NiCE’s $955 million acquisition of Cognigy is turning Enlighten Autopilot into a unified orchestration engine for AI-driven customer journeys.  Salesforce’s takeover of Bluebirds accelerates the “agentification” of enterprise apps, bringing low-code orchestration into the CRM core.

Thoma Bravo’s bid for Verint – a $2B+ portfolio expansion into WEM, voice-of-customer, and AI analytics- is another consolidation signal.

This is more than just M&A headline fodder; it’s reshaping what “AI consolidated” means to enterprise buyers and how they hold choice, pricing, and integration risk in the same tight grasp.

In the broader SaaS universe, this trend is already underway. A recent survey reports that 52% of SaaS companies now integrate AI, and by the end of 2025, 95% of organizations will use AI-powered SaaS solutions, yet, contradictorily, the number of apps per organization has actually shrunk by 18% between 2022–2024.

The Benefits of AI Consolidated with CX

For all the concern about tighter stacks and reduced vendor choice, AI adoption and SaaS consolidation bring clear benefits that can’t be ignored. Buyers are seeing more cohesive platforms, faster time to value, and fewer integration headaches.

Unified stacks, fewer silos

One of the clearest benefits of AI consolidated platforms is a reduction in complexity. Building an intelligent contact center meant buying orchestration from one vendor, analytics from another, and automation from a third. Then enterprises would pay systems integrators to stitch it all together. Every new layer introduced more risk, more time, and more cost.

Now, deals like NICE’s acquisition of Cognigy change the equation. By embedding Cognigy’s orchestration capabilities directly into Enlighten Autopilot, NICE can offer an end-to-end solution where customer intent detection, conversation design, and resolution tracking are all managed in the same stack. For buyers, that means fewer moving parts and less reliance on fragile connectors or middleware. Salesforce’s Bluebirds acquisition points in the same direction, baking low-code orchestration straight into CRM workflows.

When data, automation, and orchestration live in one place, outcomes become easier to measure, and upgrades roll out faster across the entire platform.

Improved AI maturity and adoption

Most organizations are still immature in their AI usage. McKinsey research finds that only around 1% think they’ve reached AI maturity, meaning they can deploy AI at scale with governance and accountability.

Consolidated platforms can close that gap by providing a packaged approach where compliance, observability, and orchestration are part of the core product. That matters because AI adoption has historically stalled when governance frameworks lag behind deployment goals.

With AI adoption and SaaS consolidation, CX leaders get predictable guardrails: dashboards for monitoring, pre-built integrations for data governance, and policy frameworks aligned to regulations like the EU AI Act.

For buyers under pressure from boards to accelerate rollout, this kind of ready-made governance can make the difference between a controlled expansion and an uncontrolled experiment.

Potential for Lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)

Running several vendors side by side is rarely efficient. Each one comes with its own license fees, connectors, and support contracts. In many projects, integration alone can eat up 25-35% of the total cost of AI, often costing more than the software itself. A consolidated platform trims that overhead by rolling functions into one package and cutting down on duplication.

Vendors are also experimenting with new pricing models. NICE, Genesys, and others are shifting from per-seat models toward usage- or outcome-based pricing, where companies only pay when an issue is successfully resolved. This approach mirrors trends in automation, where providers like Ada promote “resolution-based” economics. For CFOs, the promise is a clearer ROI story: predictable costs, lower integration fees, and pricing that aligns with actual business outcomes.

Scale and innovation at speed

Consolidated AI platforms can also drive scale. Big vendors often have larger research budgets, wider datasets to train on, and shorter development cycles. For buyers looking to move AI from pilot projects into live production, that muscle makes a difference.

The NICE–Cognigy deal shows how this plays out. Cognigy’s orchestration tools already had traction with global enterprises. Folded into NICE’s Enlighten AI, they become part of a wider platform that blends automation with analytics. That scale gives big vendors an edge in areas such as observability, compliance, and vertical add-ons.

A hospital can benefit from pre-built frameworks that support regulation, while a retailer might get plug-and-play modules for returns or warranty claims. In practice, these unified stacks act like AI factories, shipping features at a pace smaller vendors would struggle to match.

The Challenges of AI Consolidation

Consolidation makes life easier in some ways, but it also creates new problems that enterprise buyers can’t ignore. The same moves that simplify stacks can limit choice, raise costs, and expose organizations to bigger risks.

Fewer options, greater lock-in

Consolidation narrows the field. Vendors like NICE, Salesforce, and Microsoft are pulling automation, orchestration, and analytics into the same platforms. Once a company’s data and processes are tied in, breaking free is costly and disruptive. Smaller vendors, like Rasa, Kore.ai, and others, may still offer strong products, but it gets harder to justify the integration effort when the big players are bundling everything by default.

The pricing squeeze

At first, unified stacks often look cheaper. One bill, one vendor, fewer integration costs. But consolidation shifts leverage to suppliers, not customers. Once locked in, enterprises are at the mercy of new bundles, higher license tiers, and usage-based pricing that can quickly outpace forecasts. Some vendors are moving toward “resolution-based” pricing, where costs depend on outcomes, not licenses. That sounds attractive, but it shifts financial risk onto the buyer if volumes or recontacts rise.

Customization takes a hit

Broad platforms often miss the mark for niche requirements. Sectors such as healthcare, finance, or government run on strict workflows and heavy regulation. Generic, one-size-fits-all automation can erode those differences. CX leaders are already calling out the risks of “off-the-shelf” AI that scales well but fails under the weight of sector-specific complexity.

Innovation slows at the edges

While consolidation can accelerate mainstream development, it often leaves less room for experimentation. Cavell analysts have argued that NICE’s move for Cognigy will strengthen its position but could also reduce variety in the CX technology ecosystem. Smaller players are usually the ones pushing boundaries, and acquisitions often fold them into slower, corporate release cycles.

Higher stakes when things break

When fewer companies carry more of the stack, the stakes rise. The 2024 CrowdStrike outage is a clear reminder: a single error grounded flights, froze banks, and halted hospitals worldwide. AI adoption and SaaS consolidation can create similar vulnerabilities. If a major vendor’s automation platform goes down, the impact could ripple through entire industries overnight.

Preparing for the AI Consolidation Era

Consolidated AI is a growing trend, and CX leaders don’t have the luxury of waiting it out. The smart move now is to prepare, both technically and culturally, for a market where fewer vendors control more of the stack:

• Rethink vendor strategy: Some enterprises will commit fully to one ecosystem, while others keep their options open. A blended model is gaining traction, keep the core on a major platform, but leave space to connect smaller, specialist tools. It’s less tidy than going all-in, but it reduces dependence.
• Fix the data problem: Consolidation doesn’t fix poor data hygiene. Fragmented or inconsistent records still derail AI. Companies that invest in reliable pipelines now will see stronger performance regardless of the stack.
• Ask for transparency: Fewer suppliers mean more vendor power. Buyers should ask for straightforward pricing, clear product roadmaps, and monitoring tools that show how the AI is performing.
• Prepare the workforce: Automation changes roles more than it cuts them. Cavell expects contact center roles to rise over the next three years, though the focus will shift. Agents will handle complex or emotional tasks while AI takes the routine. Training and reskilling should be part of the plan.
• Keep regulators in mind: Rules are tightening. The EU AI Act and ISO 42001 set high standards for auditability and control. Gartner expects most enterprise AI systems to face audits by 2026. Big vendors may bundle compliance frameworks into their platforms, but that doesn’t let enterprises off the hook. Independent checks are still essential.

What’s Next in AI Consolidation

More deals are coming. Analysts expect another wave of mergers as SaaS and CX vendors try to scale AI faster. Data providers, orchestration platforms, and automation specialists are the most likely targets.

Genesys is already leaning into orchestration. Microsoft is expanding its intent-based agent frameworks. Google is pushing Gemini deeper into contact center workflows. Each move shows the same pattern: vendors want to own the entire experience, not just a piece of it.

Another shift is the rise of AI factories – studios where enterprises can design, test, and deploy their own agents at scale. NICE, Genesys, and Five9 have all released versions of this. These tools speed up development, but they also pull buyers further into a single vendor’s ecosystem.

AI is now built into almost every CX system. The critical question is who runs it and how it’s delivered. In an era of AI consolidated stacks, the firms that succeed will be the ones that prepare early and keep flexibility in reserve.

For enterprises, that’s both a challenge and an opportunity. Handled properly, feedback reveals exactly where things are and aren’t working. It tells support teams which moments frustrate. It tells product teams what’s missing, and it tells the C-suite what customers value enough to fight for.

That’s the real job of customer feedback management, turning scattered input into structured insight, then routing it to the teams that can actually do something with it.

