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The Forrester Wave™ Workforce Optimization Platforms, Q4 2021

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The Forrester Wave™ Workforce Optimization Platforms, Q4 2021

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Ashish Nagar
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Forrester Report Prepared For shish Nagar With Level

WAVE REPORT

The Forrester Wave™:


Workforce Optimization
Platforms, Q4 2021

The Eight Providers That Matter Most And How They


Stack Up

December 2, 2021

By Vasupradha Srinivasan with Daniel Hong, Ashutosh Sharma, Min Say, Bill Nagel

Summary
In our 31-criterion evaluation of workforce optimization (WFO) platform providers, we
identified the eight most significant ones — Alvaria, Calabrio, Elevēo, Five9, Genesys,
NICE, Playvox, and Verint — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report
shows how each provider measures up and helps customer service leaders select the
right one for their needs.

Additional resources are available in the online version of this report.

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WFO Gets Nimble, Multifaceted, And


Purpose-Built For Hybrid Service
Hybrid customer service is complex. It requires bringing together a distributed
workforce across voice, digital, synchronous, and asynchronous channels and using
real-time insights to dynamically map interaction volumes. The technology architecture
must be flexible, modular, and able to seamlessly combine data from multiple contact
center systems and systems of record to glean meaningful insights. Agents need a
collaborative, intuitive, user-friendly workspace that reduces cognitive load.

But updating customer service technology is rarely as simple as “Out with the old, in
with the new.” The optimal WFO stack addresses all workforce management (WFM),
performance management, quality management (QM), and employee engagement
needs for in one cohesive offering. It also needs well-designed automation and best-in-
class analytics that improve experiences. WFO platform vendors have had to evolve
significantly to help customer service leaders address the needs of today’s digital-first
world. As a result, WFO customers should look for providers that:

• Offer a comprehensive suite for traditional and modern requirements. Hybrid


customer service warrants a robust platform that seamlessly orchestrates all WFO
functions and offers single pane of glass views. Platforms with an integrated suite
approach can orchestrate cross-application data and workflows that enable a
powerful, device-agnostic, unified interface. Runtime analytics and insights enable
guided workflows and next best actions for both agents and supervisors and
improve intraday management, programmatic coaching, and employee
engagement. While some functionality like programmatic coaching and
prescriptive analytics are evolving, it’s important for WFO platforms to support
these features on a single platform.

• Deliver automation, AI, and analytics capabilities across the


platform. Automation, AI, and analytics help firms anticipate, plan, and respond to
dynamic market and operational changes with agility and accuracy while
continuously reducing human effort. WFO platforms that blend automation,
analytics, and AI support informed decision-making at scale with prescriptive
insights. Predictive models for scheduling, omnichannel forecasting, and
continuous forecasting based on machine learning (ML); robotic process
automation; ML-enabled theme and topic classification; automatic root-cause
analysis; conversational agent assistants; and other role-based virtual assistants
improve usability and experience across WFO activities.

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• Support a broad array of integrations and ongoing support services. The


plethora of legacy and proprietary technologies that many companies have built
and inherited over the years creates a complex ecosystem when it comes to their
WFO initiatives. Vendors need well-documented API and implementation support
to mitigate deployment risk. Customer education and customer success programs
are critical, as are customer advocacy groups, peer connects, best practice
forums, and idea generation programs that help companies be innovative in their
workforce management as it pertains to technology, process, and organizational
structure.

Evaluation Summary
The Forrester Wave™ evaluation highlights Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders,
and Challengers. It’s an assessment of the top vendors in the market and does
not represent the entire vendor landscape. You’ll find more information about this
market in our report on workforce optimization platforms.

We intend this evaluation to be a starting point only and encourage clients to view
product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings using the Excel-based vendor
comparison tool (see Figure 1 and see Figure 2). Click the link at the beginning of this
report on Forrester.com to download the tool.

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Figure 1
Forrester Wave™: Workforce Optimization Platforms, Q4 2021

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Figure 2
Forrester Wave™: Workforce Optimization Platforms Scorecard, Q4 2021

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Vendor Offerings
Forrester included eight vendors in this assessment: Alvaria, Calabrio, Elevēo,
Five9, Genesys, NICE, Playvox, and Verint (see Figure 3).

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Figure 3
Evaluated Vendors And Product Information

Vendor Profiles
Our analysis uncovered the following strengths and weaknesses of individual vendors.

