RingCentral has snapped up CommunityWFM, the workforce management (WFM) tech provider.
The move aims to bolster RingCentral’s cloud contact center solution: RingCX, which it launched in late 2023.
Since then, RingCX has accrued over 1,000 customers. Many chose the CCaaS solution because of its close integration with RingEX, the widely implemented unified communications platform.
While that’s its biggest differentiator, RingCentral had all the baseline capabilities of a CCaaS platform apart from WFM, until now.
Already, CommunityWFM’s capabilities are available as “RingCentral AI Workforce Management (WFM)”, which starts at a pricing point of $20 per agent, per month.
Additionally, with RingCX’s automated quality assurance (QA) solution, RingCentral can ensure its solution delivers a broad range of workforce optimization (WFO) capabilities.
Celebrating the move, Kira Makagon, President & COO at RingCentral, said: “By providing CommunityWFM’s AI-driven workforce management capabilities together with our AI-first RingCX platform, we’re giving businesses the complete set of tools to optimize operations while empowering their people, creating the foundation for superior agent performance and effortless customer experiences.
Adding AI Workforce Management to our portfolio allows us to extend our AI-first innovation to a complete portfolio of AI-based products – starting from agentic AI assistance, to real-time guidance, quality management, analytics, and now AI-powered workforce management.
As Makagon referenced, CommunityWFM offers a deep contact center WFM portfolio, which comprises solutions for forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, and review. These tools are more advanced than those most CCaaS providers have attached to their solutions.
Interestingly, CommunityWFM is also a highly collaborative solution, enabling workforce management leaders to share messages and interact with agents and supervisors, so they’re not just the “computer says no” people in the background of the contact center. Instead, they’re an integral part of customer, employee, and business success.
Businesses of all sizes have implemented CommunityWFM, with multiple case studies covering enterprises in financial services, insurance, and utilities.
Excited to join RingCentral, Daryl Gonos, CEO & Co-founder at CommunityWFM, said: “RingCentral uses our Workforce Management platform that is integrated with RingCX to optimize their own customer support operations.
By leveraging AI-driven forecasting to deliver more accurate workforce predictions with significantly less manual analysis, we’re creating an intelligent, unified experience that not only simplifies today’s workforce operations, but also anticipates the future needs of hybrid work environments and evolving customer demands.
Lastly, given that RingCX most often attracts SMBs, this acquisition represents an opportunity for many brands in this segment to advance beyond spreadsheets and Erlang Calculators.
Now, it’s up to RingCentral to showcase the potential value-add these businesses can achieve by implementing a full-fledged WFM platform.
What Does This Acquisition Mean for the WFM Market?
CommunityWFM was one of the few remaining independent WFM market providers.
Indeed, NiCE scooped up Playvox and Dialpad rolled up Surfboard last year. Meanwhile, Verint and Calabrio announced a shock merger last month.
As such, Peopleware (formerly injixo) and Assembled are the only two independent vendors with a significant global presence.
Aspect did spin out of Alvaria last year to offer an alternative. Meanwhile, Eleveo can offer a broader workforce engagement management (WEM) suite.
Nevertheless, the options for third-party solutions are limited.
Some may suggest that, as CCaaS providers develop their own WFM solutions, these are now becoming outdated in this era of contact center convergence.
However, the likes of CommunityWFM, Peopleware, and Assembled can offer much deeper solutions than those offered by the CCaaS stalwarts, bar NiCE and possibly Genesys.
In addition, global enterprises often use different core contact center solutions across locations. For instance, some may use Cisco on-premise in one location, Genesys in another, and Five9 elsewhere. In such enterprises, the ability to overlay one third-party platform that integrates with each and centralize staff management is an attractive proposition.
Typically, they also offer tighter integrations with platforms outside the core CCaaS offering, like Human Capital Management (HCM) platforms, which can help businesses put employee and operational data to work.
As such, third-party WFM solutions have their place. Yet, the options are shrinking. Meanwhile, innovation across the space may suffer, with the lack of independent vendors channeling all their effort into the WFM market.
So, while the move is a smart snap up for RingCentral, which will not only boost its portfolio but initiate the provider with a raft of new customers, it offers some tough questions for the market in a broader sense.