The best CFM systems don’t just capture data. They:

• Map feedback across the full journey, not just surveys
• Spot trends early, before they show up in churn
• Connect insight directly to actions: faster support, better products, clearer messaging

In short, modern customer feedback management platforms give enterprises a new kind of muscle: the ability to listen deeply, move early, and improve continuously

What is Customer Feedback Management?

Customer feedback management is the discipline of collecting, interpreting, and acting on customer sentiment – not just from surveys, but from every channel where customers leave a mark.

That might mean tracking a drop in CSAT after a product update, combing through live chat logs, or decoding a two-star review on Trustpilot. In most enterprise settings, it means building a feedback loop that crosses teams: product, marketing, service, and operations all relying on the same source of truth.

The best customer feedback management software doesn’t just store responses. It translates them into structured insight, surfacing trends, routing complaints, and pushing alerts to the right place, fast. It’s the glue between listening and resolution.

To work at scale, feedback systems typically include:

• Multichannel ingestion: Web forms, support tickets, NPS, app reviews, even social DMs. Every signal matters, even if it’s unstructured.
• Theme detection and prioritization: Tools flag repeat issues or keyword clusters before they become reputational risks.
• Workflow integration: A refund complaint can notify finance. A delivery bug can trigger a ticket in product ops.
• Dashboards and reporting: With the help of AI systems, leaders get a filtered view of real insights by product line, geography, or channel.

Leading companies aren’t collecting feedback in a vacuum. They’re wiring it directly into CRM systems, contact center tools frontline workflows, so the right people can act without delay. The tighter the integration, the faster teams can respond, fix what’s broken, and strengthen customer relationships that last.

Where Feedback Fits: Feedback Management, VoC, and EFM

Feedback is only useful if it leads somewhere. That’s where terminology starts to matter. Voice of the Customer (VoC), customer feedback management, and enterprise feedback management (EFM) are often used interchangeably. They shouldn’t be.

Customer feedback management is the engine room. It handles collection, sorting, tagging, and routing. Think of it as the operational layer that turns raw input from surveys, ratings, and comments into tasks and decisions. This is where data moves from inboxes and dashboards into action plans.

Voice of the Customer (VoC) goes broader. It doesn’t just listen to what customers say, it listens to how they feel, how they behave, and where they’re frustrated or delighted without necessarily saying it outright. A good VoC program blends direct feedback with behavioral signals and sentiment analysis. It’s about seeing the full picture.

Enterprise feedback management (EFM) stretches even further. It includes employee and partner insight, compliance triggers, internal process reviews, and often sits closer to risk management than CX. In highly regulated or distributed organizations, EFM is essential infrastructure.

At enterprise scale, feedback management isn’t just a support tool. It’s part of the system of record: connected to customer data platforms, CRMs, business intelligence tools, and employee engagement systems (WEM tools).

Each of these frameworks adds something. The most mature organizations use all three as parts of one loop: listen, understand, and act.

What is Customer Feedback Management? Feedback Types

Customer feedback isn’t always a form or a star rating. It’s often informal, unstructured, or buried in systems where no one’s looking. Recognizing the different types is the first step toward building something that works across departments and channels.

• Direct Feedback: The most visible kind. Surveys after support calls. CSAT and NPS prompts. Product reviews submitted through apps or portals. It’s usually structured, timestamped, and easy to analyze. But it’s also the most filtered. The people who answer tend to be at the emotional extremes, either thrilled or annoyed. Everyone else stays quiet.
• Indirect Feedback: This is what customers say when they’re not talking to you directly. Tweets. Public forum threads. Online reviews. Complaints posted to third-party sites. In many organizations, this insight slips through the cracks. But today’s customer feedback management platforms use NLP and sentiment tools to bring these comments into view before they become brand problems.
• Inferred Feedback: This is the feedback customers don’t say out loud, but show in what they do. Dropping out halfway through checkout. Asking the same question in three different places. Bouncing between help pages without finding what they need.

On their own, these signals can be easy to miss. But together, they reveal patterns of frustration that direct surveys might never surface.

Why Customer Feedback Management Matters

There’s no shortage of dashboards in a modern enterprise. But few of them speak with the voice of the customer. That’s what feedback management changes. It shifts insight from lagging reports to live reality, focusing on the real-time pulse of what customers need, want, and expect.

For enterprise leaders focused on customer experience, this isn’t a soft metric. It’s operational. According to Bain & Company, companies that excel at customer experience grow revenues 4%–8% above their market. But growth doesn’t come from tracking satisfaction scores alone. It comes from turning those scores into action.

Here’s where feedback becomes a business driver:

• Alignment Across Teams: Sales hears one thing. Support hears another. Product has a third backlog entirely. When feedback lives in separate systems, teams solve different problems. When it’s centralized, patterns emerge, and teams move in the same direction.
• Early Signal Detection: A broken link on a signup form. A billing process that’s confusing in one region. A surge in cancellation requests. Customer feedback management platforms surface these issues before they hit churn reports. The earlier the fix, the lower the cost.
• Smarter Roadmapping: Feedback isn’t just a support signal, it’s a product roadmap tool. Tracking customer insights, linking them to outcomes, and activating responses leads to strategic action. Teams can prioritize features that drive loyalty.
• Competitive Advantage: Every brand says it listens. Few can prove it. Companies that consistently close the loop visibly earn trust. In a market where switching costs are low, trust is often the only real moat.

The case for customer feedback management software isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about agility, spotting the next risk or opportunity while competitors are still guessing.

How to Build a Customer Feedback Management System That Works

Enterprises don’t lack feedback. They’re swimming in it. The challenge isn’t collection, but coordination. Scattered responses, siloed ownership, and no clear plan for what happens next. That’s where customer feedback management becomes a system, not just a task.

1. Start with What You Already Have

Before adding new tools or channels, map what’s in play. Most enterprise teams already gather feedback across:

• Post-interaction surveys
• Help desk conversations
• Social and review platforms
• Product feedback forms
• Sales and account notes

But it’s often fragmented, or locked in spreadsheets, CRM fields, and third-party platforms. Start by listing every touchpoint where customers leave a trace. Then identify who owns that data, how it’s reviewed, and whether it drives action.

2. Build a Shared System, Not Just a Repository

A true customer feedback management system isn’t just a bucket. It’s a hub. One place where cross-functional teams can view, analyze, and act on insights. That requires more than storage. It needs structure. Look for tools that:

• Integrate with your CRM system and CDP
• Tag feedback by source, product line, sentiment, urgency
• Offer role-specific dashboards for ops, product, CX, compliance
• Allow for routing, escalation, and response tracking

Consider other integrations that might be helpful too, such as connections to your ERP and business intelligence platforms, or workforce management tools.

3. Design a Feedback-to-Action Pathway

Without clear ownership, feedback dies in the backlog. Teams need to agree on what gets prioritized, who responds, and how it loops back into service design, training, or product fixes.

The strongest systems:

• Flag urgent or high-impact issues automatically
• Route insights to the right teams (with deadlines)
• Track outcomes, not just volume
• Communicate resolution back to the customer

When that loop works, feedback becomes part of how the business runs.

How to Use Feedback to Improve Business Results

Most companies collect feedback. Fewer actually do something meaningful with it. In mature organizations, feedback isn’t just a sentiment report, it’s a driver of change. Done right, it informs strategy, sharpens execution, and reduces churn.

• Prioritize patterns over outliers: It’s easy to get caught up in the latest complaint or viral review. But high-performing teams step back. They look for volume, frequency, and trends, not just anecdotes. That could mean mapping repeat issues to product features, or tracking common service pain points over time.
• Feed insight to the right systems: Don’t keep customer feedback on a CX dashboard. Use it to inform product roadmaps, workforce planning, pricing models, training strategies, and anything else that impacts the customer experience.
• Expand your metrics: Go beyond NPS and CSAT. Think about customer effort scores, overall retention rates and churn. Determine the KPIs you want to keep track of in advance, and make sure everyone is watching them, including the C-Suite.

Choosing Customer Feedback Management Software

Customer feedback is everywhere. What separates good companies from great ones is what they do with it. That’s where the right customer feedback management software comes in, to make insights actionable, accountable, and accessible across the enterprise.

Start With the Business, Not the Tool

Software selection should begin with the problems it’s meant to solve. Are customers dropping off after onboarding? Or are service complaints slipping through the cracks? Are product teams getting insight too late to act?

Clear goals tend to point to the right tool:

• Real-time alerts for contact center agents?
• Text analytics for unstructured NPS comments?
• Trend reporting to inform product roadmaps?

Once those use cases are clear, it becomes easier to separate the platforms built for scale from those that just tick boxes.

