Market Perspectives

Contact centers are undergoing a radical reshuffling of the workforce, partly because the pandemic shifted agents to remote work. But the trends were in place to reorganize the world of work long before the pandemic. Digital contact channels, which are gaining popularity, require workers that are better informed and capable of handling more complex and interdependent interactions and processes. That’s changing the nature of training, management and even process design between departments. Organizations have to provide agents with appropriate tools to collaborate and communicate with peers and supervisors, and also with peers in the back office who participate in all sorts of customer-facing or customer-adjacent processes. It is also important to provide supervisors with visibility into agent activity. That means extending existing coaching and evaluation methods, and Ventana Research believes that by 2025, 9 in ten organizations will have deployed agent management systems with features specifically built to provide supervisors the ability to manage and coach agents working from home.

Intradiem is an Atlanta-based developer of software for automating agent activities in contact centers. The product is aimed at providing supervisors with tools to automate much of the moment-by-moment monitoring of agent states, eliminating the need to manually reschedule a break, and allowing supervisors to spend their time assessing the content of customer interactions.

The Intradiem platform pulls information from automatic call distributions and workforce management systems and uses it to help supervisors optimize agents’ efficiency. It suggests reconfigurations of agent schedules, for example, based on time spent in certain activity states. Intradiem Workforce Automation looks at the current service level in a center and decides whether (and when) to offer training modules, modifying overall schedules to accommodate training time. It can also prompt for coaching sessions during agent idle time. Or, it can prompt agents to take breaks or end shifts early to keep schedule adherence within expected limits.

Intradiem has taken on a niche within contact center operations that is in the process of changing. With so many agents working remotely, it provides supervisors with visibility and control over dispersed teams. Automation is taking on a larger role in workforce-related applications across contact centers, often powered by an artificial intelligence engine that plays a broader role across platforms. Intradiem’s use of AI in its platform is limited, so there is not (yet) a set of features for direct agent guidance of the steps to take during a call. In some ways, Intradiem’s offering is aligned with how most contact centers are still organized today: as generally conservative, risk-averse entities serving very specific and limited functions.

As the bulk of centers continue to transition toward more strategic operations that are more closely tied to broader customer experience goals, Intradiem will likely have to incorporate a broader palette of features around agent guidance, performance measurement and knowledge management if it wants to expand its market. The company has an impressive roster of customers across multiple vertical markets, and has apparently been able to quantify the productivity gains its platform has delivered for them. It allows business users, which in this case are likely to be contact center supervisors and managers, to design their own rules and automations through a simple interface. Organizations can use this platform in conjunction with several of the industry’s major call-routing platforms, with more on the way, according to Intradiem. It’s most appropriate for firms in the midsized range, those with centers of significant size but still handling the bulk of interactions through voice.

Intradiem Workforce Automation is very much a contact center operational tool and less of a broader customer experience platform. While broader platforms are in vogue these days, there is still (and will continue to be) a market for dedicated contact center optimization. Intradiem’s approach has been to use the market’s awareness of gaps in data and automation to help centers level up their operations by translating efficiency gains into measurable cost savings. The company’s own argument is that its role is to provide enough savings through automation to enable centers to fund more ambitious undertakings down the road, through CX or digital transformation initiatives. The question for Intradiem will be whether it too can accelerate its transformation so that when its clients are ready to take more ambitious next steps, Intradiem will be able to help them on that road.