Leaders

• NICE’s future-fit WFO platform is peppered with AI and analytics. NICE has been


steadily investing in and enhancing its WFO capabilities, including its acquisitions
of inContact, Nexidia, and ContactEngine. The vendor uses one of its crown
jewels, the inContact cloud contact center offering to augment its differentiation in
the WFO space. NICE has invested in improving its offerings for omnichannel
customer service, focusing on digital-first work. The vendor would benefit from
simplifying its pricing and licensing models and making its support for direct and
partner managed deployments more consistent. NICE’s roadmap focuses on
improving AI and ML across the platform and deepening its ability to support
digital interactions.

NICE's WFO suite has comprehensive functionality for end-to-end WFM — a key
strength. That, combined with its leading cloud contact center offerings,
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significantly simplifies cross-domain workflows, making it a viable and formidable


WFO suite for customer service. Weaknesses includes support for legacy app
integration, which would appeal to large enterprises. Reference customers love
the what-if simulations for forecasting but find the supervisor screens crowded,
hard to navigate, and overwhelming, and they want better ongoing support. NICE
is a strong fit for enterprises that want to lead with analytics and insights for WFO.

• Verint’s sophisticated suite is rooted in an end-to-end approach to WFO. Verint


draws on its customer service and WFM heritage and keeps on top of all things
new in the evolving WFO landscape. The company has a solid strategy centered
on a customer-focused go-to-market approach, an agile platform, and a product
enhancement framework that supports emerging areas like remote work,
automated workflows, and insights-driven WFO. Verint continues to invest in and
develop in-house capabilities for WFM automation and quality and performance
management. Customer references wanted more ongoing support and education,
a key area for improvement. Verint's roadmap includes enhancements in AI- and
ML-enabled modeling for forecasting, solutions for complex workflows, and
programmatic scheduling for blended work groups across voice and nonvoice
channels.

Verint’s unified suite is a key strength; it spans WFO from end to end, including
cross-channel WFM, QM, performance management, and reporting. The integrated
suite enables seamless cross-domain workflows and is a single solution for both
supervisors and agents. Its mobile-enabled, employee-centered features for
scheduling and performance tracking with built-in gamification are a hit with
customers. Verint’s weaknesses include programmatic and automated
functionality for service ticketing, case log, and disposition management.
Reference customers love the unified agent interface but want more flexibility in
scheduling to support nonstandard intervals and pricing flexibility. Verint is a
strong fit for midsize to large enterprises seeking better lines of sight across their
large and distributed customer service operations.

• Genesys’ purpose-built suite reboots WFO for businesses of all sizes. Genesys,
a Leader in a recent Forrester Wave evaluation of contact-center-as-a-service
(CCaaS) providers, has renewed its focus on WFO and made strategic investments
in people and technology to create a robust suite that caters to businesses of all
sizes. It has a solid strategy that showcases an aggressive roadmap and has
added more than 95 capabilities to the platform over the past year.
While Genesys’ WFO suite started as an add-on for clients, it has built a best-in-
class WFO over the years and is the only Leader to publicly list their pricing
models. Genesys can improve its professional and consulting services to support,

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onboard, and improve adoption — a pain point highlighted by reference


customers. Its roadmap includes AI and ML enhancements to bring more
predictive and prescriptive capabilities to WFO.

Genesys’ suite includes all key WFO elements, but its employee engagement
focus is evident in the superlative features and deep functionality for quality and
performance management. This core strength differentiates the solution.
Weaknesses include limited real-time features for QM and intraday scheduling; it
also needs to enhance its mobile app alerting mechanisms. While reference
customers like the GUI, they’re dissatisfied with forecasting and scheduling
features, specifically for outbound and back-office workloads, and want more
flexibility to enable split shifts and break simulations across all channels.
Genesys is a great fit for enterprises seeking a feature-laden WFO platform,
exhaustive integration options, and an extensive partner and developer network.

Strong Performers

• Calabrio shines in AI, but some features may be too advanced for some
customers. Calabrio is one of the few pure-play WFO providers. It prides itself on
being customer-aligned and has invested in improving its core offerings around
speech and text analytics that impress customers. Calabrio’s acquisition
of Teleopti was a sound strategy to rapidly strengthen its WFO suite, but its
sharpened focus on the Data Explorer reporting and analytics engine got mixed
reviews from reference customers in terms of usefulness. Its roadmap includes
new voice-of-the-customer capabilities and improving user interfaces to aid
effective collaboration.

