In a contact center, workforce management (WFM) is increasingly important in optimizing the efficiency and productivity of modern businesses. This makes the contact center workforce management software market grow year by year.

According to the report from Verified Market Research, the call center workforce management software market size was valued at $6.5 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach $11.5 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 9.5%.

So, what’s the best call center workforce management software? If you are trying to figure it out, this post is what you need. In our guide, you can learn everything about contact center workforce management.

What Is Contact Center Workforce Management

Contact center workforce management (WFM) is a set of strategic processes that help optimize the performance and efficiency of your team. For example, it can help a business forecast staffing needs, automate agent scheduling, manage payroll, improve customer experience (CX), and so on.

To put it simply, using WFM in contact centers ensures that the following four things are right for your customer service:

1. The right number of agents,
2. With the right skill set
3. At the right time
4. In the right places

Why Is Workforce Management So Important for Contact Centers

As we all know, lots of contact centers are facing more complex and challenging problems. Workforce management is important for contact centers because it can help you convert complex routines into effective workflows.

WFM can help your team offer high-quality service by streamlining agent scheduling, reducing wait time, forecasting call volume, delivering consistent service levels to customers, and so on.

A powerful contact center WFM solution can help businesses optimize staffing demands to provide consistent and positive customer service. Not only that, WFM helps create a better work environment for staff by managing payroll, simplifying workflow, and balancing workload.

Core Functions of Contact Center Workforce Management

Before building a call center workforce management system, it’s crucial to have an overall understanding of the core functions in a WFM solution. Here, I conclude them as follows:

1.Forecasting Staff Needs

By forecasting staff needs, WFM solutions ensure that your team has the right number of employees at the right time, maximizing productivity and minimizing budgets. A practical WFM call center solution can achieve the goals by analyzing customer trends, digging into business demands, and scheduling employees.

Call center workforce management can help your team keep efficient and accurate labor occupancy using historical data to create a staff plan. What's more, this benefit accumulates over time if you are using other contact center software, like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Computer Telephony Integration (CTI).

2.Tracking Time and Attendance

The contact center WFM can also track the time and attendance of your agents, such as hours worked, productivity, and absences. This ensures accurate records of your agent log-ins, logouts, daily activities, and breaks, helping optimize staff planning and reduce operational costs.

Moreover, time and attendance tracking lets you have a real-time view of your contact center operation, confirming whether all agents are scheduled at their needed place at the right time. All these benefits improve the overall experience for both customers and agents.

3.Offering Customer Reports and Analytics

It’s important to report and analyze customer data for transferring your business operations. This is where the call center workforce management can help. With WFM reports and analytics, businesses can gain insight into agent key performance indicators (KPIs), like average handle time (AHT) and first contact resolution (FCR).

On the other hand, businesses can use the data to make better decisions for their contact center teams, such as agent training needs, employee plans, future operation strategies, technical upgrades, and so forth.

4.Ensure Real-time Team Management

Some advanced contact center workforce management software can even give you real-time insight into the status of agents and employees. With this insight, businesses can monitor the real status of their teams throughout the day, identifying opportunities for training and improvement.

In addition, real-time team management enables businesses to allocate current resources, especially when customer demands spike, avoiding unexpected troubles while maintaining customer satisfaction.

Benefits of Call Center Workforce Management

A successful call center workforce management solution has a profound impact on your organization. It offers a set of benefits for both agents and customers, helping businesses establish more efficient operations in contact centers.

Here’s how WFM solutions benefit a contact center:

1.Spend Less Time on Scheduling

The most obvious advantage of the WFM solutions is that they greatly reduce the amount of time spent on scheduling. With a WFM, call centers can automate the scheduling processes and reduce waiting time. Some advanced software even forecasts call volumes and monitors agent availability so that businesses can generate instant schedules.

With automated scheduling, WFM can create an efficient schedule plan, avoid employee overtime, and increase their satisfaction rates. Besides, some WFM software allows businesses to customize the schedule, such as breaks, launches, employee activities, etc.

2.Identify Extra Agent Support

The call center workforce management helps businesses find opportunities to optimize agent training and identify areas where they need extra support. By doing so, agent skill sets will be improved further for higher-quality service.

Furthermore, managers can keep an eye on the KPIs of agents, like first call resolution rates and first response time. Once they find any issues in agent performance, they can implement the necessary training and support.

3.Create Better Employee Experience

Workforce management not only benefits customer experience but also creates a better employee experience. Some WFM providers allow businesses to manage employee schedules through a custom dashboard and automatic time tracking. By highlighting employee success, WFM can encourage them to work actively and let them feel fulfilled in their work.

4.Reduce the Risk of Regulatory Compliance

Crucially, businesses must comply with local and federal labor laws to avoid any potential legal issues. The call center workforce management software can reduce compliance risks by automatically monitoring overtime hours, timecards, paid leave, and other critical labor data.