Integration Over Isolation

In a modern tech stack, no system should sit alone, especially not feedback.

Customer insights gain power when connected to:

• CRM platforms, where individual records tell a full customer story
• Contact center solutions, where timing and channel matter
• CDPs, which consolidate behavioral and transactional data
• BI tools, for deeper cross-functional reporting
• Broader ERP, WEM, and business management tools

Make sure your platforms feed the systems powering decisions.

Think Long-Term: Governance, Scalability, and Fit

Even the most powerful platform will struggle without strong foundations. For enterprise buyers, that means focusing on operational readiness:

• Can the system support multiple teams and regions with clear permissions?
• Are escalation workflows and approvals built in?
• Does the vendor offer strong uptime guarantees and compliance controls?
• Is the reporting flexible enough to satisfy both executive leadership and front-line teams?

Ease of use matters too. If agents, analysts, and leaders can’t find value in it quickly, feedback won’t flow where it’s needed most.

Discover the best customer feedback management solutions:

Customer Feedback Management Best Practices

Technology may capture customer sentiment, but it’s what companies do next that separates good intentions from real improvement. At the enterprise level, feedback shapes products, and defines brand reputation, retention, and revenue.

Here’s what the most effective teams get right.

• Track consistently: Feedback isn’t a file to review later. It’s a feed that’s active and ongoing. Companies need to review regularly, discuss in depth, and build around it.
• Make feedback cross functional: Operations needs visibility into service complaints, marketing needs to know where messaging misses, and HR should see how poor feedback is affecting teams. Get everyone involved.
• Close the loop: Replying to feedback, or acting on it, is crucial. Customers want to know their input mattered, and teams want confirmation their fix was felt. Ensure that your action is clear, powerful, and visible.
• Read between the lines: Surveys are useful, but raw behavior can say more. Combine behavioral insights, structured survey data, and conversational analytics for a comprehensive view of what customers really feel, not just what they say.
• Make it easy to act: Help teams fix issues quickly. Check if workflows are in place for feedback routing, and whether CX agents can escalate recurring problems. Give people the tools they need to act.

Customer Feedback Management Trends

Customer expectations haven’t just shifted, they’ve splintered. Channels have multiplied. Responses move faster. The tools used to manage it all are catching up. Here’s what’s defining feedback management right now:

The Rise of AI-Powered Analysis

Enterprise teams spent years circling AI as a concept. Now it’s operational. The strongest feedback systems today don’t just categorize responses, they break them down by tone, urgency, and underlying cause.

Platforms like Medallia, NICE, and Sprinklr are using natural language processing and conversational analytics to surface issues before they mutate. Instead of waiting for quarterly survey analysis, teams can spot sentiment drops and recurring themes as they happen.

Feedback Is Becoming Embedded

Feedback used to live in standalone forms: a survey here, a rating box there. That’s changing. Leading platforms now capture signals from everyday interactions: chat logs, call transcripts, even app usage.

Feedback is moving closer to the moment. A delivery delay triggers a quick prompt. A cancelled subscription opens the door to ask why. Systems are listening all the time, and they’re getting smarter about what to listen for.

Structured Feedback Loses Traction

It’s not just about ticking boxes. The most valuable insights often show up in open comments, social threads, or long-form email replies. That unstructured data used to be hard to sort. Now, it’s where the action is.

Enterprises are investing in platforms that can handle nuance: that can understand sarcasm, spot emotion, and cluster feedback without a human reading every line. Forrester calls this shift “human insight at scale”, and it’s showing up as a core capability in nearly every customer feedback management platform leader.

Everything Connects Or It Doesn’t Work

Feedback is most valuable when it flows. Into support platforms, product roadmaps, agent scripts, and CX dashboards. But that only happens when systems talk to each other.

Leading tools now integrate out-of-the-box with CRMs, contact center systems, VoC platforms, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. That allows customer concerns to influence decision-making across the business, not just in service.

Privacy Remains Crucial

The line between “listening” and “surveilling” is thin, and enterprise buyers know it. In a post-GDPR, opt-out-default world, customer feedback strategies need to include transparency.

That means clear consent prompts. Data handling disclosures. Anonymization features. Especially in regulated sectors, ethics now sit beside analytics in the buyer’s checklist.

What is Customer Feedback Management? The Voice of CX

Customer feedback management It affects product decisions, shapes brand reputation, and drives loyalty at scale.

Done well, it connects dots across departments, from support and sales to marketing and operations. It puts real-time customer truth in front of the people who can do something about it.

But it only works when the systems are connected, the insights are trusted, and the loop is truly closed. That’s why enterprise teams are investing in modern customer feedback management platforms to operationalize input.

For companies focused on loyalty, innovation, and experience, the question isn’t whether to invest in customer feedback tools. The only real question is: which one will help you act faster, and smarter? CX Today is here to help:

• Join the Community: Be part of a dynamic CX-focused network. Swap ideas with thought leaders and elevate your feedback strategy.
• Test the Tech: Discover the top-rated platforms, meet vendors, and explore trends at live and virtual events.
• Plan Your Next Investment: Use our CX Marketplace to explore top vendors in feedback, VoC, CDP, and contact center tech.

Or visit the ultimate CX guide for enterprise experience leaders, for insights into how to build a better CX strategy, one step at a time.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC) 2025 underscores how swiftly the market has shifted from digital engagement to intelligent orchestration, with AI agents, automation frameworks, and composable platforms defining the new service stack.

While last year’s report reflected stability, 2025 marks a decisive pivot.

A fresh evaluation model, new scoring criteria, and a heavier focus on agentic AI have redrawn the map.

However, despite the changes, Salesforce was still comfortably the top of the pack, with Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Zendesk some of the major names trying to chase it down.

The Definition of CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC)

But before we get into the rankings, what exactly is a CRM CEC?

Gartner defines it as a unified, AI-augmented suite that delivers both customer interaction and service process orchestration.

In essence, these systems are no longer just case management hubs; they are engagement engines, tying together data, workflows, and outcomes across front, middle, and back-office environments.

While case management, digital engagement, and knowledge management remain mandatory features, “automation of engagements” and “real-time continuous intelligence” have also become table stakes.

That means agentic AI, contextual orchestration, and low-code extensibility are now baseline expectations rather than differentiators.

Here’s how Gartner rates the field for 2025.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center 2025: Leaders

This year’s Leaders are:

• Salesforce
• Microsoft
• ServiceNow
• Zendesk
• Oracle

Salesforce

Still the benchmark for enterprise CRM, Salesforce continues to consolidate its position as the most complete AI-enabled service platform.

Service Cloud now unifies data, AI, and automation through Agentforce Service Agents and Service Rep Assistant, bridging front-line and back-office operations.

Gartner also outlined the vendor’s industry-specific strategy, with 14 tailored products and an ecosystem that spans hyperscalers and GSIs.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Customer Service keeps building momentum with a deepening AI strategy and an expanding footprint across the enterprise.

Gartner believes that the arrival of Dynamics 365 Contact Center signals a clear intent: unify CRM, CCaaS, and agentic AI under one roof.

Gartner also praised Microsoft’s extensible Power Platform, which underpins its modular design and low-code agility.

ServiceNow

ServiceNow’s Agentic Workflows and GenAI-powered agent assist position it as the go-to choice for enterprises seeking cross-departmental automation.

Gartner also highlighted the company’s unified platform and partner ecosystem, which together deliver low TCO and strong deployment consistency.

ServiceNow’s blend of ITSM pedigree and AI-driven orchestration continues to blur the line between IT and CX – and that’s where Gartner believes the market is heading.

Zendesk

The launch of Zendesk’s Resolution Platform has helped move the vendor up from a Visionary in 2024 to a true Leader in 2025.

The solution integrates copilot tools, real-time QA, and voice-bot intelligence, all within a single agent workspace.

Gartner also credited the company’s integrated WEM suite and its ability to execute globally across retail, tech, and service sectors.

Oracle

Oracle’s Fusion Service rounds out this year’s Leaders with a clear differentiator: embedded AI without extra licensing costs.

In addition, its AI Agent Studio was praised for its ability to enable users to build and manage custom agents inside the governed Fusion framework, complementing its rich enterprise data model.

The report also highlighted Oracle’s end-to-end enterprise integration – spanning ERP, supply chain, and HCM – and a vast partner network.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center 2025: Challengers

This year’s Challengers are:

• SAP

SAP

SAP’s AI-first vision, anchored in its Business AI strategy, helped catapult it from a Niche Player in last year’s report to the sole Challenger this time around.

Joule, SAP’s copilot, drives contextual recommendations across the service journey, while Resolution Room brings collaborative case solving to life.

