Dialpad Sets Sights on Workforce Engagement ManagementDialpad Sets Sights on Workforce Engagement Management

Cloud communications provider Dialpad has expanded its CCaaS feature set to include workforce engagement management (WEM), complements of a newly announced partnership with Playvox.

Via Playvox’s fully integrated suite, Dialpad is now able to offer WEM functions such as workforce management, workforce forecasting and scheduling, quality assurance, learning management, gamification, real-time performance tracking, and voice of the customer, Dialpad said.

The ability to tightly integrate contact center and WEM is increasingly becoming a customer preference, as Sheila McGee-Smith, principal analyst with McGee-Smith Analytics and frequent No Jitter blogger, pointed out in a prepared statement on this announcement. “In 2021, companies are focused on agent engagement and empowerment to address the challenges of an exceptionally competitive labor market and the requirement to support hybrid work,” she said.

As Dialpad evolved its use of AI-powered voice intelligence, gained from the 2018 acquisition of TalkIQ, it recognized the need to bring on workforce management, too, Joe Manuele, SVP of corporate and business development at Dialpad, told No Jitter. Playvox, it discovered, offers many of the features CCaaS customers need, and dovetails with Dialpad’s use of AI, he added.

Using its AI engine, Dialpad has the ability to measure sentiment and coach in real-time, Manuele said. The integration of coaching modules is “where the marriage with Playvox gets interesting,” he added.

“It's one thing for me to say, ‘Hey you know, let me tell you why you drove off a cliff’ [when what we’d] like to tell you is “Hey, you're going too fast, you're going to drive off a cliff here,’” Manuele said. Being able to “save” a contact center agent in real-time is the “true power of our AI engine, and that's where the promise of the partnership and payoffs come.”

To this day, many contact centers still attempt to manage tasks such as forecasting, scheduling, motivation, training, and quality tracking of agents using spreadsheets, Jennifer Waite, VP of product marketing at Playvox, added during our briefing. “You reach the point where you’re like ‘OK, I can tell you what’s going on right now, but I can't do well at telling you why things have happened in the past or what to look forward to in the future,” she said. A WEM platform that enables quality coaching, learning, motivation, and performance can provide contact center managers and supervisors with a complete picture of their agents, she added.

With the COVID-19 shutdown sending everyone home to work, workforce management became increasingly important in the ability to deliver a positive agent experience, Waite said.

The hardest part about being a contact center agent is having to go through all the different channels to make one thing happen, Waite said. Companies must determine if they’re doing right by their staff, are able to manage them effectively, and can give them work that makes the best sense for them and allows them to take it to the next level, she added.

During a quality evaluation call, for example, a supervisor or manager should be able to say, "We've identified some issues, now let's send out a learning module (like coaching) to help this agent," and the system should be able to schedule when that learning module gets sent out, Waite explained. “This makes it easy for everyone to ensure that the follow-through is happening, and development is really moving forward for the agents.”

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