The cloud-based software company announced its third-quarter earnings report on Monday, revealing strong results across the board. 

This has led to ongoing investments into current and future AI products and initiatives. 

“We remain on track to exceed the $100MN in ARR from new products by the end of 2025,” said RingCentral CEO, Vladimir Shmunis, adding:

“Adoption of our new AI-led products is broad-based across various customer cohorts, from small businesses to large enterprises.

“Our GSP partners are also beginning to sell these new offerings, expanding our reach and accelerating adoption.” 

This expansion has led the company to roll out multiple AI product releases this week, increasing its customer base by branching out into emerging AI trends. The launches are aimed at enhancing communication experiences for both customers and agents.

This has resulted from an R&D spend of $125MN into its new AI portfolio. The company is already seeing consistent profitable growth, in the hopes of exceeding the year-end ARR target. 

RingWEM Adds AI Workforce Tools to Cloud Contact Center

On Monday, RingCentral released its latest AI product, RingWEM, an AI-powered workforce engagement management suite designed to enhance its native cloud contact center, RingCX. 

The suite offers four capabilities to strengthen customer experience across agent performance, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiencies by using AI-powered insights: 

AI Quality Management: Designed to give human agents the skills to improve their overall performance, the quality management tool will use personalized customer quality criteria to evaluate and provide extensive insight and feedback on customer calls. 

The tool is used to analyze and observe full customer interactions and agent workflows, delivering focused guidance for reskilling. 

Furthermore, the tool offers AI-based coaching recommendations to improve agent expertise, allowing enterprises to improve their workforce by viewing their agents’ performance analytics, common communication themes and advise them on next steps using the provided data-driven advice. 

AI Workforce Management: Used to improve quality in customer service, planning for potential challenges, and overall efficiency, this tool combines precise data forecasting and resourceful scheduling to align staff with probable tasks to tackle targeted demand. 

By using precise data forecasting, the AI workforce management tool can use algorithms to analyze past and current data trends and business drivers to predict the likelihood of contact quantities, allowing time for agents to tackle abnormal spikes before they occur. 

With intelligent scheduling, the workforce tool can generate actionable schedules for agents to follow that include agent preferences, adjustable service level actions, and business requirements to keep agents on track with tasks. 

These can be modified to fit irregular changes in working conditions to ensure that service levels stay the same to avoid customer friction. 

Additionally, customer agent supervisors can run probable scenarios to analyze the effectiveness of staff models and company changes before they are implemented. 

AI Interaction Analytics: This tool provides enterprises with high-level insights into customer satisfaction with interactions, compiling data taken from surveys and summaries from the interactions themselves to address negative customer experiences. 

AI Interaction Analytics can dissect customer conversations through voice tone, language preferences, and patterns in speech to assess satisfaction. 

The tool can use this and other conversations to further analyze key customer trends and issues as a whole, allowing businesses to proactively address these concerns before escalation. 

Screen Recording: Similar to the AI Quality Management capability, this tool allows supervisors to evaluate customer-agent interactions by collectively linking calls and screen recordings for a wider range of information into quality of conversation and workflow efficiency. 

These tools can be utilized to address underlying issues with agent performance and customer satisfaction and elevate operations in contact centers to deliver smarter service. 

RingCentral Debuts Agentic Voice AI Suite

RingCentral has also released its agentic voice AI communications suite, encompassing three tools that enhance communication experiences across the lifespan of each customer interaction. 

AI Receptionist (AIR): Before a conversation begins, this tool ensures that calls are not left unanswered. 

Using the voice AI ability to interact with customers, this AI agent can comprehend a customer’s reason for calling, answer questions, hand off real-time interactions to agents with summarized caller context, and identify and log potential opportunities that may require a human agent to follow up. These can help to avoid customer friction and repeated information. 

For scheduling interactions, AIR provides multi-calendar support across a company to integrate employee schedules and harmonize teams. 

Sales opportunities are collected and stored for future use in Salesforce, HubSpot, or with AIR’s own database. 

AIR can also be used on any SIP-based phone, allowing AI customer handling to be dealt with across the cloud, any premises, or hybrid setups. 

Brian Tucker, Chief Digital Officer at Televero Health, is a customer of RingCentral’s AIR tool. 

