts, emails, and social media, ensuring a consistent experience.

Solutions catering to quality management usually offer practical features, such as:

• Call and screen recording: To hear what the agent said and did while on the call
• AI-driven analysis: To analyze call transcripts and conduct sentiment analysis
• Automated scoring: To scan 100% of interactions and compare them with quality benchmarks
• Alerts and workflows: To create alerts for immediate review if a compliance statement is necessary

What are the benefits of quality management in workforce optimization?

When your systems continuously scan communications, they uncover patterns. For example, an agent getting defensive to customer objections.

These patterns are flagged, allowing you to coach agents continuously to improve service delivery. This coaching improves your customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and enables you to retain customers.

If you get to the fundamentals of the QA process, it’s not about just flagging errors but also discovering opportunities to improve and self-evaluate.

Workforce management

Contact center workforce management (WFM) is how you optimize day-to-day staffing. WFM includes forecasting contact volumes and scheduling agents to ensure you have staff with the right skills on duty at any given moment.

If you’re running a contact center operation, you’re aware that a sizable portion of the cost is people. WFM offers you an opportunity to control this by balancing efficiency with service. Instead of being under- or overstaffed, you maintain a healthy balance of staff to ensure effective operations.

How do workforce management solutions ensure efficient operations?

Modern WFM solutions make use of historical interaction data alongside seasonality and marketing event data to forecast customer contact volumes. The system calculates the number of agents needed, taking into account each agent’s specific skills and channel expertise.

This workforce forecasting and scheduling ensures the correct number of agents are available to handle customer queries. Optimized schedules usually have:

• Staggered shifts to cover peak hours
• Multiskill scheduling to handle multiple channels
• Support for agent preferences and shift bidding, which gives agents some choice in their shifts

However, no forecast is perfect, which makes intraday management a key WFM capability. When a spike in volume occurs or agents suddenly become sick, it is reflected on the WFM dashboard, allowing managers to rebalance staffing in real-time. For example, automated intraday tools might trigger overtime requests to at-home agents via a mobile app.

What are the benefits of WFM?

Efficiency gains and cost control are the most significant benefits. You avoid the cost of overstaffing or overtime while delivering better operational efficiency. WFM allows you to adapt to fair scheduling practices, improving the agent experience.

Overall, WFM helps you achieve service continuity and a good customer experience (CX) by ensuring optimal staffing.

Interaction analytics

Interaction analytics, also known as speech/text analytics, is what drives improvement through insights in WFO. This component aggregates customer data and analyzes it to understand what’s happening and why.

Interaction analytics solutions typically create speech-to-text transcriptions for voice calls and combine them with text-based interactions. This ensures that 100% of customer data is searchable. During the analysis, speech or text analytics solutions use natural language processing to identify keywords, phrases, or topics while detecting sentiment and emotional tone.

These analytics allow you to identify common issues that turn customer sentiment negative and work on them collaboratively as a team. As a result, there are fewer training gaps, giving you a team empowered with actionable intelligence.

What are the benefits of interaction analytics?

Interaction analytics amplify customers’ voices. They provide contact center leaders with a data-driven understanding of customer needs, pain points, and sentiments in real time.

This information allows you to improve the quality of self-service workflows directly. Overall, you can make improvements based on customer data, which leads to strategic modifications in business processes.

Performance management

Contact centers have several key performance indicators (KPIs), including efficiency metrics, such as average handle time (AHT), and outcome metrics, like CSAT scores or the net promoter score. Performance management ensures that everyone, from frontline agents to executives, has visibility into and access to these metrics, driving continuous improvement.

The performance data is automatically collected and presented in role-based dashboards and reports, which can be real-time or near-real-time reports. This data reflects how your current strategy is driving metrics that matter to leadership. Sometimes, WFO solutions incorporate gamification elements to display leaderboards and achievement badges, challenging agents to engage in friendly competition. For instance, a dashboard might display top performers for the day in terms of first contact resolution (FCR).

When gamification is used effectively, it significantly improves engagement, making it easier to hit business goals.

What are the benefits of performance management?

It aligns employee goals with organizational objectives, building a culture of transparency and trust. Moreover, gamification creates more employee engagement while keeping the team’s morale up and rising.

Benefits of Workforce Optimization

As a cohesive system, various WFO components deliver several benefits for contact center teams.

Increased operational efficiency

WFO ensures that time is being invested optimally to drive operations critical to contact centers’ workflows. If there is idle time, WFO optimizes staffing. A sound system is capable of forecasting call volumes on different days and times, empowering you to manage staff effectively. WFO helps agents become more productive, which directly impacts their performance metrics.

This optimization happens through automated monitoring, reporting, and agent coaching. The result is more efficiency for your team and overall contact center workflows.

Improved customer experience

WFO impacts CX positively. It makes the correct number of trained agents available at the right time to assist buyers. As a result, your customers get faster query resolution. Customers are less likely to be stuck on hold or transferred around. Intelligent routing plays a critical role here. It connects the customer to an agent who can assist in their preferred manner. It improves FCR, leading to higher CSAT scores.

