In today’s competitive landscape, delivering exceptional customer experiences is paramount to success. More and more, contact centers are counted on not only to support customers but provide important insights, drive loyalty, and fuel overall growth. That’s why having the right workforce engagement management (WEM) and workforce management (WFM) solutions to bolster contact center performance is absolutely critical.
In this environment, Verint is a well-known provider of customer engagement solutions. With the Verint Open Platform, Verint provides an AI-powered CCaaS solution that strives to automate and optimize CX. Beyond the Open Platform, their portfolio also includes solutions for customer analytics, workforce optimization, and compliance.
However, if you’re here, you’re probably wondering whether Verint workforce management solutions are up to the task of meeting today’s contact center needs and challenges. Below, we’ll take a look at these solutions and provide a comprehensive look at five top Verint alternatives and competitors in the workforce management space.
Why Look for Verint Alternatives?
The Verint platform offers a robust set of workforce engagement management features, with noted strengths in quality management and monitoring, analytics, and scheduling. However, beyond these strengths, there are areas where real Verint users have found the platform to be lacking.
Ease of Use
One of the biggest issues reported by Verint users is that its products can be difficult to use. Verint reviewers note that while some new offerings are aimed at fixing this, much of the product’s UI remains outdated and can be cumbersome to navigate. Ease-of-use issues can ultimately add up to a lack of adoption among team members, a lack insight for the organization, and overall poorer performance.
Customer Support
Another common and long-term issue cited by Verint detractors is a customer support team that can be extremely slow to respond. In the 2024 G2 Grid® Report for Contact Center Workforce products, Verint users ranked the platform’s quality of support among the lowest of any market leaders. Recent customer reviews note problems like support tickets going unanswered for significant lengths of time and a lack of live chat or support options.
Reporting Functionality
Though Verint CX products are capable of providing a range of insights about aspects of the customer journey, many workforce management users report issues with reporting functionality, usability, and sophistication. For example, one Verint customer stated in a recent review:
“The reporting out of Verint is lackluster. The report center and ad hoc reporting modules are dated and difficult to navigate.”
Pricing
Meanwhile, Verint’s pricing model and premium cost can present challenges for some organizations. As it’s been noted, Verint offers a wide range of powerful solutions, but achieving full functionality may require tacking on costly add-ons. Plus, a lack of seamless integration between these different modules can lead to a higher total cost of ownership and, in turn, a lower return on investment. Additionally, some users find Verint’s pricing structure to be complex, making it difficult to understand the true cost of implementation and ongoing use.
The Top 5 Verint Workforce Management Alternatives
With an idea of where Verint may fall short for today’s contact centers, let’s dive into the compelling alternatives available on today’s market. Below, we’ll cover these prominent Verint competitors:
- Calabrio ONE
- Aspect Workforce (Formerly Alvaria)
- NICE
- Talkdesk
- Genesys
1. Calabrio ONE
We’re typically pretty modest, but there’s no denying that Calabrio ONE is a leading Verint alternative, offering powerful contact center workforce management tools within a fully integrated, true-cloud suite of performance solutions. Only Calabrio ONE combines workforce optimization (WFO), agent engagement, and powerful AI-driven business intelligence within a single suite that’s built to adapt and scale with your business.
Key Features & Differentiators
- Fully integrated suite: The Calabrio ONE platform provides an integrated set of solutions in a single platform with a unified, intuitive experience. Leading workforce management tools can be used right alongside quality management, business intelligence, and much more.
- True-cloud technology: Calabrio is built from the ground up leveraging cloud-native technology for faster processing, reliability, scalability, and agility—as well as easier administration and development.
- Focus on employee empowerment: The platform includes a range of features—from a mobile self-scheduling app to predictive NPS and custom dashboards—are designed to help contact centers get the most out of their workforce, elevating both agent and customer experiences.
Pros
- Overall ease of use: Users and industry evaluators alike have consistently named Calabrio a leader in usability and reliability.
- Lower long-term total cost of ownership: Suite-wide custom reporting and dashboards provide WEM and WFO business intelligence, and robust interaction recording and analytics support improvement—all at no extra cost.
- Integrations and flexibility: Customers can integrate Calabrio’s powerful suite with products from their existing—or desired—CX and HR ecosystem. Cloud-based Calabrio ONE offers seamless integration with an array of platforms and solutions, from CCaaS and enterprise BI to payroll and beyond.
- Powerful analytics: AI and machine learning-driven analytics are embedded across the Calabrio ONE suite, putting easy-to-use data-driven intelligence and predictive capabilities in the hands of every user—and without requiring a data science PhD.
2. Aspect Workforce (Formerly Alvaria Workforce)
Aspect Workforce, formerly known as Alvaria Workforce, is a workforce management solution designed to help large contact centers optimize their employee scheduling, forecasting, and performance management. It offers a range of features aimed at improving agent productivity, reducing costs, and enhancing customer satisfaction. Aspect Workforce emphasizes automation and efficiency, with tools for automated scheduling, adherence monitoring, and performance tracking.
Key Features & Differentiators
- Enterprise focus: The Aspect Workforce Enterprise solution offers a feature set geared toward enterprise workforce management for distributed global teams.
- Flexible deployment: Aspect offers both cloud and on-premises deployment options, providing flexibility for organizations with different IT infrastructure preferences.
- Sophisticated forecasting and scheduling: Aspect Workforce includes advanced forecasting algorithms and automated scheduling tools to help optimize staffing levels and minimize overstaffing or understaffing.
Pros
- Shift scheduling and planning tools: Aspect users report strengths in shift scheduling. This strength is supported by “what-if” modeling and planning solutions.