Calabrio’s core strength is its nuanced AI-driven features for WFO like absence
and overtime probability, predictive QM and Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS)
modeling, and desktop analytics. Its in-house developed speech and text analytics
flags sentiment, phrases, and acoustic errors, although not fully in real time. Weak
points include key feature misses like automatic schedule optimization, proactive
alerting for intraday management, and prescriptive insights. The unified agent
desktop and virtual assistant can be improved with enhanced functionality and
design. Reference customers specifically noted that Data Explorer is
overwhelming and hard to use. They commented that it was too much of a good
thing and that it was hard to distinguish nice-to-haves from must-haves. Customers
also want design changes like one-click schedule reset, which Calabrio has
addressed with its most recent product update. Calabrio is a solid choice for
enterprises that have advanced WFO use cases and are data- and insights-
obsessed.

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• Alvaria has solid employee engagement support but needs better real-time


features. Alvaria has combined the best of the former Aspect Software and Noble
Systems into an all-in-one contact center platform. The vendor used Noble
Systems’ unique capabilities in employee engagement, gamification, and analytics
to create Alvaria Motivate, a suite for employee engagement and coaching. This is
a good strategy, as employee engagement is critical for the agent workforce —
especially with the extreme pressures on customer service reps today. Pricing
flexibility is a weakness; Alvaria only supports traditional pricing and licensing
models. It could also improve customer support and partner management. Its
roadmap focuses on amplifying the synergies from the merger and enhancing
WFO features for multichannel support and long-term capacity planning.

Alvaria does core WFM extremely well. Its innovative forecasting and staffing
models for omnichannel customer service include support for outbound — a rarely
considered workgroup and a strength. The platform blends automation effectively
across forecasting and intraday management with a slick UI. Weaknesses include
its real-time analytics and insights for QM and intraday
management. Alvaria Insights is key to building these proactive and predictive
features but is not generally available yet. Reference customers love the WFM
features for outbound but want a simpler, less cluttered interface and better report
organization to make it user-friendly. Alvaria is a great fit for enterprises that are
already using Aspect or Noble and those looking specifically for comprehensive
outbound capabilities.

• Playvox is your digital WFO, but its planned enhancements are just table
stakes. California-based Playvox is a relatively new but growing QM provider that
added WFO with its acquisition of Agyle Time’s WFM early this year. Playvox is a
next-generation WFO platform built for digital interactions and workloads, going
beyond the more traditional WFOs built on voice and erlang modeling. The focus
on digital is a winning strategy. Its partnerships with leading omnichannel CRMs
like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Salesforce and commitment to be a cloud-only
provider reflects its confidence in bringing together a strong WFO suite for digital
channels. As a result, Playvox strategically does not offer advanced customization
or consulting, a weakness that makes it a slightly niche provider and less attractive
for enterprises. It has a strong R&D budget and a roadmap to build more AI-
enabled predictive enhancements across the platform.

Playvox excels in forecasting and scheduling on digital channels. Other integrated


features for speech and text analytics and performance management are on an
improvement path to cater to enterprise needs. A key weakness for Playvox is its
lack of native support for voice recording, still a dominant need for most

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enterprises. Other areas for improvement include automated intraday


management. Reference customers hailed QM and coaching as almost purpose-
built for lean digital-first ops but indicated that they want stronger analytics and
better automation across the platform. Playvox is a solid fit for small and medium-
size organizations that are inclined to support customers on digital channels.

Contenders

• Five9 lights it up with its cloud contact center but needs better real-time
capabilities. Five9, another Leader in our CCaaS Wave evaluation,
acquired Virtual Observer in early 2020 and made headway in becoming an end-
to-end contact center. In addition to selling to new customers, Five9 has a large
installed base of cloud contact center customers that it upsells WFO to. The
vendor’s approach of building seamless integrations with leading CRM providers
to make WFO available from within the CRM is a sound strategy. However, its
traditional pricing and engagement models are weaknesses. Five9's roadmap
focuses on blending conversational AI and WFO to enable better workflow
automation, agent-facing virtual assistants, and real-time feedback management.

Five9 has strong capabilities for forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling
and for long- and short-term planning. It has made cutting-edge enhancements
to speech and text analytics that improve searchability. But features like intraday
schedule management, automatic schedule optimization, coaching automation,
and real-time analytics need improvement and make for a weaker offering for
emerging WFO needs. The interface, navigation, and visualizations on the
platform, while exhaustive, seem intimidating to the average business user and
need design improvements to cater to both technical and functional user groups.
Reference customers commented on the clunky scheduling interface and want
better real-time reporting, analytics, and automation from the platform. Five9 is a
solid fit for midsize enterprises seeking broad contact center capabilities with
native WFO.

