Executive Summary

Agent Management

Agents are the foundation of the contact center processes that impact every customer experience. These processes, and the customer service function, must be able to operate from any location, at any time, and agents must be able to respond to customers via any communication channel for any request. Optimized contact center processes feature agents who are empowered to take action on behalf of the customer and who are supported by technology that supplements, guides and extends the productive capacity of the workforce. During challenging periods, contact centers must be ready to operate across all communication channels in a scalable way to meet spikes of inbound demand.

A focus on workforce agility will enable the organization to adapt, shift focus and continue to meet customer service expectations even during challenging periods. Organizations can improve the agility of their agents through continuing education programs, offering learning paths that prepare individuals to shift tasks when necessary. Workforce flexibility, particularly within customer service, requires a focus on digital readiness and the implementation of tools that engage the agents and allow them to adapt and support customers as needed during disruptions to the standard working environment.

To improve the agent experience within the organization, focus on the agent work environment and on the digital experience for agents as they engage with customers. The physical work environment has an impact on the agent experience, and organizations must be prepared to support agents who work from home or other non-centralized locations. But perhaps even more important is the digital work environment — the agent desktop and other tools available to agents no matter where they are physically located. The quality of these tools helps determine the level of satisfaction an agent has while engaging with customers, and the complexity of legacy systems can be a detriment to agent performance and, subsequently, their retention.

When the agent experience is hindered by the tools the agent has at their disposal, the experience provided during customer interactions will suffer. Thus, optimizing the agent experience is a critical step in the delivery of a superior customer experience. Several factors in the work environment are usually the issue, among them the tools the agent uses to work with customers and resolve their issues. Key among those tools is the agent desktop, which is the digital center of customer interactions and the gateway that provides access to the individual applications the agent needs to deliver service.

The desktop supports direct dialogue with customers and provides the agent with visibility into, and information about, all the interactions that comprise the customer journey; it is essential for effective dialogue with the customer. And it allows agents to monitor and assist intelligent virtual agents. When properly utilized, the desktop acts as the hub that provides fast, easy access to all applications the agent needs to serve customers.

In the same way that organizations have focused on optimizing the customer experience by using a tool known as the voice of the customer to gain feedback and understand customer sentiment, they are beginning to look at the value of an analogous tool, the voice of the agent, to help optimize the agent experience. Addressing the voice of the agent includes listening to the challenges that agents themselves identify and the needs that agents report, instead of just focusing on targeted efficiency coaching.

Elevating agent concerns to the same level of importance as customer concerns can accomplish a number of important goals. It demonstrates to agents that the organization cares about their challenges and needs. It can enable the organization to target specific issues impacting the comfort, satisfaction and efficiency of subsets of agents, down to the individual. And when agent feedback relates to the tools they use, improving those tools can help improve agent recruiting, motivation, performance and retention, which in turn improves the customer experience.

Agents’ ability to provide memorable, personalized experiences to customers often is hampered by technological limitations. Legacy agent desktop and CRM systems are still in use at many organizations, and this creates challenges for today’s contact centers. Modern desktops should provide a single point of access to the several applications used in interactions with the customer, but in most cases, agents need to use many applications with the agent desktop to resolve customer issues.

A modern agent desktop must unify an array of disparate sets of data to sufficiently empower the agents to be responsive to customer needs, but in many instances, agents are forced to navigate to multiple applications individually/separately in order to resolve customer issues. There is ample evidence that limited agent visibility into the history of interactions can result in customer frustration and dissatisfaction. This constraint reduces responsiveness and the ability to personalize agent-customer interactions.

When seeking to optimize the customer experience, organizations have traditionally focused on metrics related to interaction durations or transaction outcomes rather than metrics related to the customer’s experience. The historical focus on average handling time (AHT) and first call resolution (FCR) have led to management efforts that push agents to operate quickly and handle more interactions, and it has encouraged coaching focused on how to improve agent operations within the parameters of inadequate desktop technology.