- Automated coaching and evaluation tools: Voice and screen recording evaluation tools streamline coaching and feedback process; recording requirements can be altered to meet company needs and support PCI compliance.
Cons
- Lower customer satisfaction, poor support: Recent industry-wide evaluations give Aspect relatively low marks for overall customer satisfaction, ease of admin, and quality of support.
- Limited customization and connections: Compared with other Verint alternatives, Aspect Workforce offers few connections with commonly used CCaaS platforms and other tools.
- Steep learning curve: Complexity, lack of customization, and outdated UI mean that many users may require lengthy training to get a handle on Aspect Workforce tools—and may lead to low adoption.
- Difficult setup: Aspect users and third-party evaluators gave the platform poor scores when it comes to ease of setup.
3. NICE
NICE is a global leader in customer experience solutions, offering a broad portfolio of products and services. Their workforce management solution, NICE IEX, is a feature-rich platform designed to help organizations of all sizes optimize their workforce operations. NICE IEX provides tools for forecasting, scheduling, performance management, and employee engagement, all within a single integrated platform. Meanwhile, NICE CXone is a fully cloud-based platform that, although focused primarily on customer experience and engagement solutions, also provides a more limited WFM feature set.
Key Features & Differentiators
- Market presence: NICE is a market leader with a large global customer base.
- Huge CX solution set: NICE offers perhaps the market’s most wide-ranging set of products focused on customer experience analysis and optimization.
Pros
- Ease of use: The NICE CXone platform was given high scores in ease of use in recent reports; however, the NICE Workforce Management tool was given significantly lower scores.
- Robust features: Similar to its overall CX-focused offerings, the NICE IEX product features an expansive set of features for workforce engagement management.
- Investment in AI: NICE has made significant investments in AI-driven features, including AI-powered forecasting and machine learning-generated schedules.
Cons
- Notoriously slow, limited customer support: Users of the WEM giant regularly report slow response times and little to no input in feature development or product direction.
- Sprawling solution is complex, requires extras: Diverse offerings can lead to complexity, reliance on pricey add-ons, and reversion to hosted, rather than cloud, solutions.
- Limited external integration: Users must rely heavily on add-ons from within NICE ecosystem as connections with common external solutions are limited.
4. Talkdesk
Talkdesk is a cloud-based contact center solution that includes workforce management capabilities as part of its integrated platform. Talkdesk aims to provide a unified solution for managing both customer interactions and agent performance. Their workforce management tools focus on simplifying scheduling, improving agent engagement, and providing real-time insights into contact center operations.
Key Features & Differentiators
- All-in-one CCaaS + WEM: Talkdesk aims to provide an integrated solution for both contact center communications and workforce engagement management.
- Omnichannel communications: As a CCaaS provider, Talkdesk is noted for its omnichannel integration and support for a wide variety of digital communication channels.
Pros
- Ease of use: Users give high grades to dashboards and Talkdesk’s overall usability.
- Strong learning and coaching support: Built-in Knowledge Base and remote onboarding provide users with support.
Cons
- Locked into Talkdesk CCaaS: Whereas other WEM and WFM solutions like Calabrio ONE give flexibility, users must rely on Talkdesk for CCaaS needs.
- Limited forecasting and scheduling: Talkdesk’s forecasting and scheduling capabilities may be less robust compared to dedicated WFM solutions, potentially limiting accuracy and advanced optimization features.
- Lack of reporting customizability: Despite a sleek interface, reporting offers little customizability and overall functionality relative to alternatives.
5. Genesys
Genesys is another leading CCaaS provider with a strong presence in the world of customer experience. In addition to its communications platform, which is perhaps best known for its sophisticated omnichannel routing capabilities, Genesys offers its own WEM and WFM solutions. In 2023, Genesys began offering the standalone Genesys Cloud EX solution focused on employee engagement.
Key Features & Differentiators
- AI-driven CX orchestration: Unique conversational AI-backed tools drive greater personalization and automation.
- Variety of recent acquisitions and investments: In recent years, Genesys has stepped up its investments in WFM, making a number of strategic acquisitions.
Pros
- Intuitive interface: Genesys reviewers frequently describe the platform as highly usable.
- Integration options: A large application marketplace enables teams to connect seamlessly with a wide range of external solutions, including Calabrio ONE, to supercharge its CCaaS capabilities.
- Continuous delivery model: Get updates consistently and with only rare interruptions.
Cons
- New to WEM: Though Genesys is a major name in the CX space, their enterprise WEM tools are relatively untested.
- Limited scheduling and forecasting capabilities: Compared with a dedicated WFM solution like Calabrio, key features in areas such as self-scheduling, intraday management, and adherence are less powerful—or unavailable.
- Focus on larger organizations: While Genesys caters primarily to bigger teams, those under 100 seats may receive lower priority in support.
Looking for a Verint Alternative for Your Workforce Management Needs?
In the ever-evolving landscape of customer experience, selecting the right workforce engagement management (WEM) solution is crucial for contact centers to thrive. While Verint has been a prominent player in the market, exploring alternatives like Calabrio ONE can unlock new levels of efficiency, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction.
Meanwhile, for organizations desiring an all-encompassing approach to contact center optimization, Calabrio ONE’s flexible integration capabilities allow it to be seamlessly combined with other powerful solutions mentioned in this article, such as Talkdesk or Genesys. This synergy creates a powerful ecosystem where Calabrio ONE’s strengths in WEM complement the unique features of its counterparts, resulting in a truly comprehensive solution for enhanced contact center performance.
Learn more about the power of Talkdesk + Calabrio as well as Genesys + Calabrio, and book a demo to see Calabrio’s leading solutions today.