The quality management and analytics components make it easier to deliver a more consistent, high-quality service. Supervisors have the clarity they need to identify issues and intervene timeously to ensure customer service isn’t adversely affected.

Reduced operational costs

WFO drives cost savings, which is a critical benefit, as overstaffing is expensive. It optimizes staffing levels and the time investment made, reducing overtime expenses. This saving easily translates into tens of thousands of dollars each quarter.

Moreover, the forecasting side of WFO lets you plan operations while running lean. It reduces inefficiencies like:

• Being overstaffed
• Fielding redundant calls due to poor quality
• Experiencing excessive agent churn

As a result, costs also go down, increasing overall ROI.

Stronger employee engagement

Employee engagement and employee satisfaction are often by-products of WFO. WFO tools take into account the unique needs and preferences of your agents, giving them flexible scheduling options, such as the ability to swap shifts during their time off or bid on preferred shifts. It lets contact center agents achieve a better work-life balance to avoid burnout.

Beyond this, the element of gamification and recognition makes the monotonous routine more interactive for agents. They get a better sense of what they’re doing and how their job contributes to the organization’s success. It naturally creates more accountability in agents.

Best Practices for Implementing Workforce Optimization

If you’re planning on implementing WFO in your business, there are a few strategies that will give you the best outcome.

Integrate platforms and data sources

Maintain one source of truth. Ensure your CRM software, human resources software, and other analytics tools integrate cohesively into the broader ecosystem. This integration eliminates data silos, providing leaders with clear visibility into agent performance and customer interactions.

Most importantly, one source of truth for staffing, coaching, and service delivery ensures accurate data, encouraging informed decision-making.

Prioritize customer-centric metrics

Prioritize CX metrics over agent performance metrics. Yes, efficiency matters, but not at the expense of the CX. Metrics such as FCR, CSAT scores, and AHT should carry more weight than the average call volume per agent.

It is crucial to balance productivity with CX KPIs, as the latter directly influence long-term customer loyalty and establish a “quality over speed” culture.

Involve employees in quality assurance and feedback

The quality management part of WFO encourages agents to play a more active role in QA. Coach them on how to self-assess areas for improvement and work on them. It’s best if this ability is weighted in their performance reviews, allowing them to focus on self-evaluations as an opportunity for growth.

Set an example by appreciating and rewarding agents who have leveraged the quality management component to improve their service delivery.

Use AI and automation

Make use of automation as much as possible to catch errors, compliance issues, or gaps in workforce planning and scheduling. AI and automation work on available data, ensuring you don’t spend time and effort on fixing false positives. The opportunities for real-time coaching allow you to supervise and intervene when necessary, rather than when the situation has already escalated.

It’s advisable to focus on these opportunities to lead your team toward success and fulfill your goals as a supervisor.

Adopt a continuous improvement mindset

As customer behaviors change and call volumes shift, you need to evolve and adapt constantly. A WFO system will give you the insights you need to make the necessary changes. From the start, cultivate a mindset of continuous improvement in the team and ensure the WFO system is up to date and flexible to incorporate constantly changing working variables in contact center workflows.

It’s advisable to develop a practice of rebalancing scorecards and reviewing trends to keep them up to date.

Pilot before scaling

It’s best to test before you roll out a new system. Tests with smaller teams will let you fine-tune integrations, refine workflows, and aggregate feedback.

This approach enables phased implementation and onboarding, providing organizations with a safety net to mitigate risk and build confidence in the system before rolling it out across the entire company.

Best Workforce Optimization Solutions in 2025

Many contact center software solutions have WFO and workforce engagement capabilities. Here are a few popular software options:

1. Nextiva: best all-in-one platform

Nextiva unifies communications and customer management, combining unified communication as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS). This means that your phone system, contact center, and customer data live in a single ecosystem.

With Nextiva, you get advanced flexibility, intraday scheduling, shift bidding, and real-time operational dashboards, helping supervisors adapt staffing on the fly. It comes equipped with AI, catering to real-time transcription and sentiment analysis use cases.

Below are some notable features of Nextiva related to WFO:

• AI-based agent scoring: The system analyzes interactions and scores agent performance automatically.
• Customizable dashboards: Agents get transparency into their metrics and gamification with leaderboards via the Nextiva Analytics and Voice Analytics features.
• 99.999% uptime SLA: The solution is reliable and has multiple data centers to ensure service continuity.
• 24/7 support: Nextiva has an excellent reputation for supporting customer queries around the clock to assist with the WFO transition or troubleshooting.

Overall, it’s an all-in-one WFO platform with components that work seamlessly out of the box. For example, omnichannel contact handling, WFM, and quality monitoring are all packaged as one WFM software.

If you’re looking for a single-vendor, cloud-native platform that covers all the bases, from telephony to scheduling to performance, Nextiva is a top contender. It’s particularly well-suited for organizations that want to break free from fragmented apps and modernize their contact center platform. Most importantly, the tool caters to the needs of SMBs and the scale of enterprises.