Native ERP integration remains SAP’s trump card, tying front- and back-office data into a single service flow.

Yet, Gartner noted that SAP’s expansion remains focused on its ERP base, and advanced knowledge management still requires external tools.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center 2025: Visionaries

This year’s Visionaries are:

• Pegasystems

Pegasystems

Unfortunately, while Zendesk managed to move up, Pega dropped down from a Leader in 2024 to a Visionary in 2025.

Despite this, Gartner still highlighted the company’s workflow-centric AI and low-code agility as anchors for a CEC built for scale in highly regulated industries.

Gartner also praised its end-to-end orchestration capabilities, connecting customer journeys to operational workflows — something many competitors are only now attempting.

However, Pega’s opaque pricing and enterprise-only focus limit its broader appeal. Migrating to its new Constellation design system also requires significant change management.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center 2025: Niche Players

This year’s Niche Players are:

• eGain
• Freshworks
• Zoho
• Creatio

eGain

Like Pega before it, this year also saw eGain trending in the wrong direction.

Yet, there’s still plenty of positives to take from another Magic Quadrant appearance.

Gartner praised the vendor’s AI Knowledge Hub, which has been expanded with GenAI for summarization and content orchestration.

Unfortunately, eGain’s limited partner reach and delivery consistency issues pushed it into the Niche camp.

Freshworks

The report outlined Freshworks’ Freddy AI Copilot, which now offers real-time coaching and next-best-action guidance. The platform has also grown to cover marketing, sales, and service.

Gartner cites deployment agility and unified CX design as wins, but notes execution risk in balancing SMB and midmarket ambitions, along with concerns around add-on AI costs.

Zoho

Gartner believes that Zoho remains one of the strongest value options in the CRM field. The vendor’s Zoho Desk feature delivers essential case management at a fraction of the cost, supported by a proprietary cloud infrastructure and vast partner network.

Gartner spotlights its affordable TCO and data-privacy control, but flags limited innovation pace and weaker automation depth.

Creatio

The final entrant in the 2025 report is Creatio, with its Service Creatio platform credited for bringing no-code composability to the CEC stage.

Its new AI Command Center was also highlighted for its ability to unify AI agents for proactive service optimization.

However, Gartner did question the company’s AI consumption pricing and limited reach in emerging markets.

Key Takeaways: A Market Redrawn by Agentic AI

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center 2025 reflects a fundamental shift: CECs are no longer just about “case to resolution”; they’re becoming AI-driven orchestration platforms that operate across the enterprise.

Salesforce, Microsoft, and ServiceNow dominate thanks to unified data models and composable AI layers.

Oracle strengthens its AI-embedded value proposition, and Zendesk doubles down on agent experience.

Meanwhile, SAP’s ERP-centric AI vision and Pega’s automation depth remind us that the enterprise backbone still matters.

For buyers, the takeaway is clear: the next wave of customer engagement platforms won’t just manage service interactions; they’ll think, act, and adapt in real time across the customer journey.

Discover more CX Today rundowns of other Gartner Magic Quadrant reports below:

• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises 2025
• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) 2025
• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Conversational AI Platforms 2025

Like most analyst events, AWS used the forum to share its vision of the industry and provide attendees with a roadmap of what’s to come for its contact center solution.

While I can’t go into product-level information, as much of it was under NDA, there were several key takeaways from the event worth sharing.

Below are my top four takeaways from Amazon Connect Horizons:

1. AI Agents Will Work in Harmony with Humans

Regardless of which event I attend, I inevitably hear about the rise of agentic agents with contact centers being viewed as the ‘low hanging fruit,’ as every organization is looking to improve the way it interacts with customers.

This always raises the questions of whether AI agents will replace humans, and the answer is yes and no, with it really depending on the type of interaction.

If one plots all the possible interactions between customers and a brand on a 2×2 grid with the axes being frequency and complexity, anything high-frequency and low-complexity is ideally suited for an AI agent.

This includes password resets, account balances, shipping status, and other mundane things people don’t like doing.

The rest of the more complex interactions will be handled by human agents, but these conversations will still have some element of AI in them. The conversation may start with an AI agent or AI could advise the human agent on what to say.

Over time, an AI agent will be a standard part of a contact center agent’s toolkit and will work with the human to provide upleveled interactions.

While I can’t get into the specifics of the information shared at the event, I can say this topic of bringing people and AI together was a big focus for Amazon Connect Horizons.

During my time there, I had a chance to talk to Pasquale DeMaio, VP of Amazon Connect, to get his thoughts.

DeMaio said:

“We believe a full agentic solution on top of Connect is the key to the future of everything we will do in customer service.”

“That doesn’t mean every interaction will be fully agentic. In fact, we believe that a human-centric experience is absolutely essential, and customers need the ability to seamlessly move back and forth across human and AI agents.”

2. Amazon Connect Is Not Just for Builders

The biggest misconception regarding Amazon Connect is that it’s only for builders.

That was true when the company launched Amazon Connect, but that was many years ago.

As DeMaio put it, Amazon “has always had more UX than API,” but the company does offer a best-in-class developer experience, as one would expect with it being an AWS product.

One of the ironies of this point is that because of the pre-built integrations Amazon Connect has, there is often less developer time required with some of its competitors.

One of the system integrators I talked with at the event told me that when going from Genesys on-prem to a cloud solution, the migration path to Amazon Connect is easier than with Genesys Cloud, because so much of it is integrated.

I asked DeMaio about developer-led customers versus out-of-the-box customers, and he explained that “the broad majority of our customers are not doing any or minimal development.”

He added, “I don’t want to dissuade customers from developing, but for almost everything we do, we have low-code and no-code interfaces making customization easy.”

This is consistent with the experiences of the customers I have talked to, as almost all of them have set up Amazon Connect with just a few mouse clicks.

3. Utilization Pricing Will Be the Norm in the Norm AI Era

One of the unique aspects of Amazon Connect is that it uses utilization-based pricing.

The majority of other CCaaS providers, by contrast, offer plans priced on a per-seat per-month basis, regardless of whether the seat is used or not.

Most customers will estimate the number of seats they need during peak periods, which creates a massive overpayment, as many of these seats will be unused most of the year.

Consider a retailer whose call volume skyrockets between Thanksgiving and Christmas. No retail organization wants its customers to have to wait too long in a queue, so they will staff up during these times.

With Amazon Connect, companies can provision as many seats as they want but only pay for the minutes used.

The criticism of this is that spend won’t be consistent month over month, which is true, but I have yet to talk to a customer that isn’t spending significantly less with utilization-based pricing.

Generally speaking, there are a handful of customers, such as government organizations, who prefer a consistent month over month cost, even if that means overspending, but that is no more than about 5% of companies.

With AI, vendors have been experimenting with different pricing models including per seat and outcome-based pricing, but the only one that will scale over time is utilization.

The concept of a “seat” doesn’t make sense with AI agents, as they are just machines, and a single agent can handle thousands of calls.

Since AI spins CPU/GPU cycles, it’s the easiest and fairest way to price and, over time, will become the norm.

4. A Fully Integrated CX Platform Will Create Differentiation in the AI Era

As an industry we talk about “CCaaS” as its own market but in reality, there is no such thing.

What customers really want is a CX solution that is comprised of CCaaS plus a bunch of other products such as quality management, WEF, WEM, and other functions.

Most of the traditional CCaaS providers have chosen partners for many of those functions, creating integration challenges and silos of data. With AI, silos of data lead to fragmented insights.

Looking ahead, vendors need to bring these capabilities together under a single platform to deliver AI that spans the entire customer journey.

AWS designed Amazon Connect to be a single platform to simplify deployments. In my conversation with DeMaio, he mentioned that when Amazon wins a customer, they often replace over 30 vendors, which greatly simplifies deployments.

In the AI era, a single platform is necessary to unify the data and provide meaningful CX insights.

Although Amazon Connect came to market prior to the AI boom, it was developed with this vision.

DeMaio has told me on several occasions that the mission of Amazon Connect is to create the most advanced CX AI solution that requires a single platform.

This is why the company chose to build its own adjacencies rather than trying to shortcut it with acquisitions. This will serve it well as AI capabilities become the criteria for vendor selection.

Summary

When Amazon Connect first came to market, I was skeptical as to whether a late entrant could create enough differentiation to usurp the established vendors.

AWS has certainly done that, as in just a few years it has gone from new vendor to Gartner MQ leader.

Connect initially targeted organizations looking to transform itheir customer experiences, but that’s all companies today.

Moving forward, AWS’ single platform, which encompasses CCaaS plus many of the adjacencies required to run a contact center, should serve it well as the AI transition moves from vision to reality.

