Workforce Management Featured Article
Workforce Management Market Set to Explode
The contact center has long relied on workforce management as a way to deliver productivity improvements and help manage a variety of individuals in a constantly changing environment. While technology has evolved significantly in this space in the past few years, workforce management has been a value-add for more than three decades. As the industry players have firmly settled into 2015, it looks like this year could be a turning point and new opportunities are just around the corner.
Produced by DMG Consulting, the 2015-2016 Contact Center Workforce Management Product and Market Report highlights areas of opportunity, including the fact that the market is finally waking up and new focus in back-office operations and branches, and the ability to deliver the solution via the cloud is opening new doors. Overall, the industry is expected to produce revenue growth as high as 13 percent in 2015 and 2016, with 12 percent growth in 2017 and 2018. Primary growth drivers include further development in the back-office and increasing adoption of the cloud.
Considered a mature market, innovation is expected to return to workforce management. Vendors are recognizing the importance of investing in their outdated solutions and end users are demanding new and improved user interfaces and functionality. Investments are likely to be seen in the cloud, the back-office and in branch capabilities. Contact centers are also likely to look to this technology to help with forecasting and smaller vendors are expected to hit the market with competitive offerings that will challenge the key players.
The attention to the back-office is no accident as this segment of the industry now has 2.6 times the number of contact center employees, representing a significant growth opportunity for workforce management. Companies are increasingly updating older technology and the demand for cloud-based solutions is driving an examination of key offerings on a pay per use model. As workforce management solutions that have been in place for at least 10 years are on the chopping block, growth predictions could fall short, especially as new vendors emerge on the market.
This expansion will also help in the development of new functionality and keeping costs under control. While companies will look to the cloud for cost-effective measures to drive better access to technology, that doesn’t mean every contender will deliver better cost value. Decision makers will still have to do their homework and identify those providers best suited to meet their needs. In doing so, they’re also more likely to improve the bottom line over all.