2. NiCE CXone: enterprise leader with analytics and compliance

NiCE CXone (formerly inContact) is a cloud-native platform trusted by large organizations with complex operations. Analytics and AI forecasting are among its most significant strengths, enabling accurate prediction of volume and staffing needs. This drives intelligent call routing adjustments on the fly.

Below are some key features of NiCE CXone.

• Performance analytics: It offers actionable insights into any trend or KPI you want to track.
• Compliance and security: The platform includes tools like compliance recording management to secure recordings and meet GDPR “right to be forgotten” requests. There’s a compliance center add-on that automates many retention and oversight tasks for contacts.
• Omnichannel quality monitoring: This lets users access voice, email, chat, and other modes of communication in one place.

NiCE CXone is excellent for large organizations with complex global operations. It has decent routing capabilities and rich functionalities. However, with such a comprehensive tool, you may encounter challenges in administration. In addition, the costs will be on the higher side, which makes it more useful for enterprises that can leverage its potential.

3. Five9: well-rounded with inbound, outbound, and AI coaching

Five9 boasts blended inbound and outbound capabilities. It delivers a powerful predictive dialer that makes outbound campaigns more efficient for your team. Based on agent availability and call volumes, the dialer forecasts the number of free agents and automates dialing, ensuring agents’ time is well-invested in talking to customers.

The platform comes with some prominent WFO capabilities, such as quality management, WFM, and dashboards, and integrated dialer and CRM tools. In addition, there are a few standout features, including:

• AI transcription: The platform uses AI to transcribe calls while using natural language processing (NLP) to offer real-time guidance to agents.
• Agent assist: The bot suggests answers from a knowledge base during live chats and calls, supporting newer agents on tough calls.
• CRM integrations: The platform connects with many popular CRMs, like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics, and Oracle.
• Quality management: The platform delivers multichannel recording and automated scorecards to add gamification to increase employee engagement.

Five9 is a suitable option for mid-sized to large organizations, as it is intuitive and scales well. However, as you scale to many hundreds of agents, it’s advisable to engage Five9’s solution architects to make sure integrations and routing logic are optimally configured.

4. Genesys Cloud CX: AI-driven omnichannel and advanced automation

What sets Genesys Cloud apart is its focus on experience orchestration. It intelligently coordinates every step of the customer journey. In terms of WFO, this translates into a platform that uses AI to optimize agent scheduling while ensuring effective customer routing and offering self-service options.

Genesys Cloud CX delivers AI chatbots and IVRs to handle some interactions, reducing the load on agents. In addition, there are many key features offered by Genesys Cloud CX, for example:

• Predictive engagement: The system tracks website behaviors to anticipate when a customer might need help.
• NLP-powered interaction analytics: It categorizes interactions based on topic and sentiment, making it easier for supervisors to focus on specific areas during coaching.
• Real-time automation: AI detects customer intent and routes a query not just based on static skill but also based on the likelihood of issue resolution.

Genesys Cloud CX is good for omnichannel and AI-first strategies. However, it can be complex and costly for large organizations to use the breadth of its capabilities. If use cases like journey orchestration and personalized routing are in your priorities, you’ll find Genesys a suitable platform.

5. Talkdesk: flexible, AI-first alternative to legacy systems

In this group, Talkdesk is a relatively new (founded in 2011) cloud contact center player with a strong reputation for innovation. The platform positions itself as a modern alternative to legacy WFO suites like NICE.

Talkdesk’s approach to WFO is embedded in its workforce engagement management offering, which emphasizes intuitiveness and AI from the ground up. It focuses on usability and low-code customizations, making it a user-friendly option. The platform heavily leverages AI in forecasting and scheduling, where scheduling has the capabilities to auto-generate optimized rosters and recommend shifts.

You get some noteworthy features, such as intraday reforecasting and AI-powered speech and text analytics, which feed into quality management. It automates call scoring and prioritizes interactions that QA should focus on.

Overall, Talkdesk is an excellent fit for organizations that value innovation and agility and want to transition from their enormous legacy or on-premise WFO solutions.

Optimize and Scale Your Workforce with Nextiva

WFO can turn your call center or contact center from a cost center into a competitive advantage, provided that it’s implemented effectively with the right systems and practices. Nextiva stands out with its all-in-one simplicity and customer-first approach. You get seamless support from the team to carry out the implementation process. The platform’s reliability and support are added benefits when customers assess Nextiva’s rich features.

The Nextiva team goes above and beyond to ensure your WFO goals are met and assists you from implementation to optimization. What differentiates Nextiva is how it merges power with ease of use. You don’t need to have multiple vendors or to add on disparate systems; everything, from workforce scheduling to CRM pop-ups and analytics dashboards, comes in a unified communications solution. It streamlines workflows and reduces your costs and IT overheads while giving agents a seamless experience.

Choosing a WFO solution is a significant decision, but remember that technology is just one part; you also want a vendor that will be a long-term partner in your success. Nextiva’s focus on customer success and continuous innovation fits the bill.