He said, “Using RingCentral’s AI Receptionist, the results are undeniable. We saw our monthly appointments increase 14 percent in the first four months, an increase in monthly revenue of over $200,000. 

“That kind of growth and return on investment is exactly what we need.”

AI Virtual Assistant (AVA): During a conversation, AVA can provide an agent with real-time assistance across customer interactions by implementing four key capabilities: 

• Real-Time Calls and Meeting Summaries: Identify the relevant information, questions, and actionable tasks during the span of a call or meeting, generating summaries and highlight reels to allow agents to keep track of the interaction’s objective during the call. 
• AI Writer to Create and Translate Communications: This capability can draft, edit, and translate conversations in multiple languages, allowing for seamless and customer-focused messaging. 
• Multi-Use Assistance Across Workflows: By adapting to a user’s communication method, via phone, text, or chat, this tool can provide intelligent prompts and relevant actions for each task. 
• Product Adoption and Feature Discovery: AVA can advise discovery and management methods to improve RingCentral’s overall customer enterprise experience. 

Kira Makagon, President & COO, RingCentral, explained the value of AVA in an enterprise workflow: “By putting trusted voice intelligence at employees’ fingertips, AVA makes work more productive and empowering,

“AVA is your personal virtual assistant that enables you to work smarter, faster, and more efficiently.”

AI Conversation Expert (ACE): After a conversation, ACE steps in to offer evaluated business insights from these interactions and adds it into one analytics and insights layer for a simplified outlook. 

It provides real-time insight into current customer satisfaction, trends in revenue, and overall agent team performance, giving context to performance data to allow leaders to act quickly. 

When requested, ACE can turn compound data into written summaries, recommend actions and examples of improvement, and be used an interactive interface to allow leaders to inquire related queries with instant results. 

Zach Jecklin, Chief Information Officer at Echo Global Logistics, and customer of ACE, uses the tool for improving company knowledge on customer calls and data trends. 

“AI Conversation Expert provides us with the detailed coaching for individual calls, and the dashboard connects the dots by rolling up all that data into a clear, concise view of the major trends impacting the entire business,” Jecklin said.  

“We used to have call data. Now, we have business intelligence. It’s that simple.”

RingCentral Pairs New AI Tools with Solid Growth

RingCentral has launched the new AI tools in conjunction with the announcement of its strong third earnings quarter. 

During its earnings call, the company reported a total revenue result of $639MN, seeing a growth of 5 percent from the previous year. 

Subscription revenue also increased, rising by 6 percent to $616MN, with a 23 percent rise of $130MN in free cash flow, which it intends to increase during the rest of the year.

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. 

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.

GET THE LATEST RESEARCH

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.

THE ULTIMATE CX GUIDE

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.

AWS, Five9, and Talkdesk join them in the Leader square, with the latter bouncing back after placing as a Visionary last year.

Content Guru also rises up the pile. It has shifted from the Niche Player quadrant and is now a Challenger. Meanwhile, Cisco moves in the opposite direction.

8×8 has dropped out of the evaluation, yet Zoom enters and takes its place as a Niche Player.

Alongside 8×8, Google, Microsoft, and Sprinklr are prominent CCaaS providers that don’t feature in the Magic Quadrant matrix.

The Definition of Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)

All cloud applications that enable customer support teams to manage multichannel conversations fall under the term “Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)”.

The providers included in the Magic Quadrant assemble those apps, both native and third-party, on CCaaS platforms, enabling service experiences led by both humans and AI.

Yet, it’s not all about facilitating conversations. CCaaS platforms will also offer solutions for analytics and reporting, agent assistance, and workforce engagement management (WEM).

While Gartner’s definition is more comprehensive, that’s ultimately what each vendor in the report offers.

The analyst evaluates them on such capabilities, alongside pricing models, support services, integrations, verified customer feedback (stripped from Gartner Peer Insights), and more.

In doing so, the research firm splits nine of the most prominent industry players into four groups: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players. Here’s how they performed.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders

Leaders sit in the top right-hand square of the Magic Quadrant, scoring above average in their “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision”. This year’s Leaders are:

• NiCE
• Genesys
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Five9
• Talkdesk

NiCE

NiCE has secured several major enterprise CCaaS deals this calendar year, including two nine-figure mega-contracts.

