Market Perspectives

ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Agent Management: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.

While contact center operations require very specific technology for things like interaction routing and analysis, customer support is fundamentally a business about managing labor. For decades, contact centers have tolerated attrition rates of as much as 100%—even higher in some sectors. The fundamental tension in centers between maintaining high service levels and manageable costs is almost entirely due to the fact that the labor pool is always in flux. The costs to hire, train, motivate and retain qualified agents dwarf every other ongoing expense, including the cost of technology.

This is a key reason why artificial intelligence technology has become so exciting to software providers and buyers in this space. AI use cases for contact centers have promised to both dramatically increase agent productivity and reduce the number of interactions that need to reach agents. The result has been a shift in the focus of agent management technology away from long-term fundamentals like scheduling and monitoring and towards tools that use more automation to do things like evaluate interactions in bulk to look for performance anomalies. Today, agent management is more focused on analytics and automation than enabling shift trading or optimized scheduling. Ventana Research asserts that by 2026, agent training and skill development will primarily be self-directed, using automated scheduling and AI assessments.

ISG Research defines the Agent Management category to include traditional tools and their successors: systems used to schedule, evaluate, motivate and manage contact center agents, including workforce management, quality measurement, agent desktops, agent performance and agent experience. Many of those elements overlap, and all have a significant analytic component. They also bleed into automation, self-service, customer feedback and knowledge management.

Agents are still the foundation of contact center processes that impact every customer experience. These processes 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 ensure agents are empowered to take action on behalf of the customer and 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 in a scalable way to meet spikes of inbound demand.

Workforce flexibility requires a focus on digital readiness and tools that engage the agents and allow them to adapt and support customers as needed during disruptions to the standard working environment. Focusing on workforce agility enables enterprises to adapt, shift focus and continue to meet customer service expectations even during challenging periods.

The physical work environment impacts the agent experience, and enterprises must be prepared to support agents who work from home or other non-centralized locations. Perhaps even more important is the digital work environment—the agent desktop and other tools available to agents no matter where they are located. The quality of these tools helps determine the level of satisfaction an agent has while engaging with customers. The complexity of legacy systems can be a detriment to agent performance and, subsequently, their retention.

When the agent experience is hindered by available tools, customer service interactions suffer. Optimizing the agent experience is a critical step in a superior customer experience. Several factors in the work environment are usually the issue, among them the tools agents use to work with customers and resolve issues. Key among those tools is the agent desktop, which is the digital center of customer interactions and the gateway that provides access to individual applications the agent needs to deliver service.

The desktop supports direct dialogue with customers and provides the agent visibility into—and information about—all the interactions that comprise the customer journey. It is essential for effective dialogue with the customer and 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.

Enterprises have focused on optimizing the customer experience by using voice of the customer tools to understand customer sentiment. In the same way, enterprises are beginning to look at the value of listening to the voice of the agent, encouraging agents to identify gaps in tools, skills and the work environment instead of focusing on targeted efficiency coaching.

Elevating agent concerns to the level of importance of customer concerns accomplishes several important goals. It demonstrates to agents that the enterprise cares about their challenges and needs. It enables 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.

An agent’s ability to provide memorable, personalized customer experiences is often hampered by technological limitations. Many enterprises still use legacy agent desktops and customer relationship management systems, creating challenges for contact centers. Today’s desktops should provide a single point of access to all applications used in customer interactions. Unfortunately, many agents need to work across multiple applications to resolve customer issues.

An agent desktop must unify disparate data sets to empower the agent to respond to customer needs. However, in many instances, agents are forced to navigate to multiple databases separately to resolve customer issues. There is ample evidence that limited agent visibility of the customer’s history of interactions can result in frustration and dissatisfaction. This constraint reduces responsiveness and the ability to personalize agent-customer interactions.

When seeking to optimize the customer experience, enterprises 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 and first-call resolution has led to management efforts that push agents to operate quickly and handle more interactions and has encouraged coaching focused on improving agent operations within the parameters of inadequate desktop technology.

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

An optimally configured agent desktop with convenient access to all necessary information simplifies the agent’s work, improving the experience for the agent and the customer. Today’s agent desktops connect to information sources from across the enterprise and provide dynamically generated information and potential responses derived from the context of interaction. The desktops also automatically channel the agent response to the customer’s preferred mode of interaction and provide visibility into customer journey touchpoints across connection channels. When the agent desktop rests on a unified customer data platform, it quickly provides the contextual information an agent needs to personalize customer interactions.

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

Agent management offerings have expanded, incorporating features that support agent guidance and assistance; gamification; collaboration; the use of AI for interviews, hiring and evaluations; workflows and automation; remote or hybrid workers; and analytics with more sophisticated key performance indicators. ISG Research believes that the necessity of agents, whether human or machine-based, requires a focus on agent management. Some software providers are moving faster than others to recognize and implement the shift to benefit customer engagement.

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

This Buyers Guide research examined software providers that offer agent management systems independently and in packages that include contact center routing features. Most independent providers concentrate on the agent experience without offering interaction routing or any communications or telephony aspects for operations. In fact, many providers that offer complete platforms use specialists to deliver those capabilities via white label or original equipment manufacturer relationships to contact centers. It is more likely that a contact center software provider with a routing platform will use third-party agent management tools than a proprietary system. Buyers should investigate which agent management provider is aligned with or embedded within which contact center routing platform.

Enterprises should note that the term “agent management” as we define it is very closely related to common industry terms 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 picture of the full spectrum of needs for today’s workforce.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Agent Management evaluates products such as 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 features. To be included in this Buyers Guide, products must include workforce management, quality management and performance measurement, at a minimum.

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of agent management as we define it: 8x8, Alvaria, AWS, Calabrio, Content Guru, Five9, Genesys, Nextiva, NICE, Odigo, Playvox, Salesforce, Talkdesk, UJET and Verint.

This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of customer experience software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.

We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating agent management offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.

The Buyers Guide for Agent Management in 2024 finds NICE first on the list, followed by Verint and Genesys.

Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.

The Leaders in Product Experience are:

• NICE
• Verint
• Genesys

The Leaders in Customer Experience are:

• NICE
• Genesys
• Verint

The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:

• NICE, which has achieved this rating in seven of the seven categories.
• Genesys in five categories.
• Verint in three categories.
• Calabrio and Talkdesk in two categories.
• Content Guru and Playvox in one category.

The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.

Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle agent management, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.

ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our agent management blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.

You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.