Yet in many enterprises, the tools remain underutilized.  

With many WEM capabilities bundled into larger CCaaS deployments, they often sit idle, reduced to basic scheduling and adherence reporting.  

This ‘switch-on-and-forget’ approach means that despite investing in powerful platforms, leaders rarely unlock their full potential.  

The result is a workforce managed by numbers, not supported by people.  

As Jim Fleming, WFM Solutions Consultant at Sabio, warns:  

“Although many organizations have feature-rich WEM platforms, they’re only scratching the surface of their capabilities, often driven by outdated or redundant processes.” 

The ripple effects are clear: agents get locked into rigid shifts, coaching sessions slip through the cracks, feedback loops stall, and KPIs from another era still define performance.  

In too many operations, contact centers are stuck firefighting, not optimizing.  

WEM Needs a Rethink  

WEM can often be viewed as a cost center, instead of a value driver. 

However, when done right, WEM creates a dynamic, agent-centric environment where scheduling, coaching, quality, and analytics all work together, driving improved CX. 

The tool’s real value lies in creating a dynamic, agent-centered environment where scheduling, coaching, and quality all feed into one another.  

Unfortunately, many enterprises never manage to make that leap.  

“Organizations go through rigorous processes to ensure they invest in the right tools, yet they don’t invest in appropriate support to fully leverage the solutions,” Fleming explains.  

“They essentially turn the lights on with basic functionality rather than innovating through technology and processes to differentiate from competitors.”  

In a nutshell, WEM is not just about tools; it’s about design.  

Features like AI-driven scheduling or automated quality management can have a significant impact – but only when paired with processes that value agents as much as SLAs.  

Tackling Everyday Frustrations  

When organizations are able to shift their mindsets around the role of WEM, results often come quickly.  

Take one of the most common pain points in any contact center: booking time off.  

At Benenden Health, staff used to wait for manual approval of holiday requests. Now, thanks to a ‘Time Management’ app developed with Sabio inside Genesys WEM, they get instant decisions.  

“The automated decision-making means advisors receive instant decisions on their time-off requests, completely eliminating the need for human intervention,” Fleming explains. 

However, the effect stretched beyond efficiency. Transparency boosted morale, giving advisors confidence and control over their allowances.  

It’s a small change with a big impact, and proof that WEM isn’t just about operational gains.  

As Fleming puts it:  

“When properly implemented with agent-centric design, WEM tools don’t just improve operational metrics; they create happier, more empowered employees.”

Where WEM Trips Up in the Real World  

The insights from Benenden’s WEM implementation paint a picture of what it is like on the frontline of customer service and experience.   

This is an area that Sabio is particularly passionate about, as evidenced by its Community Days, where planners and CX leaders share stories of their individual experiences.  

One common frustration that seems to come up time and time again is the gap between expectation and execution.  

“There’s often a disconnect between what organizations think their WEM technology will do versus the processes needed to actually achieve those outcomes,” Fleming says.  

Leaders may think automated leave is already ‘live’ – only to realize the processes behind it were never built.  

Another blocker is trust. AI-driven forecasting and scheduling promise huge efficiency gains, but many planners remain hesitant, as Fleming explains:  

“There’s leadership pressure to embrace AI, but planners need to understand how systems arrive at their recommendations because they’ll inevitably be asked to explain the rationale.”  

Still, the sessions also reveal plenty of wins.  

For instance, one large retailer cut overstaffing by 12 percent after ditching static Excel models for dynamic scenario planning. SLA stability also improved.  

The message from these Community Days seems to be that when enterprises break out of firefighting mode, WEM starts delivering real results.  

Designing WEM Around People  

So, what does success for your WEM program actually look like?  

According to Fleming, it’s about making WEM a continuous process rather than a set of disconnected tools:  

“We integrate real-time adherence, agent self-service, learning nudges, AI-driven quality management, and analytics-driven insights into single, continuous processes.” 

That kind of design pays off across the board: businesses cut inefficiencies and protect SLAs; employees get fairer schedules, faster feedback, and better coaching; and customers enjoy quicker responses and higher first-call resolution.  

It also helps to shift the emphasis from compliance to empowerment.  

WEM stops being an admin system and becomes the connective tissue of the modern contact center.  

The Untapped Value of WEM  

For enterprise leaders, the lesson is clear: WEM isn’t about ticking boxes or measuring adherence; it’s about shaping the agent experience. And in shaping that experience, customer outcomes naturally improve.  

As Fleming concludes:  

“The goal is always to make agents’ working lives easier while delivering measurable business outcomes, because when you get that balance right, everyone benefits: agents, customers, and the business.”  

For those unsure if their WEM is pulling its weight, a fresh look at design and processes is the best starting point.  

You can learn more about Sabio’s WEM philosophy by visiting the website today.   

You can also gain insights into the company’s wider expertise and experience by checking out this exclusive interview with Sabio’s Chief Revenue Officer, Ioan MacRae. 

Press Ganey Forsta, often referred to as “PG Forsta”, is a rising force in the voice of the customer (VoC) space, rivaling Qualtrics.

Indeed, it recently placed as a Leader in the market’s latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for VoC.

In doing so, PG Forsta ranked alongside InMoment, which it later rolled up in May.

As such, this latest acquisition brings together three of the VoC space’s biggest brands.

Yet, Qualtrics is one of the market’s two most prominent names, with Medallia the other.

The acquisition will extend its market leadership and help consolidate the space.

Nevertheless, it will also boost Qualtrics’ industry-specific offerings, with PG Forsta widely deployed in the healthcare space and other highly-regulated sectors.

Across these industries, it offers advanced journey visualizations and templates, simplifying feature adoption.

PG Forsta is also well-known for its strong support services and differentiated AI solutions for front-line, customer-facing employees.

As such, it can offer many more bows to Qualtrics’ quiver, with the deal marking the VoC giant’s largest investment since it was taken private by Silver Lake in 2023.

“Bringing Qualtrics and Press Ganey Forsta together will accelerate the adoption of AI and create the most comprehensive platform for improving the human experience,” said Zig Serafin, CEO of Qualtrics.

Combining Qualtrics’ AI platform with Press Ganey Forsta’s trusted analytics and deep expertise creates an opportunity to deliver exceptional value and measurable outcomes for our customers.

The combined companies are expected to generate nearly $3BN in annual revenue. The cash and stock transaction is expected to close in the coming months, and the two companies will continue to operate independently in the meantime.

But beyond size, Patrick T. Ryan, Chairman and CEO of Press Ganey Forsta, stressed that the real differentiator is the ability to turn massive data into smarter, faster decisions powered by AI.

“AI is rapidly transforming every industry, and organizations need proven, innovative solutions grounded in deep expertise to move from insight to impact faster,” he said. This investment ignites our ability to deliver.”

Qualtrics has already been making strides in AI with tools like Conversational Feedback, Qualtrics Assist, synthetic research platform Edge Audiences, and Experience Agents. According to the company, more than one-third of customers have adopted these AI features, and 90 percent of their top 50 enterprise clients are already using them.

Now, with Press Ganey Forsta’s benchmarking data and advisory services in the mix, Qualtrics aims to help clients move from insights to impact faster.

As Bill Staikos, Founder and Managing Partner of Be Customer Led, put it in a LinkedIn post:

In the quickly consolidating CXM space, this is the loudest signal yet that ‘experience’ is more and more about data fidelity and industry depth. PG’s healthcare footprint is enormous, and the combined company also recently picked up InMoment. So this is data scale + vertical credibility + AI (and AI training) in one package.

That massive healthcare footprint sees Press Ganey Forsta work with 41,000 providers across 30 countries. As it does so, Press Ganey Forsta’s Human Experience (HX) Platform brings together customer experience, employee experience, patient experience, and market research. Yet, its influence is expanding.

Jim Davies, Co-Founder and Executive Partner at Actionary, summarized the move by telling CX Today:

The PG Forsta acquisition strengthens Qualtrics’ healthcare and VoC capabilities, expanding its portfolio and reinforcing its market leadership in experience management. The next frontier will be proactively embedding insights directly into operational workflows to shape customer experiences in real time.

What Does the Deal Mean for Qualtrics’ Rivals?

“The combo locks up healthcare for Qualtrics, as they’ll now have a massive inventory of longitudinal patient and clinician signals, wrapped in compliance workflows and integrations, that most horizontal platforms simply don’t have,” according to Staikos.

For Medallia, it brings both real pressure and hidden opportunity. The pressure is clear, as the narrative is shifting hard toward platforms that offer high-signal, trusted, industry-specific data and the ability to drive meaningful action within existing systems. But the opportunity lies in leaning into its strengths: blue-chip clients, strong service delivery, and a foothold in industries like financial services, travel, and telco, Staikos wrote.

Yet, what about other market competitors Sprinklr and Verint?

“[T]his is a green light [for Sprinklr] to lean into their “unified front-office execution,” continued Staikos. “They already own care, social, and marketing workflows; the move now is to prove closed-loop activation with measurable cost-to-serve and revenue lift using the signals they already collect.”

For Verint, which will merge with its rival Calabrio after its recent acquisition by Thoma Bravo, “the path is ‘interaction + intent + outcome’. They can bind VoC to interaction analytics and WEM so leaders can remove failure demand, versus just putting it on a dashboard.

“In the end, if you’re not going to be the data-plus-vertical incumbent, you have to be the activation engine that lives natively in CRM, CCaaS, EHR, POS, and ERP. Vertical depth, packaged outcomes, first-party data leverage, and ruthless proof of value in quarters, not years, is the winning message.

The VoC market has been heating up with consolidations and AI innovation. All eyes will be on how quickly the combined company can integrate its capabilities and deliver on its promise to turn better data into better human experiences at scale.

Today, companies aren’t just being measured on speed or resolution rates. They’re being measured on how it feels to do business with them.

That feeling, the tone of a conversation, the empathy in an answer, the confidence in a response; these usually comes down to one thing: how supported the agent on the other end actually feels.

Workforce engagement management is the connective tissue that keeps human-led customer experiences from falling apart under pressure.

Originally born from workforce optimization (WFO) – which focused on labor cost, scheduling, and productivity – workforce engagement management expands the scope. It adds intelligence, coaching, flexibility, and voice-of-the-employee feedback into the equation.

The business case is obvious: high agent churn is expensive. Disengaged teams drag down CSAT and NPS. Frontline burnout doesn’t just affect morale; it affects every metric a CEO cares about.

But the strategy isn’t just HR’s problem. WEM cuts across operations, IT, and customer leadership. In modern enterprises it’s becoming foundational to everything from digital transformation to AI-readiness.

VISIT THE WEM MARKETPLACE

What Is Workforce Engagement Management?

So, what is workforce engagement management?

WEM software is a suite of technologies designed to improve the day-to-day experience of employees and agents. It’s there for the people answering calls, handling chats, resolving issues, or keeping the service engine running behind the scenes.

WEM platforms bring together previously siloed functions like:

• Workforce forecasting and scheduling (WFM)
• Quality assurance and interaction scoring (QM)
• Learning and coaching workflows
• Performance dashboards and gamification
• Real-time feedback and voice-of-the-employee programs
• AI-powered assistants and agent-facing automation

The best platforms do all of this across cloud environments, hybrid teams, and global time zones, with as little admin as possible. What really sets the WEM model apart is that it’s designed for people, not just processes. Vendors are building tools that offer real-time coaching prompts, simplified self-scheduling tools that actually consider agent preferences, and dashboards that monitor burnout.

WEM has become a strategic partner to:

• Operations: by tightening resource alignment and reducing downtime
• CX leaders: by lifting customer sentiment through empowered agents
• IT and digital teams: by enabling automation without alienation
• HR and L&D: by tracking skill development in real time, not quarterly

It also connects tightly to other pillars in the modern CX ecosystem, from ERP systems to business intelligence platforms.

WEM vs. Legacy Workforce Tools: Understanding the Evolution

Talk to any enterprise ops lead or CX architect about workforce software, and you’ll probably hear this first: “We’ve got some of that already.”

What they usually mean is WFO, WFM, or a quality management system that hasn’t been updated in years. Somewhere along the line, it all blurred together. But there are differences to be aware of.

• Workforce Optimization (WFO): This is the legacy stack. Workforce optimization was built for scale, not flexibility. It’s a system of record for making sure the right number of people were in the right place at the right time, with as little waste as possible.
• Workforce Management (WFM): Forecasts, schedules, rosters. If WFO is the umbrella, WFM is the spine. It calculates expected volumes and assigns shifts accordingly, across voice, chat, email, social, sometimes even back office tasks.
• Quality Management (QM): Every enterprise has some version of this. A system that records calls, tracks disclosures, and grades interactions. Some still use spreadsheets. Others have automated tools that flag risky phrases or negative sentiment.

Workforce engagement management changes the lens. It doesn’t just track productivity or performance; it helps create the conditions where productivity actually happens.

It connects scheduling with well-being. Performance with recognition. Coaching with data. It gives agents the ability to swap shifts, track progress, and get live feedback without jumping through three systems and two supervisors.

The best WEM software listens to agents as much as it monitors them. It surfaces burnout risk, not just missed KPIs. Plus, it turns “manager reviews” into live, AI-driven guidance when it matters most, in the middle of a conversation, not the end of the month.

Essential WEM Capabilities for Modern Contact Centers

Plenty of platforms claim to boost engagement. But WEM software is different, not just because of what it includes, but because of how it connects those features into the day-to-day flow of work.

Here’s what defines leading WEM solutions in 2025:

AI-Powered Forecasting & Scheduling

WEM starts with smarter staffing. AI tools predict contact volume across channels (voice, chat, social, email), then build schedules around both demand and agent availability, including preferences and skills. Some systems, like NICE EEM, even auto-adjust shifts intra-day to fill unexpected gaps.

Real-Time Quality Management

Traditional QM scores interactions after the fact. WEM platforms now layer conversational analytics, real-time transcription, and auto-suggestions to help agents course-correct mid-call, not after it’s too late. They go beyond quality monitoring and call recording, with real-time insights.

Performance & Gamification Dashboards

Agents and supervisors get tailored dashboards that show key KPIs from AHT to CSAT, alongside gamified goals, rewards, and badges. Not just for fun – for focus. It works: a Gallup study found gamification boosts productivity by up to 14% when combined with coaching.

Learning & Development, Embedded

WEM software often includes integrated learning management system (LMS) modules, allowing supervisors to assign training based on performance data, not gut feel. Employees get regular microlearning nudges tied to real-time metrics. They’re smart, targeted, and actually used.

Voice of the Employee (VoE) & Sentiment Tracking

Feedback tools are embedded into most leading WEM platforms. Pulse surveys, in-session sentiment tagging, eNPS trend tracking. All designed to give leaders a line of sight into engagement, before it becomes attrition.

Hybrid-Ready Scheduling & Self-Service

Self-scheduling. Mobile shift swaps. At-a-glance schedule visibility. In a hybrid world, these features are increasingly crucial. Companies don’t just need to manage employee schedules; team members need to be able to make shift changes themselves.

Measurable Business Impact: The ROI of WEM Solutions

Ask any enterprise CX leader where they’re losing ground, and chances are the answer isn’t tooling – it’s people. Attrition, disengagement, inconsistent performance. The fundamentals. The truth is, most of it’s avoidable if the systems around the work actually support the people doing it.

That’s the core promise of workforce engagement management in 2025. It’s not just better data or cleaner interfaces, but an operational model built for sustained, scalable performance: one that integrates AI, learning, flexibility, and accountability into the work itself.

Here’s where the return on investment becomes undeniable:

1. Serious Retention Improvements

Contact centers have a talent problem. The work is hard, the pressure is growing, and legacy systems aren’t built to reduce either. The result? Enterprise-level attrition rates of 35%–45% are still considered “normal”, and the true cost per lost agent runs deep:

• $10,000–$15,000+ in replacement and training costs
• Knowledge loss
• Disrupted team continuity
• CX instability, especially for high-value customers

WEM solutions counter this with structure. They allow agents to:

• See progress, not just tasks
• Adjust schedules to fit real lives
• Receive feedback that’s timely and specific
• Access growth paths without needing to chase them

This is what shifts perception from “just a job” to a role worth keeping.

2. CX That Starts From the Inside Out

What drives true loyalty, especially in high-emotion, high-complexity interactions, is the confidence and care on the other end. WEM software makes that possible by:

• Flagging sentiment changes in real time
• Providing AI-suggested prompts during live interactions
• Helping agents manage stress levels and emotional loads through pacing and workflows
• Tying the voice of the employee (VoE) insights directly into customer journey metrics

When agents feel heard, supported, and prepared, they’re more likely to listen, support, and solve.

3. Operational Control Without the Micromanagement

This is one of the reasons contact center leaders actually like WEM: it puts control back in their hands without overloading supervisors or requiring three tools to do one job.

Key benefits from the ops side include:

• AI-powered staffing models that adjust by hour, not just day
• Intraday management tools that detect gaps, absenteeism, and surges in real time
• Blended service support: voice, chat, async messaging; all tracked against unified KPIs
• Integration with CPaaS platforms to connect agent workflows with external customer comms

WEM helps ops teams run smoother shifts, make smarter staffing calls, and prevent fire drills before they start. It turns guesswork into decision science.