Key to these deals are its advanced global support services, which Gartner lauds, alongside the vendor’s “technical account manager support”.

Additionally, the analyst pinpointed “advanced AI and analytical capabilities” as a strength. However, it didn’t note how NiCE’s burgeoning enterprise partnerships, with the likes of AWS, ServiceNow, and Snowflake, aid that AI strategy and set the stage for end-to-end, automated resolution flows.

Also, Gartner fails to mention NiCE’s workforce engagement management (WEM) heritage, which continues to be a significant differentiator, especially with the top two third-party alternatives – Verint and Calabrio – set to merge. However, in fairness, confirmation of this merger seemingly came through after the research firm completed its evaluation.

Genesys

Genesys excels in big enterprise deployments, especially from its own on-premise install base, offering tried-and-tested playbooks, process maps, and solutions to make migrations easier.

Gartner recognizes these strengths, alongside its “adaptability and innovation”, highlighting Genesys’s rapid delivery of new, differentiated features.

Somewhat remarkably, however, Gartner doesn’t mention Genesys’s leading role in converging CCaaS and CRM solutions, despite noting this as a key market trend.

Its recent $1.5BN investment from Salesforce and ServiceNow seemingly rubberstamps Genesys’s strategy here, with the two CRM vendors taking learnings from their collaboration with the CCaaS revenue leader and applying those industry-wide.

As that trend kicks into gear, Genesys will continue to play a leading role in converging the customer support stack.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Gartner notes that Amazon Connect clients often report their satisfaction with building “functionally rich AI capabilities”, leveraging the broader AWS portfolio.

As this suggests, AWS uses its size well and enables differentiated innovation.

AWS also wins praise for its “customizable solutions”, which seems to reinforce perceptions that Amazon Connect is a platform for the builders.

Yet, the perceptions are outdated. For instance, its major platform re-architecture, announced in March 2025, embedded first-party AI capabilities across its platform, enabling customers to deploy native AI in “just a few clicks”.

As such, Amazon Connect is now more of a solution for businesses that want an “oven-ready” platform, as well as those looking to build. Unfortunately, whether intended or not, this report somewhat reinforces those antiquated notions.

Elsewhere, Gartner praises AWS’s “ability to scale”. Yet, surprisingly, omits its pricing model, which advances on consumption-based pricing. Indeed, it includes a single price for all AI features, lowers costs for AI testing, and ensures customers don’t need to pay for unused seats. That’s often a big deal-winner for AWS.

Five9

Five9 has endured some negative press in 2025 with multiple rounds of layoffs. However, its CCaaS revenue growth held firm, rising at a double-digit rate.

Gartner credits strengths in its “support services” and “broad market fit”, with Five9 growing far beyond its North American roots and delivering successful enterprise implementations worldwide.

Many of those implementations have a “high attach rate for AI Agent functionality”, per Gartner, with Five9 quick out of the gates in releasing AI agent functionality.

That speed reflects deeper strengths in contact automation, with it being the only CCaaS vendor to make it onto CX Today’s top conversational AI providers to watch list in 2025.

Talkdesk

After a two-year absence, Talkdesk is back in the Leader’s quadrant. Its “industry-specific solutions” are a big reason why, as it not only customizes its products to the sector, but pre-packages specialized integrations and workflows to accelerate migrations and innovation.

The solutions have expanded Talkdesk’s market, as Gartner emphasizes. Yet, another key solution that the CCaaS provider released helped here: Talkdesk Embedded.

Interestingly, this solution helps “embed” elements of Talkdesk’s cloud contact center into third-party CRM and helpdesk systems. Not only is that innovative from a platform convergence perspective, but it makes Talkdesk an attractive option for system integrators (SIs).

Lastly, Gartner lauds Talkdesk’s account managers, who have seemingly helped its customer satisfaction levels rise sharply over the past 18 months.