The adequacy of the data available within the agent desktop has a direct impact on the agent’s experience, as does the actual design and usability of the desktop. Clumsy and cluttered desktops can be improved by deploying modern web- and cloud-based applications and adopting a unified desktop approach. Modern-generation agent desktops can be individually configured to match the particular skills and experience of the agents using the system. For example, an inbound interaction can be routed to an agent who has the appropriate skills to respond to the known issue and who is provided with the relevant customer information so there is no need to search across systems while assisting the customer. In fact, “intelligent” agent desktops will anticipate what the customer might need and prompt the agent using predictive intelligence and machine learning (ML) technology.

When the agent desktop is optimally configured and provides rapid access to all needed information, it simplifies the agent’s work and so improves that experience for both the agent and the customer. Modern agent desktops can connect to information sources from across the organization and provide dynamically generated information and potential responses derived from the context of interaction. The desktops can also automatically channel the agent response to the customer’s preferred mode of interaction and provide visibility into the customer journey touchpoints across connection channels. When the agent desktop rests on a unified customer data platform, it can quickly provide the contextual information an agent needs to personalize the interaction with the customer.

Providing agents with the tools they need to improve the customer experience can improve the agent experience. Agents who feel empowered by their tools rather than at odds with their technology are more likely to deliver better customer experiences and will be less frustrated, fatigued and burned out. Furthermore, modern systems can provide performance analytics to deliver up-to-date information to the agent on their performance and suggest areas for improvement.

The pandemic created the circumstances for a complete reassessment of the tools and processes used in contact centers to manage agents. In short order, an entire industry’s fundamental assumptions about technology and best practices were called into question by the need to remove workers from crowded centers into home environments, a situation that persists today as a matter of preference.

We define agent management as the set of tools used by an organization and its contact center, including supervisors and managers, to engage with and optimize the performance of their customer-facing professionals. Agent management includes workforce management, which is primarily scheduling agents and forecasting volume; quality management, including interaction recording, agent evaluation, coaching and performance measurement; tools that measure and facilitate the agent experience, such as feedback; and the management of the agent desktop environment.

Today’s agent management offerings have expanded, incorporating modern features that support agent guidance and assistance, gamification, collaboration, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for evaluations, hiring and interview, workflow and automations, handle remote or hybrid workers and analytics with more sophisticated KPIs. Ventana Research believes that the necessity of agents, humans or machines, requires a focus on agent management and that some vendors are moving faster than others to recognize and implement the shift for most effective customer engagement.

With the agent pool now often dispersed from the main location, centers need to provide agents with different kinds of collaboration and communication tools so they can work in teams and be adequately coached by supervisors. They need things like video for internal meetings and training, and the organizations need process automation systems to ensure that out-of-sight agents follow set procedures and do not become disconnected from the overall strategy.

The pandemic was a dramatic accelerant for trends that were already in play. Chief among them has been the development of AI/ML systems. The impact of AI/ML on contact center technology cannot be overstated: it plays a role at every stage of the customer’s journey and touches agents at every stage of their job. AI/ML has improved processes and access to information/information flow in myriad ways: it produces better schedules for handling combined voice and digital interactions; it provides more accurate answers to customer questions; it supplies insights on sales opportunities that agents might overlook; and it enables fully automated evaluation of an agent’s entire call history, rather than just a random sample.

Ventana Research asserts that through 2026, technology for agent management will expand beyond tracking and performance measurement to include a wide array of AI-enhanced tools. The following are examples of use cases in agent management that buyers should explore. Each is supported by multiple vendors in the marketplace, making it possible to compare approaches.

• The same AI models that generate conversations for self-service chatbots are used to create interaction summaries, dramatically cutting after-call work time for agents, a major cost savings.
• Recordings of calls and text transcriptions of digital interactions can be evaluated for quality by automated AI so that an agent’s evaluations are not based on a small random sampling of calls. This reduces bias, speeds up feedback and increases the chances that an agent will be able to use the feedback to improve subsequent performance. If feedback is available in real time, agents can take immediate steps to recover from a poor interaction.
• Agent guidance and assistance systems promise to empower agents with suggestions related to three key areas: the customer's intent, knowledge resources relevant to an inquiry and processes related to compliance that must be followed.

This Buyers Guide research examined vendors that provide agent management systems both independently and in packages that include contact center routing features. Most of the independent vendors concentrate on the agent experience without offering interaction routing or any of the communications/telephony aspects for operations. In fact, many of the vendors that offer complete platforms use these specialists to provide their capabilities in white label or OEM relationships to contact center providers. It is more likely a contact center vendor with a routing platform will be using a third-party’s agent management tools whether they know it or not. Buyers should take care to investigate which agent management vendor is aligned or is being embedded within which contact center routing vendor.

Our research had specific product evaluation criteria for capabilities in agent management that included workforce management (primarily scheduling agents and forecasting volume), quality measurement (interaction recording, agent evaluation, coaching and performance measurement), agent experience and feedback, agent performance management and agent desktop. Beyond that, we also evaluated features related to agent guidance and assistance, gamification, collaboration and much more.

Organizations should note that the term “agent management” as defined above is very closely related to terms common in the industry, such as “workforce optimization,” “workforce engagement management,” and “agent performance optimization.” We believe that our definition presents the clearest guide to the specific capabilities required for effectively running the agent portion of a contact center and that other industry definitions, while useful in certain contexts, do not provide a complete enough picture of the full spectrum of needs for the modern workforce.

This report evaluates a subset of the overall vendor pool that offers dedicated agent management platforms: 8x8, Alvaria, AWS, Calabrio, Content Guru, Five9, Genesys, LiveVox, NICE, Playvox, Talkdesk and Verint.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, Ventana Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. Ventana Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of vendors and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirement in any organization. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select technology vendors and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to ranking and rating vendors in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an organization.

This Ventana Research Buyers Guide: Agent Management is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings will address organizations requirements for contact center software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the RFP process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with technology vendors. An effective product and customer experience with a technology vendor can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, Ventana Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of capability, we applied the Ventana Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for contact center to an organization’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of vendors and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a vendor’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of a contact center technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an organization’s ability to reach its potential performance. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time, and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of vendors that does not represent a best fit for your organization.

To ensure the accuracy of the information we collected, we asked participating vendors to provide product and company information across the seven product and customer experience categories that, taken together, reflect the concerns of a well-crafted RFI. Ventana Research then validated the information, first independently through our database of product information and extensive web-based research, and then in consultation with the vendors. Most selected vendors also participated in a one-on-one session providing an overview and demonstration, after which we requested they provide additional documentation to support any new input.

Ventana Research believes that an objective review of vendors and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of contact center software and applications. An organization’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating contact center systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these vendors and as an evaluation methodology.

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Vendors: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing technology vendors for your organization. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from technology vendors on their products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating a RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
   Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
   What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
   Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
   Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
   Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
   Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. 

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a technology vendor are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an organization if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your organization’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or vendor assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an organization may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one vendor or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of vendors and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Vendors Across Categories

The research finds NICE first on the list, with Calabrio in second place and Genesys in third. Companies that place in the top three of any category earn the designation of Leader. Calabrio and Genesys have done so in six of the seven categories; NICE in five; Verint in two; and LiveVox and Content Guru in one category.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the vendors. Those vendors whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. In short, vendors that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places vendors into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies vendors overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of vendors in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The vendors awarded Exemplary are: Calabrio, Genesys, NICE and Verint.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of vendors in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The vendors awarded Innovative are: Content Guru and Talkdesk.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of vendors in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The vendors awarded Assurance are: LiveVox and Playvox.

Merit: The categorization for vendors in Merit (lower left) represent those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The vendors awarded Merit are: 8x8, Alvaria, AWS and Five9.