4. A Feedback Loop That Actually Works

Traditional employee feedback processes are often slow, vague, and almost never actionable in the moment. WEM makes engagement and feedback part of the actual workflow:

• End-of-shift sentiment pulses
• In-the-moment feedback tagging
• eNPS scores tied to performance windows
• Manager dashboards showing team trends in real time

Instead of waiting for problems to surface, WEM lets companies track friction as it builds, and respond before people check out.

5. A Bridge to the AI-Enabled Future of Work

AI isn’t just for self-service chatbots. The most forward-looking WEM platforms are already embedding it directly into the agent experience, not to replace humans, but to extend their capabilities.

• Smart Assist: Live prompts during customer interactions
• Auto-tagging of performance triggers and coaching moments
• Adaptive learning that updates training based on new behaviors
• Workflow routing that adapts to agent strengths and availability
• Emotional analysis to detect frustration and disengagement on both the agent and customer side

Some companies are even experimenting with systems that empower leaders to manage AI agents and human employee workflows on the same platform.

Leading WEM Vendors and Platform Selection

There are dozens of impressive workforce engagement management vendors worth considering today. Some are blending WEM and business intelligence, others are going all-in on AI. But all of the top providers have one thing in common – a commitment to improving the employee experience.

A few examples of companies to keep an eye on:

• NICE: NICE has been pushing WEM as more than a product; it’s a strategy. Their CXone WEM suite includes AI-powered forecasting, real-time coaching, voice of the employee tools, and gamification in one system.
• Genesys: The Genesys WEM suite is packed with tools for elevating employee experience, AI-powered scheduling and forecasting, automatic quality assurance, workplace scheduling, and even sentiment analysis are all included.
• Five9: Another CCaaS mainstay, Five9’s WEM capabilities have evolved rapidly, especially in AI-assisted scheduling and integrated performance management. It’s a good choice for organizations already using Five9 as a contact center backbone, looking to consolidate their workforce tools under one vendor.

Companies like Calabrio, Verint, and even AWS, all offer their own solutions tied to contact center systems and business intelligence tools.

Need a closer look? Visit the WEM market map.

THE WEM MARKET MAP

Choosing the Right WEM Solution: What to Ask

Before jumping into demos and procurement cycles, smart buyers get clear on three things:

• Where does WEM sit in your wider CX stack? Is it standalone, or does it need to integrate tightly with CRM, CCaaS, or CPaaS tools?
• What metrics are you trying to move? Retention? CSAT? Schedule adherence? Time to competency?
• How usable is it at the agent level? A platform is only as good as the adoption it gets, especially from the people actually doing the work.

Remember innovation, too. Most of the leading WEM vendors in the market today are going all-in on artificial intelligence, governance management, and intuitive automation. Take advantage.

Implementation Best Practices for Maximum Impact

Getting WEM software in place is one thing. Making it part of how teams actually work is more complicated. Here’s what high-performing teams do differently:

Start with Outcomes, Not Features

Before rolling out dashboards or changing schedules, clarify what you’re trying to improve.

• Higher agent retention?
• Smoother hybrid workflows?
• Faster time-to-proficiency for new hires?

Let those outcomes shape the strategy, not the other way around.

Need help planning your rollout? Read: The New Best Practices for WEM

Embed Feedback Loops

Don’t wait for the annual employee engagement survey.

• Use in-session pulse checks
• Track sentiment shifts in real time
• Let agents rate coaching interactions, not just supervisors

The feedback is already there. WEM just needs to catch it, route it, and act on it. Done right, it becomes part of the daily rhythm, not another initiative.

Personalize Performance, Without Playing Favorites

WEM dashboards make it easy to rank people. But the real value comes from coaching individual patterns, not just posting leaderboards.

• Who’s improving fastest?
• Who’s flatlining under pressure?
• Who’s consistently solving complex issues, but missing soft skill marks?

Use that insight to tailor coaching, training, and recognition, not just for fairness, but for effectiveness.

Build for Flexibility, Not Just Control

Self-scheduling, mobile notifications, shift trades: these features are friction reducers. Give agents more control, and watch adherence go up, not down.

Especially for hybrid or global teams, asynchronous flexibility is a major retention lever, and WEM platforms make it manageable without compromising ops integrity.

Integrate with the Rest of the Stack

WEM works best when it’s not a silo. That means tight integration with:

• CRM systems (for customer context)
• Business intelligence tools (for strategy alignment)
• CPaaS or CCaaS platforms (for seamless routing and escalation)

If it’s not connected, it won’t scale.

Workforce Engagement: What’s Next

Workforce engagement management hasn’t finished evolving. In the same way customer experience has evolved from contact resolution to journey orchestration, workforce engagement management is shifting, from dashboards and reports to intelligent, adaptive systems that respond in real time to what’s happening on the floor.

The core function hasn’t changed: WEM exists to help teams perform better, stay longer, and deliver consistently great experiences. What’s changing is how that happens, and the speed with which enterprise buyers are now expected to keep up.

Here’s where WEM is headed next:

• Intuitive AI-driven coaching: Vendors are moving from QA scorecards to live feedback systems. Agents are no longer waiting for weekly reviews to know how they’re doing. With conversational analytics and sentiment detection now embedded in many WEM platforms, coaching happens mid-interaction.
• Personalization at the Team Level: Personalization isn’t just for customers anymore. The best WEM software is already adapting performance plans, learning modules, and scheduling rules based on individual agent profiles, considering skill levels, schedule preferences, and past coaching outcomes.
• Experience Data: Historically, “engagement” was something companies surveyed once a year and filed under HR. But in a high-churn, always-on contact center? That model fails. In 2025, Voice of the Employee (VoE) and EX metrics are treated as critical signals as important as CSAT or NPS.
• Improved Hybrid Orchestration: Hybrid teams aren’t going away. If anything, they’re expanding, especially in regions where talent is global and support demand is 24/7. Modern WEM tools now handle multi-time-zone scheduling, mobile shift self-service, and role-specific dashboards.
• Increased Convergence: The days of WEM as a standalone product are ending. It’s becoming part of something bigger, an integrated experience management layer that spans customer data platforms, CRMs, CCaaS ecosystems, and analytics tools.

Need an up-to-date view of the latest trends in the WEM landscape? Check out the latest research and reports, with insights taken straight from market leaders.

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Why Workforce Engagement Management is Crucial to CX

There’s a shift happening in enterprise CX. It’s not just about faster tools or lower handle times. It’s about creating operations that care about people as much as they care about performance. Because in every customer interaction, agents either lift the brand or quietly erode it.

When companies treat engagement as a measurable, manageable part of their CX operation, the benefits stack up fast:

• Lower attrition
• More consistent experiences
• Higher trust from agents and customers alike
• Operational efficiency that doesn’t burn people out to deliver it

WEM doesn’t solve everything. It gives teams the infrastructure to solve what matters, from burnout to broken feedback loops, without building from scratch every quarter.

Looking to upgrade? CX Today is here to help:

• Join the Community: Be part of a dynamic CX community. Share insights, benchmark strategies, and keep pace with the leaders transforming customer and employee experience.
• Test the Tech: Explore the latest WEM platforms, CRM systems, CDPs, and more with real-world events, focused on the CX industry.
• Plan Smarter: Compare vendors across categories. Evaluate features that matter, and build a stack that works with the CX Marketplace.

Alternatively, explore the ultimate CX guide, a single destination for everything enterprise leaders need to know about the technologies, processes, and strategies shaping the future of experience.

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The all-cash deal is valued at approximately $1.4BN and is expected to close during the fourth quarter.

It is Thoma Bravo’s third acquisition in just a matter of weeks, following the roll-ups of Dayforce and Verint in late August.

Yet, PROS brings new capabilities to its portfolio, including CPQ (configure, price, quote), price optimization, and revenue intelligence solutions.

In announcing the deal, Jeff Cotten, President and CEO of PROS, stated that as a private company, “PROS will be more agile and have greater flexibility to invest in innovation and expand our platform.”

It will also gain the luxury of focusing on longer-term goals, like leading the emerging field of agentic intelligence and analytics, as it no longer has to manage for short-term quarterly results.

Nevertheless, what most excites Martin Schneider, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, is how PROs fits into the broader Thoma Bravo portfolio.

“Thoma Bravo continues to build out a sizable portfolio of applications providers outside of its previous concentration in cybersecurity,” he noted. “It will be interesting to see how well they can continue to drive momentum for PROS as a private equity-backed company.

“PROS has been making significant inroads in the hospitality and airline industries, but its recent investments in AI have made its pricing and CPQ offerings for B2B very compelling,” continued Schneider.