Yet, CTO Munil Shah, who arrived in April 2024, also deserves plaudits. Indeed, since his arrival, Talkdesk hasn’t just executed on its industry-specific strategy but delivered several unique innovations to boost the customer and employee experience. Its AI Rewriter is an excellent example.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Challengers

Challengers in the Magic Quadrant place in the top left-hand square of the Magic Quadrant, excelling in their “ability to execute” but trailing Leaders in their “completeness of vision”. This year’s Challengers are:

• Content Guru

Content Guru

Like Genesys, Content Guru has established a reputation for doing “big” well. Gartner underscores this, alongside the vendor’s suitability for brands with significant scale and customization requirements.

Additionally, the research firm recognizes “high service availability” and “AI service orchestration” as key differentiators for the brand.

However, Gartner doesn’t reference how Content Guru is converging CCaaS and customer data platform (CDPs). That is a big differentiator, as the provider helps its customers to establish an omni-data layer from which all its AI innovation can spring, setting customers up for long-term success.

Given this, it’s perhaps surprising that Content Guru didn’t score better in its “completeness of vision”. Nevertheless, Gartner does raise “negotiated SLAs” and “complex pricing” as two of its cautions.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Visionaries

Visionaries in the Magic Quadrant sit in the bottom right-hand square of the Magic Quadrant, scoring well in their “completeness of vision” but lagging Leaders in their “ability to execute”. This year’s Visionaries are:

• There are no Visionaries in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS.

Gartner Magic Quadrant Niche Players

Niche Players in the Magic Quadrant sit in the bottom left-hand square of the Magic Quadrant. While they have accrued a strong industry presence, their “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision” fall behind the market Leaders, according to Gartner. This year’s Niche Players are:

• Cisco
• Zoom
• Vonage

Cisco

Cisco is one of only two “Customers’ Choice” vendors, which Gartner tagged in its latest Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer” for CCaaS report. That reflects the high satisfaction rates of its install base.

As such, it’s surprising that the analyst didn’t note positive word of mouth as a core strength. Instead, it applauded how Cisco has converged CCaaS with UCaaS and CPaaS. Indeed, this combination boosts the Webex Contact Center in various ways, such as enabling swarming and next-level proactive customer service. As AI agents soon start leading outbound conversations, that latter strength will come increasingly into its own.

Meanwhile, the report also commends Cisco for its “global support network” and “advanced security measures”. The latter demonstrates how Cisco, like AWS, is doing an excellent job of leveraging its broader portfolio to deliver unique innovation.

Nevertheless, it has dropped into the Niche Player Quadrant. Amongst Cisco’s listed cautions are its “multiple administrative interfaces” and “limited third-party integrations”, which are possible justifications here.

Zoom

Zoom only entered the CCaaS space in 2022, but ever since, its innovation streak has gone from strength to strength, while its install base has surged.

Much of that is due to its reputation for delivering consumer-grade tech to the enterprise. Yet, Gartner also pinpoints its “tight UCaaS integration” as a principal reason, alongside its “native AI functionality” and “simplified setup and administration.”

However, Zoom doesn’t just think of CCaaS and UCaaS. On one platform, it delivers both solutions alongside conversational AI, sales intelligence, Workvivo, and many more applications. That single ecosystem sets the stage for original innovation and data sharing that can set Zoom apart.

As such, expect Zoom to rise in the coming years, as it also addresses the “breadth of features” and “third-party integrations” concerns Gartner pinpoints in its report.

Vonage

Like Cisco, Vonage wins plaudits for converging CCaaS, UCaaS, and CPaaS. Its CPaaS offering is particularly strong, though, enabling access to APIs – like 5G network APIs – that strengthen the spine of Vonage’s contact center platform.

Gartner also applauds how Vonage has optimized its solution for the midmarket and its “Salesforce Service Cloud integration”, although the latter doesn’t appear much different from the integrations offered by Genesys and AWS.

Where Vonage does stand apart is in its Intelligent Workspace, which leverages AI to rearrange the screen based on the call, enabling agents to better navigate their desktops.

However, Gartner cautions toward the provider’s “system reporting” and “tendency toward use of CRM partner technology.”

The CCaaS Magic Quadrant: A Third-Party Take

For an extra perspective, CX Today invited Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, to share an alternative take.

Kerravala anticipated NiCE and Genesys would lead the pack again, yet agreed with AWS creeping closer to Gartner’s frontrunners.

