Workforce Engagement Tools Can Boost Agent ExperienceWorkforce Engagement Tools Can Boost Agent Experience
Lower turnover and improved employee satisfaction are two benefits from the use of workforce engagement tools, according to Metrigy’s latest research.
July 16, 2025
Many contact center agents come, and then they go. It’s the nature of the role, especially for staff positions —job satisfaction is elusive and the work experience not to agents’ liking. For their supervisors, what all this turnover means is having to deal with an unending cycle of hiring, onboarding, and offboarding.
Workforce engagement management (WEM) can help ease the burden, elevating the agent experience such that job satisfaction improves and turnover rates shrink. Metrigy’s recently published Workplace Engagement Management: 2025-26 research study with 316 companies shows this to be the case.
In the study, three quarters of respondents agreed that the agent experience at their companies got better with the use of WEM solutions. Additionally, those measuring WEM’s impact on their agent metrics attribute improvements in both employee satisfaction and turnover to its use. Following WEM adoption, employee satisfaction rose 18.4% on average, and turnover dropped by 4.7 percentage points, from 19.2% to 14.5%, our data shows.
Workforce management (WFM), which facilitates forecasting and scheduling, contributes to the positive change in employee satisfaction and turnover more than any of the other applications that fall into the WEM bucket, according to the study. When used effectively, WFM tools can create a work environment that is balanced, predictable, and supportive for agents while easing the scheduling and forecasting burden for supervisors.
With AI, WFM tools are getting increasingly sophisticated. Rather than forecasting staffing needs based on pre-defined rules and static models, advanced WFM tools use more sophisticated AI technologies to identify trends and spot anomalies for dynamic forecasting. For scheduling, AI optimization engines can crunch through a variety of factors, such as target service levels, agent skills, and individual preferences, to create the best-case scenarios for any given day within a contact center.
Already half of companies studied are using AI for forecasting and scheduling. Additionally, a significant majority of supervisors say they trust AI for this use—with one quarter even considering their trust to be “absolute” (the highest level on a 1-to-7 scale). The goal for nearly 60% of companies is to allow contact center managers to react to scheduling and forecasting insights if not in real-time (41.1%) then at least on an hourly basis (17.9%). Daily changes suffice for 24.1%, weekly for 11.6%, and monthly for a slight 1.8%.
The more agile supervisors can get with forecasting and scheduling, the more flexibility they can afford agents with their work schedules, as well as where they work. When we looked at the factors that contributed to measurable improvement in agent experience, performance gains enabled by AI assistance was the top factor, while flexible scheduling and more training in general tied for second. Allowing agents to work remotely was next on the list.
When asked to rate the importance of factors related to agent time and agent professional development for overall work experience, the surveyed companies didn’t overwhelmingly weight one or two factors above others . That is, agents are equally motivated by the ability to designate preferred shifts, work from home, swap shifts, and so on as they are in their personal skills development and advancement.
Three quarters of companies already support scheduling flexibility, with most pinpointing work-life balance and greater employee satisfaction as the primary benefits. Scheduling flexibility might include options such as:
Allowing agents to pick their own start and end times within a range
Splitting shifts between different peak periods
Working 40 hours/week but in fewer days than the norm, or, conversely, working part-time or micro-shifts
Bidding for preferred shifts or, similarly, swapping shifts with others
Work full-time from home or in a hybrid model of some days in the contact center and others at home
Companies can enable and support scheduling flexibility in a variety of ways, but most (62.2%) do so via a self-service portal through which agents can view their schedules, swap shifts with others, submit time off requests, and otherwise manage their workweek. Many (47.1%) provide the same sort of capabilities in a mobile scheduling app that saves agents from having to log into their desktops. AI-powered optimization tools, real-time scheduling bots, and shift-bidding systems are often working behind the scenes to finesse agent schedules in line with personal preferences and business requirements.
Among the 21.5% of companies that don’t allow agents to self-schedule their working hours, concern about understaffing for some shifts stands out as the primary inhibitor. Complexity, difficultly keeping track of whether agents are on time and available as planned, skill set mix, and lack of appropriate policies are other reasons companies have for not letting their agents use self-scheduling tools.
Advancing the use of WFM with AI tools can help companies address such concerns, but technology isn’t the only answer. Companies must clearly articulate the policies they’ve established for scheduling—including accountability for failing to meet commitments—and provide training and ongoing guidance for agents. Failing to do so will be counter-productive, especially if agents end up feeling unfairly penalized for their flexible work preferences.
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