• Elevēo is great for the no-fuss contact center but needs stronger omnichannel
WFO. Elevēo, the erstwhile Zoom International, supercharged its interaction
recording services to include cloud-native WFO. The vendor is a feisty provider for
contact centers in retail with fewer than 500 seats. Its ambitious strategies for
partnerships with leading contact center platforms and feature buildouts cater to
first-time users looking for a functional WFO solution. Elevēo is less expensive, as it
uses an open source stack; this is a strength in that it is very attractive to price-
sensitive, development-inclined customers. But its strategy to be a simple WFO
tool will not meet the needs of large enterprises. Elevēo's roadmap focuses on

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improving its capabilities in analytics, algorithmic schedule management, and ML-


enabled forecasting and reporting.

At its core, Elevēo is a WFO suite that offers all the basic and must-have WFM, QM
and coaching functions for a midsized contact center. The platform uses a unique
conversation-style view for customer interactions across channels and can capture
Employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS) — all strengths. Missing functionality like
programmable coaching management, training and coaching recommendations,
self-scheduling, and semi-real-time analytics are weaknesses. Reference
customers like Elevēo's speech tags and its utility but want it to fix bugs
faster. Elevēo is a great fit for small to medium-size enterprises looking for a
nimble platform that is extensible and simple to use.

Evaluation Overview
We evaluated vendors against 31 criteria, which we grouped into three high-level
categories:

• Current offering. Each vendor’s position on the vertical axis of the Forrester Wave
graphic indicates the strength of its current offering. Key criteria for these solutions
include product architecture, integrations, workforce management, intraday
schedule management, interaction recording, QM, coaching, automated QM,
employee engagement, and unified agent workspace.

• Strategy. Placement on the horizontal axis indicates the strength of each vendor’s
strategy. We evaluated product vision, market approach, innovation roadmap,
planned enhancements, supporting products and services, partner ecosystem,
delivery model, and commercial model.

• Market presence. Represented by the size of the markers on the graphic, our
market presence scores reflect each vendor's revenue, number of customers, and
average deal size.

Vendor Inclusion Criteria

Forrester included eight vendors in the assessment: Alvaria, Calabrio, Elevēo, Five9,
Genesys, NICE, Playvox, and Verint. Each of these vendors has:

• Annual WFO platform revenue of at least $10 million. We included vendors that
have at least $10 million in revenue for their WFO platform globally.

• A full WFO platform suite, not just disconnected components. We included


vendors that offer an entire WFO platform suite, not merely disconnected parts.

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• Significant interest from Forrester customers. The vendors we evaluated are


frequently mentioned in Forrester end user client inquiries, advisories, shortlists,
case studies, interactions at events, and other conversations.

Supplemental Material
Online Resource

We publish all Forrester Wave scores and weightings in an Excel file that provides
detailed product evaluations and customizable rankings; download this tool by clicking
the link at the beginning of this report on Forrester.com. We intend these scores and
default weightings to serve only as a starting point and encourage readers to adapt the
weightings to fit their individual needs.

The Forrester Wave Methodology

A Forrester Wave is a guide for buyers considering their purchasing options in a


technology marketplace. To offer an equitable process for all participants, Forrester
follows The Forrester Wave™ Methodology Guide to evaluate participating vendors.

In our review, we conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors to consider for
the evaluation. From that initial pool of vendors, we narrow our final list based on the
inclusion criteria. We then gather details of product and strategy through a detailed
questionnaire, demos/briefings, and customer reference surveys/interviews. We use
those inputs, along with the analyst’s experience and expertise in the marketplace, to
score vendors, using a relative rating system that compares each vendor against the
others in the evaluation.

We include the Forrester Wave publishing date (quarter and year) clearly in the title of
each Forrester Wave report. We evaluated the vendors participating in this Forrester
Wave using materials they provided to us by September 20, 2021, and did not allow
additional information after that point. We encourage readers to evaluate how the
market and vendor offerings change over time.

In accordance with The Forrester Wave™ And New Wave™ Vendor Review Policy,
Forrester asks vendors to review our findings prior to publishing to check for accuracy.
Vendors marked as nonparticipating vendors in the Forrester Wave graphic met our
defined inclusion criteria but declined to participate in or contributed only partially to
the evaluation. We score these vendors in accordance with The Forrester Wave™ And
The Forrester New Wave™ Nonparticipating And Incomplete Participation Vendor
Policy and publish their positioning along with those of the participating vendors.

Integrity Policy

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We conduct all our research, including Forrester Wave evaluations, in accordance with
the Integrity Policy posted on our website.

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