“As a late entrant, for Amazon to have made its way into such a strong position in such a short period of time is a testament to how much they have invested in this business, said Kerravala. “They came to market around the same time as Twilio but have certainly set themselves apart.”

Five9 also maintains its place at the top. However, the analyst cautions about its long-term sticking power. While acknowledging its CTO as an industry thought-leader, Kerravala referenced the executive turnover, since Gartner completed its research, as a concern. After all, it likely indicates flux in its strategy.

“[This] shows the flaw in the Magic Quadrant,” he noted. “It’s a document that is supposed to live on for a year but can’t adapt to market changes.”

Nevertheless, Kerravala’s most significant gripe is with Cisco’s drop from a Challenger to a Niche Player. “Gartner’s position does not align with reality at all,” he said.

Cisco CCaaS has shown very strong growth and was a Gartner Peer Insight Customer Choice [provider] for 2025. This shows the disjointedness in Gartner research.

“While I don’t think they’re a leader yet, they have a very high level of execution capability and should be a Challenger or Visionary.”

Lastly, Kerravala stated his belief that Zoom should shift right, citing its vision for enterprise communications beyond CCaaS and UCaaS, alongside “very strong” channel feedback and its “tremendous growth up and down market.”

Delve into additional coverage of Magic Quadrant reports exploring adjacent technologies below:

• Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC) 2024
• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Conversational AI Platforms 2025
• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) 2025

The move aims to bolster RingCentral’s cloud contact center solution: RingCX, which it launched in late 2023.

Since then, RingCX has accrued over 1,000 customers. Many chose the CCaaS solution because of its close integration with RingEX, the widely implemented unified communications platform.

While that’s its biggest differentiator, RingCentral had all the baseline capabilities of a CCaaS platform apart from WFM, until now.

Already, CommunityWFM’s capabilities are available as “RingCentral AI Workforce Management (WFM)”, which starts at a pricing point of $20 per agent, per month.

Additionally, with RingCX’s automated quality assurance (QA) solution, RingCentral can ensure its solution delivers a broad range of workforce optimization (WFO) capabilities.

Celebrating the move, Kira Makagon, President & COO at RingCentral, said: “By providing CommunityWFM’s AI-driven workforce management capabilities together with our AI-first RingCX platform, we’re giving businesses the complete set of tools to optimize operations while empowering their people, creating the foundation for superior agent performance and effortless customer experiences.

Adding AI Workforce Management to our portfolio allows us to extend our AI-first innovation to a complete portfolio of AI-based products – starting from agentic AI assistance, to real-time guidance, quality management, analytics, and now AI-powered workforce management.

As Makagon referenced, CommunityWFM offers a deep contact center WFM portfolio, which comprises solutions for forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, and review. These tools are more advanced than those most CCaaS providers have attached to their solutions.

Interestingly, CommunityWFM is also a highly collaborative solution, enabling workforce management leaders to share messages and interact with agents and supervisors, so they’re not just the “computer says no” people in the background of the contact center. Instead, they’re an integral part of customer, employee, and business success.

Businesses of all sizes have implemented CommunityWFM, with multiple case studies covering enterprises in financial services, insurance, and utilities.

Excited to join RingCentral, Daryl Gonos, CEO & Co-founder at CommunityWFM, said: “RingCentral uses our Workforce Management platform that is integrated with RingCX to optimize their own customer support operations.

By leveraging AI-driven forecasting to deliver more accurate workforce predictions with significantly less manual analysis, we’re creating an intelligent, unified experience that not only simplifies today’s workforce operations, but also anticipates the future needs of hybrid work environments and evolving customer demands.

Lastly, given that RingCX most often attracts SMBs, this acquisition represents an opportunity for many brands in this segment to advance beyond spreadsheets and Erlang Calculators.

Now, it’s up to RingCentral to showcase the potential value-add these businesses can achieve by implementing a full-fledged WFM platform.

What Does This Acquisition Mean for the WFM Market?

CommunityWFM was one of the few remaining independent WFM market providers.

Indeed, NiCE scooped up Playvox and Dialpad rolled up Surfboard last year. Meanwhile, Verint and Calabrio announced a shock merger last month.