When we look at Thoma Bravo’s portfolio, they have the makings of a CPQ and revenue operations powerhouse, considering they are also the majority owners in Coupa and Conga software. How much the company wants to “mix and match” among its portfolio to create new offerings remains to be seen, but they have assembled quite a list of solid SaaS solutions for key elements of the go-to-market tech stack.

To Schneider’s point, alongside its cybersecurity heritage, Thoma Bravo is building quite the portfolio, in revenue operations, as he mentions, but also in customer engagement. In these spaces, other firms in the space are struggling to stand out. As such, its acquisition streak opens the door to some creative combinations.

The Creative Combinations in Thoma Bravo’s Portfolio

Consider Verint. Upon completion of that deal, the analytics software provider will merge with Calabrio, its workforce engagement management (WEM) rival, which Thoma Bravo owns.

But Aisera and Medallia are other obvious connections in the Thoma Bravo stable, as they compete with Verint in the conversational AI and voice of the customer (VoC) markets, respectively.

Thoma Bravo could also mix and match Verint in more intriguing ways. Take UserTesting, for example. Imagine blending Verint’s analytics with UserTesting’s real-time customer feedback and voice-of-customer insights, providing users with a full picture of the numbers and the narrative behind customer experiences, flowing straight into the contact center. Schneider’s colleague, Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, touted this possibility during a recent episode of CX Today’s Big News Show. 

Now, layer in Hyland, another Thoma Bravo company, to bring enterprise content management, rich data capabilities, and digital asset management on tap. Nuxeo, Hyland’s content platform, adds commerce-enabled DAM (digital asset management), opening the way for personalized content and shoppable experiences in real time.

Piecing all that together under one brand name would take an enormous effort. Yet, Thoma Bravo is in a position to stitch together a unified customer engagement platform that bring together content, customer voice, video, AI, and live engagement all under one roof.

And with the recent PROS acquisition, Thoma Bravo adds pricing and sales optimization. That’s the kind of end-to-end ecosystem that could reshape how brands understand, engage, and sell to their customers.

As teased in November, the “Five9 Fusion for ServiceNow” solution embeds some of Five9’s CCaaS tooling directly into ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM).

In doing so, both vendors hope to deliver a unified agent experience, consolidate support data, and lower management burden.

Five9 also has a similar offering with Salesforce. Meanwhile, ServiceNow has set up similar integrations with Genesys and Zoom.

These announcement signals that, as customers demand tighter CCaaS and CRM connections, both vendors are ready to lead from the front.

Going deeper on the latest integration, Kim Hill, SVP of Partner Sales at Five9, said:

Five9 Fusion for ServiceNow delivers a foundation for service excellence, eliminating the friction of multiple systems and empowering agents with a single interface to work confidently and efficiently and deliver faster, more personalized interactions at scale.

“With this new integration, every touchpoint becomes more intuitive and impactful for customers and agents alike.”

The integration goes live with two tools embedded into ServiceNow CSM, with a third to come soon.

First is Five9 TranscriptStream, which is its real-time transcription solution. It now integrates with the ServiceNow Workspace.

Of course, reps can refer to the live transcript at any point during phone conversations. However, TranscriptStream may also feed ServiceNow’s Now Assist.

In doing so, contact centers can generate call summaries, next steps, and more post-call notes from within the CRM itself.

Alongside real-time transcription, Five9’s intelligent routing engine now directs digital contacts into ServiceNow while pulling in metadata from CSM for smarter routing.

Additionally, the routing engine can combine that metadata with that from Five9 Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) solutions. That opens the door for routing decisions based on agent performance, forecasting, and schedule data.

Ultimately, that could enable contact centers to introduce routing logic, such as if an agent is about to go on break, they get a contact that’s likely simple to solve. That’s an exciting possibility.

However, onto the third tool: Native Call Controls, which will come to the ServiceNow Agent Workspace in early 2026.

With Native Call Controls in ServiceNow CSM, reps can manage customer calls in a Universal Agent Inbox. As such, agents may handle interactions across all channels on ServiceNow. They can also do so in Five9. It’s the company’s choice!

Excited to bring that new level of flexibility to their 200 shared customers worldwide, Michael Ramsey, GVP of Product Management for CRM and Industry Workflows at ServiceNow, said:

Five9 Fusion for ServiceNow helps businesses break down fragmented systems and deliver a unified, agentic AI-powered service experience.

“By leveraging ServiceNow’s AI-driven CRM platform alongside Five9’s real-time transcription and intelligent routing, organizations gain end-to-end visibility and actionable insights, enabling agents to resolve issues faster and provide customers with exactly what they need, when needed.”

Lastly, by managing all customer service conversations directly on the ServiceNow platform, it’s simpler to connect these with its AI agents, which span the enterprise.

As such, contact centers may devise resolution flows beyond the front office, pulling data from and actioning processes within various systems across the enterprise.

The Hot Take: A Significant Move Given ServiceNow’s CRM Ambitions

Five9 is answering customer calls for tighter CCaaS-CRM integrations and setting a course for a future where the two technologies converge. Its benefits are clear.

The same benefits apply to ServiceNow. Yet, it takes some unique advantages from the partnership.

Most obviously, it establishes the CRM as the central component of the customer service stack. Yet, by pulling closer to Five9 (alongside Genesys and Zoom), it edges closer to a new type of buyer: customer service leaders.

Already, ServiceNow is building fast momentum in the CRM space. In large part, this is because AI is becoming increasingly utilized in customer service and across the broader front office. As this trend continues, IT is increasingly leading buying decisions. Already, they use ServiceNow’s software for service management and most trust its technology.

However, if ServiceNow is serious about its ambitions to usurp Salesforce as the CRM market leader, it must initiate itself with CX function leaders.

Statement announcements with CCaaS leaders like Five9, as rubberstamped by the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant, help bridge the gap.

Customers will continue to have full access to the Sell product until the shutdown date.

As Zendesk noted in a web post, the move will help channel all its attention toward transforming the customer service stack.

“This change allows us to focus even more deeply on what we do best – helping businesses like yours deliver exceptional customer and employee service,” noted Jennifer Chang, VP of Product Development Program Management and Operations at Zendesk.

By concentrating our efforts on service, we can move faster, innovate more boldly with AI, and build solutions that make a bigger impact for your teams and your customers.

To help customers make the transition, Zendesk has set up a native integration with the Pipedrive sales CRM so they can export their data from Sell.

Similarly to Zendesk Sell, the sales force automation solution helps customers visualize their pipeline, manage leads, and automate the sales process, while generating reports with AI in a single workspace.

Zendesk Is Primed to Go All In on Customer Service

Zendesk has a massive global user base that leverages its customer service CRM. But until recent years, it struggled to answer: what’s next?

In 2018, it expanded into providing a broader CRM platform by releasing Zendesk Sell, but never went all-in to channel Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and others across all CX functions.

From there, it moved to acquire SurveyMonkey to expand into voice of the customer (VoC) solutions, but the deal ultimately broke down.

Shortly after, it went private and brought in former Genesys President Tom Eggemeier as CEO.

He then pulled Zendesk back to what it does best: customer service.

With now almost as many people who had been Genesys execs on its board as Genesys, it has since bought a cloud contact center platform, expanded into workforce engagement management (WEM), and launched its Resolution platform.

How Zendesk Is Reimagining Customer Service Experiences

Eggemeier shared his vision for the future of customer service in a recent interview with CX Today.

During the interview, he stated: “Five years from now, it’s definitely going to be more automated… I think it’s going to be more proactive. It’s going to be more personalized. And you’re going to start blurring these lines because everyone’s going to be focused on how do I create lifetime value, retention, and satisfaction with my customers, employees, and the businesses that I serve.”

Eggemeier acknowledged that “there is a little bit of a hype cycle” when it comes to integrating AI into contact center operations. But, he added that the technology is more than a passing fad. The CEO continued:

It is going to fundamentally change the way you provide customer service or employee service, whether it’s business or consumers. It is going to fundamentally change your work and the nature of work.

This will present challenges as voice is seen as the most natural interface for human communication and is at the forefront of AI advancement, especially with the rise of autonomous agentic workers in contact centers.

However, as AI-powered voice assistants take on more responsibilities, potentially even to the point of interacting with other digital agents on behalf of customers, questions arise around how they are monitored and how systems ensure accountability and human escalation when things go wrong.

“We’re preparing ourselves and our customers for that future and that eventuality today. So, rather than buying a point solution that is boxed out, we’re laying the foundations so that our customers can grow on the journey,” summarized Jonathan Barouch, VP & GM of Zendesk for Contact Center.