We warn that close vendor placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every organization or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle contact center, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one vendor’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular organization’s needs.

We advise organizations to assess and evaluate vendors based on their requirements and use this research as a reference to their own evaluation of a vendor and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an organization’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an organization’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, vendors are not evaluated for the entirety of the products; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an organization’s requirements but how the vendor operates. As more vendors orient to a complete product experience, the more robust of an evaluation can be conducted.

The research based on the methodology of expertise identified the weighting of Product Experience to 80% or four-fifths of the total evaluation. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (20%), Capability (20%), Reliability (15%), Adaptability (10%) and Manageability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall rankings in this research. NICE, Calabrio and Verint were designated Product Experience Leaders as a result of their commitment to agent management technology. Vendor rankings for Genesys, Content Guru and Talkdesk were found to meet a broader range of enterprise agent management requirements. Calabrio and NICE, in particular, placed higher in Adaptability, Manageability and Reliability, with the latter’s focus to govern, connect and process product information across the traditional enterprise and cloud computing environments contributing to its high ranking.

Many organizations might be inclined to only evaluate capabilities for those in IT or administration, but our research identified the criticality of Usability (20% weighting) across a broader set of usage personas that should participate in agent management.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a vendor is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an organization has with its vendor is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that vendor. Technology providers that have Chief Customer Officers area more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring the marketing of their commitment is made abundantly clear on website and in the buying process and customer journey. Our Value Index methodology weights Customer Experience at 20%, or one-fifth, as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the vendor-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The vendors that ranked the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Leaders Genesys, NICE and Verint. The category leaders in Customer Experience provided the highest level of information to communicate their commitment and dedication to customer needs. Vendors such as Calabrio, LiveVox and Playvox were not Overall Leaders, but they have a high level of commitment to Customer Experience.

Some vendors that have not prioritized Customer Experience and provide little to no information through their website or presentations for our evaluation. Many have customer case studies to promote their success but lacked depth on what they do to demonstrate their commitment to their clients’ contact center excellence. This makes it increasingly difficult for organizations to evaluate vendors on the merits of their commitment to customer success. As a result, many of the vendors did not rank well in Customer Experience, though it does not mean their products will not provide adequate functionality. As the commitment to a vendor is a continuous investment, the importance of supporting customer experience in a holistic evaluation should be included and not underestimated.

Appendix: Vendor Inclusion

For inclusion in the Ventana Research Agent Management Buyers Guide for 2023, a vendor must be in good standing financially and ethically, with at least $20 million of revenue in agent management. The firm must operate across at least two countries and have at least 50 customers.

This evaluation is derived a comprehensive evaluation of contact center and agent management tools covering the overall market its underlying market segments. To qualify for inclusion in the agent management research, a vendor’s offering must include:

• Workforce management
• Quality measurement
• Agent Experience and Feedback
• Agent performance management
• Agent desktop

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of vendor packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include vendors that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a vendor is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market, and it is reflected on the vendor’s website that it is within the scope of the research, that vendor is automatically evaluated for inclusion. 

All vendors that offer relevant contact center products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the research evaluation process at no cost to them.

Seven of the 12 vendors responded positively to our requests for additional information and provided completed questionnaires and demonstrations to help in our evaluation of their agent management products. We categorize participation as follows:

Complete participation: The following vendors actively participated and provided completed questionnaires and demonstrations to help in our evaluation of their product: Calabrio, Content Guru, Genesys, LiveVox, NICE, Playvox and Verint.

Partial participation: The following vendors provided limited information to help in our evaluation: AWS, Five9, and Talkdesk.

No participation: The following vendors provided no information or did not respond to our request: 8x8 and Alvaria.

Vendors that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have significant impact on their classification and rating, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those vendors.

Products Evaluated

Vendors of Note

We did not include vendors that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in the Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Vendors of Note.”