As such, Peopleware (formerly injixo) and Assembled are the only two independent vendors with a significant global presence.

Aspect did spin out of Alvaria last year to offer an alternative. Meanwhile, Eleveo can offer a broader workforce engagement management (WEM) suite.

Nevertheless, the options for third-party solutions are limited.

Some may suggest that, as CCaaS providers develop their own WFM solutions, these are now becoming outdated in this era of contact center convergence.

However, the likes of CommunityWFM, Peopleware, and Assembled can offer much deeper solutions than those offered by the CCaaS stalwarts, bar NiCE and possibly Genesys.

In addition, global enterprises often use different core contact center solutions across locations. For instance, some may use Cisco on-premise in one location, Genesys in another, and Five9 elsewhere. In such enterprises, the ability to overlay one third-party platform that integrates with each and centralize staff management is an attractive proposition.

Typically, they also offer tighter integrations with platforms outside the core CCaaS offering, like Human Capital Management (HCM) platforms, which can help businesses put employee and operational data to work.

As such, third-party WFM solutions have their place. Yet, the options are shrinking. Meanwhile, innovation across the space may suffer, with the lack of independent vendors channeling all their effort into the WFM market.

So, while the move is a smart snap up for RingCentral, which will not only boost its portfolio but initiate the provider with a raft of new customers, it offers some tough questions for the market in a broader sense.

Verint Confirms $2BN Takeover by Thoma Bravo, Set to Merge with Calabrio

Thoma Bravo has agreed to acquire Verint in a deal that values the tech provider at $2BN, including debt.

Upon the deal’s completion, Verint will merge with Calabrio, its workforce engagement management (WEM) rival, which Thoma Bravo owns.

Also under the private equity firm’s ownership are Aisera and Medallia, which compete with Verint in the conversational AI and voice of the customer (VoC) markets, respectively.

However, there is no suggestion that these CX stalwarts will also be brought into the fold.

A Verint press release announcing the move contains a quote by an anonymous spokesperson, stating:

Together, Calabrio and Verint will bring a powerful set of products to accelerate a shared vision: delivering an AI-powered, open CX platform to customers who are focused on driving strong business outcomes in their operations.

In bringing these companies together, Thoma Bravo merges two of the “big three” WEM providers, with NiCE being the other (Read more…).

Accenture Snaps Up NeuraFlash, a Prominent Salesforce & AWS Consulting Company

Accenture has confirmed the acquisition of consulting firm NeuraFlash.

NeuraFlash chiefly provides services and solutions for businesses committed to Salesforce and AWS.

Yet, over the past 12 months, it has made a lot of noise in the CX space by developing agentic solutions for sales, service, and field service operations.

By doing so, it has established a reputation as a leading partner of Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, reporting 60+ Agentforce implementations in May 2025.

In a LinkedIn post from last week, NeuraFlash CEO and Co-Founder, T. Brett Chisholm, claimed his company is the “#1 Salesforce Agentforce partner!”

Salesforce echoed a similar sentiment during a recent earnings call, with Srini Tallapragada, President & Chief Engineering Officer, naming NeuraFlash a key Agentforce partner, alongside Accenture.

With the deal to roll up NeuraFlash, Accenture is perhaps looking to move from one of several key Agentforce players in the space to the undisputed, go-to Agentforce leader (Read more…).

Google Is Building AI Mode Agents to Automate Customer Support Tasks

Google has unveiled a new AI Mode agent designed to take on basic service tasks, starting with restaurant reservations.

The feature, currently locked behind the $250-per-month Google AI Ultra subscription, plugs into the company’s AI Mode for Search, which transforms the traditional results page into a Gemini-powered assistant.

For now, the agent’s functionality is limited. It can check live restaurant availability and link customers directly to booking platforms like OpenTable, Resy, and Tock.

However, future capabilities have already been mentioned, with Google planning integrations for local service appointments and event tickets via Ticketmaster, StubHub, SeatGeek, and Booksy.

This points to a much broader ambition: creating AI-powered ‘machine customers’ that can handle service interactions independently on behalf of humans.

The idea of machine-to-machine customer service isn’t entirely new.

Google has been experimenting with customer-facing AI for years – from Duplex making dinner reservations in 2022, to its more recent ‘Ask for Me’ feature, which dials businesses for users.

