Workforce Management Benchmark Report 2025: Six Key Insights

Chris Dealy at Peopleware explores six key insights from their 2025 workforce management benchmarking report.

The world of customer service, contact centres, and workforce management (WFM) is constantly changing. Customer expectations, technology, and best practices never stop evolving.

Peopleware regularly conducts in-depth benchmark studies to track industry trends and market developments.

Peopleware collaborates with customer service and planning professionals on a daily basis, so many of the findings in the benchmarking study confirmed their expectations. Some of the findings, however, took them by surprise. Let’s explore six key insights from the study:

1. WFM Is Even More Important Than We Thought

The survey made it very clear: WFM is strategically important. 99% of respondents said that WFM is critical to the success of their organization, with 81% of them saying that it’s becoming more important over time.

This isn’t just a gut feeling; there are measurable results. Organizations that effectively use workforce management software report increased efficiency and reduced operating costs (65% of respondents), reduced planning effort (51% of respondents), and lower turnover and hiring costs (41% of respondents).

All of that goes straight to the bottom line. In fact, WFM is increasingly being seen not as an operational function, but as a strategic enabler for overall financial performance and employee retention.

Given the importance of their role, it’s no surprise that planning professionals report high levels of job satisfaction: 98% find their roles rewarding, and 87% feel secure in their jobs.

When it comes to staying up to date, professionals find some sources of information much more useful than others.

2. Scheduling Practice Is Lagging Behind Other Innovations

Schedule efficiency is the core purpose of WFM. Efficient scheduling leads to a consistently good customer experience, reduces periods of wasteful overstaffing, and minimizes the excessive workload that results in employee burnout, absenteeism, and turnover.

We were therefore surprised to find that schedule efficiency is a key performance indicator (KPI) for only a minority of organizations.

90% of respondents track service level (SL), 82% track abandonment rate (ABR), and 80% track average speed of answer. But only 27% track schedule efficiency.

We detected room for improvement in scheduling elsewhere in the survey. While organizations strive to align staffing with demand, many have yet to adopt scheduling strategies that leverage optimization and employee engagement.

For example, 79% of respondents now manage hybrid teams. However, demand-driven and optimized practices are still underutilized. Only 23% say they use demand-driven, optimized scheduling for most of their employees.

That means 3 out of 4 contact centres are missing the full benefits of the optimized scheduling that the best workforce management software makes possible.

When it comes to optimized scheduling, the biggest roadblock isn’t technology, it’s resistance to change. 56% of organizations cite pushback from employees, team leaders, or management as their biggest challenge.

3. Employee Engagement: Intent Isn’t Matched By Action

There’s a lot of talk around us about employee engagement and empowerment. However, the data shows that while 87% of organizations say employee engagement is ‘very important’, nearly 60% of frontline employees say they feel slightly engaged, somewhat engaged, or not engaged at all.

This highlights the disconnect that many leaders will recognize: engagement is critical for their organizations, but they often struggle to turn intent into action.

It gets more worrying when we look at employee autonomy. 53% of organizations give less than a quarter of their agents any say in their schedule.

That’s a huge mismatch between the needs of a modern workforce and the systems and processes we’re using to support them.

Engagement isn’t just about giving employees more perks; it’s about giving them more control and flexibility, especially over their schedules. Engagement starts on the floor.

When employees can swap, bid, and manage their shifts, they feel more trusted and more engaged in their work.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but organizations that spend more than 9 hours a week on engagement are 3.8x more likely to report highly engaged employees, compared to those spending less than 4 hours.

4. There Is a WFM Software Feature That Dramatically Improves Shrinkage

Shrinkage is the percentage of paid time that employees are not available to handle customer interactions.

This includes unproductive at-work activities such as breaks, meetings, training, and 1:1s, plus out-of-office time for time off, sickness, lateness (or tardiness), and general unexplained absences.

Some shrinkage is unavoidable and even desirable; employees need regular training to stay abreast of product innovations, price changes, and new regulations, for example.

And hard-working employees deserve time off. But absenteeism, excessive sick leave, and lateness are problems in many contact centres. 44% of survey respondents cited high shrinkage as one of the biggest challenges they face.

Good workforce management practices and effective workforce management software have a major impact on shrinkage levels.

By accurately estimating shrinkage levels, you can build headroom into your staffing calculations so that you can cope with shrinkage as it arises.

Good employee engagement processes will tend to decrease absenteeism. Real-time adherence management will reduce lateness.

And clear analytics will reveal excessive shrinkage so that it can be better managed. The survey results confirmed these assertions – and revealed a clear correlation between the use of one WFM software feature and reduced shrinkage.

5. Call Volumes Are Down – And That’s Not the Only Channel Shift

As we expected, the survey confirmed that the customer service landscape is undergoing a digital transformation.

Live chat (handled by 58% of respondents) and social media (handled by 48% of respondents) are the fastest-growing channels, reflecting changing customer preferences and the need for real-time, omnichannel engagement.

Compared to our 2020 survey, the prevalence of calls has declined markedly, with 38% of respondents reporting a reduction in volumes.

This is aligned with our expectations, but we were surprised to see that email is in steep decline as well; 32% reported a reduction in email volume.

Call volume trends vary by industry. Government and healthcare are actually seeing growth in call volumes. Meanwhile, call volumes in sectors such as utilities and travel are dramatically down, as these industries are in the vanguard of adopting a ‘digital-first’ communications strategy.

6. AI Is Already Having Major Consequences

As pioneers of AI-based forecasting, we expected to see a reduction in the average effort required to produce accurate forecasts.

That expectation is confirmed by the survey. In our 2020 survey, the majority of respondents typically achieved a forecast that deviated from the actual by 5% or less.

This remains true in 2025, but what has changed is the effort required to achieve that level of accuracy. The percentage of respondents who spend less than 2 hours per week on scheduling has tripled since 2020.

Bearing in mind that the survey population included users of various WFM tools, ranging from Excel to AI-powered workforce management software, the conclusion is clear: AI-based forecasting saves a significant amount of planner time.

As AI chatbots increasingly handle simple customer queries, the remaining customer contacts that need to be handled by human employees will naturally become more complex and varied.

Consequently, we expected to see an increase in uncertainty and volatility in contact volumes and average handling time (AHT).

That is indeed what the survey revealed. 61% of respondents cited ‘uncertain and volatile volumes and AHT’ as their biggest forecasting challenge, well ahead of the other challenges.

As AI takes care of the tedious, repetitive number-crunching tasks in the planning process, the skills required to be successful in contact centre management and planning are changing.

There’s a growing need to blend technical expertise with human-centered capabilities. The survey shows that soft skills take the lead, with collaboration and teamwork (71%) emerging as the most essential skills for the future.

Interpersonal traits such as empathy (cited by 52% of respondents) and resilience (cited by 49% of respondents) are nearly as valued as hard skills, underscoring the shift toward more people-focused strengths.

Key Takeaways

The report captures where the industry stands today – what’s working, and what’s holding organizations back. It identifies emerging trends and equips customer service and workforce management professionals with data-driven insights that keep them at the top of their game.

The report includes the following advice based on the findings of the study:

• Reinforce WFM’s strategic role
• Modernize forecasting with AI
• Level up scheduling
• Bridge the intraday visibility gap
• Balance metrics with employee experience
• Upgrade technology with integrations in mind
• Invest in the WFM professionals of tomorrow

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Peopleware – View the Original Article

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Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Author: Peopleware
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson