What is workforce management software responsible for?

Workforce management solutions are used in a variety of settings where managing and coordinating the schedules of hundreds of employees is important. I am most familiar with workforce management solutions in contact center environments. Workforce management solutions allow you input your forecasted demand (or call volume) and then create an employee schedule to meet that demand.

Typically in larger call centers there are many factors to consider when creating the schedule, including the types of calls you anticipate receiving and the "skills" of the people you need to answer the call. Workforce management software can then take this demand and even consider your schedule history (e.g. how many people were previously schedule, how many were absent) to apply certain algorithms and then create the schedule. The tool is then also be used real-time to track things like a) what is current call demand and do I have the agents to meet it and b) whether employees showed up and adhered to their schedule. If you've hear of a "command center" in large contact centers, workforce management is an integral tool.

As you can imagine workforce management system are designed to integrate with other call center technologies, especially your phone systems and ACD. Industry-leading vendors that provide workforce management solutions include Aspect, Verint and Genesys Labs. These tools would integrate with their own ACDs as well as phone systems from the likes of Avaya and Cisco.

I'll leave it to other experts to provide more detail.