Yet, as analysts recently discussed on The Big CX News Show, these latest moves feel less like a revolution and more like an incremental step (Read more…).

Avaya Offers All Its Staff Voluntary Exit Packages, Sources

Avaya has offered “everyone at the company” a voluntary exit package, a person familiar with the matter told CX Today.

The source revealed that Avaya hopes the move will shed “a lot of employees”.

CX Today has reached out to Avaya for a statement, but the company declined to comment.

The objective to shed employees is one Avaya has chased since its CEO transition, announced in July 2024.

Just four months later, Avaya kick-started a sweeping round of layoffs. While these initially impacted North America, they stretched across the globe by early 2025.

In January, CX Today learned the layoffs left some regions, including Europe and the Middle East, threadbare.

Now, Avaya appears to be following up with another drastic move to cut its staff further and leave some areas with little more than a remote presence.

Reacting to the speculation, Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, told CX Today:

Such a move would likely aim to maximize profitability, so Avaya can return profit to equity holders.

Having only emerged from a second bankruptcy in seven years in 2023, these headlines will fan the flames of speculation about Avaya’s long-term future (Read more…).

If there’s an issue on a brand’s site, it aims to flag it before customers report the problem.  

Earlier this month, Contentsquare shared its intention to expand its platform by snapping up Loris AI, a conversational intelligence solution deployed in contact centers.  

The solution comprises AI and machine learning models that analyze what customers are saying, without asking them directly.  

By bringing Loris into the fold, Contentsquare takes a unique step in merging digital analytics with conversational intelligence. 

That helps expand the scope of customer journey analytics beyond isolated digital analytics, customer feedback management, and contact center intelligence tools. 

By doing so, Contentsquare hopes to enable a deeper understanding of where customer journeys break and possible solutions. 

As Jonathan Cherki, CEO and Founder of Contentsquare, explained: 

CX is shifting fast, and conversations are becoming an essential part of how people interact with businesses. With Loris, we’re giving our customers the capabilities they need to lead this transformation – to understand and optimize conversations, and connect them to the broader digital journey.

Alongside this deeper understanding of where customer journeys break, Contentsquare is helping businesses prepare for a future where AI becomes evermore present across digital channels. 

That AI includes third-party conversational assistants, channels Gartner predicts will handle 70 percent of customer interactions, from start to finish, by 2028.  

As more interactions shift to these digital assistants, brands need to capture that conversational data and pool it. If not, they’ll only secure a partial view of how customers engage and where those AI-led interactions broke.  

By wrapping conversational analytics around live and AI agent conversations, Contentsquare can centralize that intelligence with broader journey context and derive new insights. 

Etie Hertz, CEO of Loris AI, shared his enthusiasm for joining Contentsquare’s mission. “AI agents and effortless brand engagement are unleashing a conversation revolution,” he said. “The companies that harness this conversational intelligence will win in this new world.

Combining Loris and Contentsquare connects digital interactions, AI responses, and customer conversations seamlessly with real business outcomes like satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value.

The combination also elevates Contentsquare’s vision to become a platform all customer-facing teams can plug into, not just a digital owner or contact center leader.   

Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, applauds this approach.  

“I really appreciate organizations that think about CX holistically, the entire customer journey,” he said. “Traditionally, the contact center has been viewed as a cost center rather than a profit driver, since most customers only end up there when something goes wrong. Before that, they’re interacting on the website or in a store. 

That’s why platforms like ContentSquare are so valuable: they provide a complete view of the customer lifecycle.

“This acquisition of Loris signals a deeper focus on AI and analytics to capture and understand those interactions more comprehensively,” he summarized. “I’m excited to see how they build on this.”

However, Contentsquare is far from the only big brand to make an exciting, recent acquisition in the customer experience space.  

Most recently, private equity firm Thoma Bravo snapped up Verint, planning to merge the vendor with its workforce engagement management (WEM) rival Calabrio.  

Meanwhile, NiCE rolled up Cognigy to converge its Mpower CXone contact center platform with a leading conversational AI solution.  

Much like Contentsquare’s acquisition of Loris AI, these moves highlight a consolidation trend that may just reshape the customer experience landscape.