How to Make Sure an Effective Call Center Workforce Management

For contact center managers, building an effective workforce management system may seem difficult and arduous. However, there are some simple and practical tips to help you start the processes, with room for further slight adjustments based on your specific contact center operations.

Tip 1. Deploying Right Agents at the Right Time

It is important to make sure you have the right agents and schedule them at the right time. In addition, each agent’s skills should be matched with customer inquiries to avoid customer frustration.

Tip 2. Use Analytics and Forecasting for Scheduling

An effective WFM system should dive into historical data to make a proper schedule. For example, you can give insights into the customer data from the last peak period to adjust schedules for the next busy period.

Tip 3. Monitor Key Metrics of Agent Performance

To make sure of a good WFM strategy, you should monitor the service quality of agents, like customer satisfaction, average handle time, and first call resolution. This helps contact center managers find areas for improvement.

Tip 4. Integrate with Some Advanced Technology and Tools

Workforce management can play a better role in contact centers when integrating with other tools, such as CRM systems, AI, IVR, CTI, and chatbots.

Best Contact Center Workforce Management Software in 2025

It is time to choose appropriate workforce management software for your contact center. After investigating extensive reviews from authoritative sites, like Trustpilot, we summarize several top call center workforce management software. Let’s pick one from them:

1. RingCentral

The RingCentral contact center is best suited for large businesses that want to utilize WFM solutions as an add-on. It provides advanced routing and workforce management tools across various channels. These tools can help your team manage customer interactions seamlessly and work efficiently with existing systems, like CRMs.

Pros:

1. Support multiple devices
2. Standout integrations
3. Workforce engagement tools
4. Support global team collaboration

Cons:

1. Limited self-service options

2. CloudTalk

CloudTalks offers cloud-based call center workforce management tools, ideal for small to mid-sized businesses that prioritize enhancing customer service. With a wide range of features, it helps you manage calls and customer interactions efficiently. Its flexible pricing plans are also suitable for growing businesses.

Pros:

1. Straightforward setup and user-friendly interface
2. Customer-focused tools
3. Scalable pricing plans

Cons:

1. 14 days of free trial

3. Insightful

Insightful is professional workforce management software designed to monitor employee activity, track productivity, and manage attendance across the contact center. It provides real-time activity insights into the agent's work and makes it easier to adjust the scheduling plan and improve performance.

Pros:

1. Easy to monitor inefficient activities
2. Light on system resources
3. Data-driven insights
4. Cost effective

Cons:

1. Limited integration options
2. Short free trial

4. Five9

If you are looking for an automated and intelligent workforce management tool, Five9 is an ideal choice for your call center team. It is cloud-based WFM software that offers scalable tools, like call routing and predictive dialing, to help your team manage customer interactions. With comprehensive reporting features, it gives you insights into agent performance metrics.

Pros:

1. User-friendly functions
2. Seamless integration capabilities
3. Real-time manager guidance capabilities
4. Omnichannel support

Cons:

1. Costly for small businesses
2. Complex reporting requires integration
3. Require technical skills to set up and manage

5. Talkdesk

Talkdesk is also a cloud-based contact center solution best for businesses that focus on agent workforce management. It provides AI-driven insights into your team to make proper agent scheduling and training plans.

Besides, some features like sentiment analysis and predictive analytics offer valuable feedback on customer interaction. Its scalable and flexible solutions also meet the demands of evolving businesses.

Pros:

1. Easy to track users
2. Straightforward and user-friendly interface
3. Strong integration
4. Customizable metrics on the dashboard

Cons:

1. No free trial
2. Occasional glitches

In Conclusion

Read here, I believe that you have a comprehensive understanding of workforce management. Contact centers need to handle various complex customer issues almost every day. So, make sure you have a trustworthy call center workforce management tool through these tough and uncertain times in modern businesses.

Contact Center Workforce Management FAQ

1.What’s the formula for WFM in a call center?

The formula for WFM usually utilizes the Erlang C formula to calculate the number of staff needed to meet specific customer service levels in a call center. Here’s how it works:

1. Incoming workload = Total calls × Average Handling Time (AHT)
2. Individual capacity = The number of work hours each employee has availab

2.What are the basics of workforce management?

Workforce management is the process of optimizing a team or organization’s employees to improve their efficiency, productivity, and overall business performance. Basic WFM tasks usually include staff scheduling, tracking attendance, forecasting agent needs, and managing compliance.

3.What are the KPIs for workforce management?

In a contact center, the common KPIs for workforce management are things like employee engagement, overtime hours, turnover rate, time to hire, and so on. These metrics help optimize WFM efficiency, manage labor costs, and enhance productivity.

4.What are the four key pieces of WFM?

The four key pieces of WFM can be concluded as follows:

1. Forecasting call volumes and staffing needs
2. Scheduling agents efficiently
3. Analyzing performance to make proper decisions for consistent improvement
4. Monitoring real-time adherence to schedules