Is it time to upgrade to a smart WFM solution?
Think seriously about how your business operates right now. Your teams are dispersed, customers are more demanding, and real-time communication happens across dozens of channels. In theory, everything should be more connected and informed than ever, but countless companies are still oblivious to one thing: how their people are actually doing.
That’s where Smart WFM comes in. By blending Workforce Management with Conversational Intelligence (CI) and AI, forward-thinking companies are starting to catch what others miss: signs of fatigue, emotional drop-offs, workload overload, and tone shifts.
Take Broadvoice’s Smart WFM solution. It doesn’t just manage schedules, it tracks forecast volumes, predicts staffing needs, monitors service and performance levels in real-time for intraday changes, and more. A Smart WFM is a valuable investment in a world where the line between well-being and performance is thinner than ever.
The Challenge: Burnout, Attrition, and Performance Dips
Workforce management isn’t just about ensuring you have enough people in the office (or logging in remotely) to handle day-to-day tasks anymore. You need to balance effective scheduling and capacity with actual employee needs. In 2025, 66 percent of employees are suffering from burnout. In some industries, that percentage is even higher.
If you think that’s just an “ethical” issue, it’s not. According to Gallup, disengaged employees cost companies around 18 percent of their annual salary each year. It’d be one thing if burned-out employees just quit, but they don’t. They stay in their roles, turn up to work, and mentally check out.
Even worse, the signs that employees are struggling often get lost in the noise. By the time performance KPIs take a hit, the damage is already done. Think about how often decisions get made based on lagging indicators, surveys, quarterly reports, and after-action reviews. It’s like diagnosing an illness after the fever’s gone.
Unfortunately, the traditional WFM tools companies use to manage their teams are built for logistics, not people. They know who showed up, who logged in, and who hit their target, but they don’t know who’s drowning. That’s why businesses need Smart WFM systems that track not just tasks but real-time performance levels, adherence and occupancy, and even sentiment in calls.
The Smart WFM Solution: Integrating AI for Proactive Support
The world’s leading WFM vendors are quickly recognizing the need for deeper insights to manage teams effectively. AI is becoming a valuable tool for not just predicting staffing needs but also helping companies adapt in real time and avoid burnout.
For instance, the Broadvoice Smart WFM platform (combined with a range of AI-powered tools from the same vendor) uses AI to power:
Real-time dashboards, human-first alerts
Companies get dashboards that not only show who’s logged in and what tasks they’re juggling, they highlight patterns like a sudden spike in after-hours messages, flattened emotional tone on calls or meetings (through contact center CI) or persistently high occupancy rates.
These are real signs that your people are riding the burnout express. The system can flag those trends and notify you or even suggest scheduling pickups or micro-breaks.
AI Forecasting and Scheduling
The Broadvoice Smart WFM (and other AI tools) work together to identify patterns, sustained weeks of emotional dip, day‑to‑day rise in customer sentiment variance, and build a picture over time.
This leads to better AI forecasting tools that allow managers to build schedules on both real-time and historical data. You can choose how to allocate resources based on seasonal demand, skills, and even employee requests, balancing performance with wellbeing.
Automated Adjustments
Because these AI-powered WFM tools capture real insights in the moment, they can automatically adjust shift patterns and resource allocation strategies. For example, if your contact center team is suddenly overwhelmed by a rapid spike in calls, the system can suggest moving employees around.
That way, you’re less likely to end up with overworked, burned-out employees, who either skip coming to the office entirely or just “log out” of each conversation.
Connected Insights
What makes this especially powerful is how this smart WFM solution connects to other critical tools. With Broadvoice’s advanced analytics, for instance, you can layer real-time data with historical insight across channels.
The platform surfaces key metrics like conversation volume, duration, sentiment trends, and agent behavior patterns. So you’re making better staffing and coaching decisions not just based on a gut feeling, but with data that actually understands the context.
Smart WFM Solutions in Action: The Real Benefits
Still wondering how a smart WFM solution can really make a difference to your team? Ultimately, it all comes down to better, more human-centric planning. Not just scheduling based on demand, but making real plans, and dynamic adjustments based on what actual employees need.
Making that shift leads to:
- Lower Costs and Higher Stability: Disengaged staff can cost up to 18 percent of payroll each year, and that excludes recruiting and training expenses. Replacing team members costs about 100–300 percent of their salary. With a Smart WFM, spotting early stress signals means fewer people abandoning ship.
- Better Performance, Better Experience: Using AI insights to schedule team members based on their skill level, actual capacity, or potential for burnout automatically leads to better productivity. You’re not piling more tasks onto one employee than another; you’re making realistic decisions based on people’s strengths and weaknesses.
- Happier Teams, Stronger Engagement: When employees feel genuinely seen and supported, engagement soars. Teams using Smart WFM systems report fewer burnout cases and more days with high energy. More engaged teams lead to better performance outcomes all around.
These benefits compound over time. With consistent real-time monitoring and calibrated support, teams maintain better morale and performance over the long haul. Plus, with less stress and more efficiency baked into daily rhythms, leadership gains clarity on scaling people and processes without breaking culture.
Case Studies: Companies Benefitting from Smart WFM Tools
All of this sounds great in theory, but where’s the evidence that smart WFM solutions really drive ROI? The answer is: pretty much everywhere. Just a couple of examples:
- OPRM: The Optimal Pain and regenerative medicine clinic uses Broadvoice’s b-hive platform, and WFM tools to manage healthcare teams that rarely spend time behind a desk. With AI insights and analytics, the company has been able to manage hot-desking staff more effectively, improve work-life balance for team members, and enhance customer service.
- East Texas Disability Associates: ETDA’s case managers work across multiple sites with clients who have complex needs. Since adopting Broadvoice’s unified platform (including Smart WFM), the leadership reported better workload balance, improved staff responsiveness, and crucially, no major staffing burnout issues during peak demand periods.
- JFS Desert: A nonprofit that shifted rapidly to remote operations needed a way to ensure staff weren’t drowning in after-hours VoIP calls and chat. Their solution? Broadvoice. The result: holistic visibility across schedules, better real-time support for stress signals, and zero spikes in attrition even during the hardest months.
The Strategic Advantage of a Smart WFM Platform
Broadvoice isn’t the only company exploring AI’s benefits for enhancing workforce management. Many of the industry’s top vendors recognise that AI can bring more context and nuance to staffing, scheduling, and decision-making processes.
The opportunities grow even further when you connect smart WFM with other intelligent tools, such as:
- Advanced Analytics: AI-powered business intelligence platforms provide businesses with a broader view of everything from customer experience to employee performance, so they can make scheduling decisions that actually deliver consistent outcomes.
- Agent Assist tools: AI-powered real-time assistants can help reduce burnout even further, giving agents and employees suggestions, guidance, and support whenever they need it. Productivity skyrockets, engagement improves, and teams shoulder less burden.
- Conversational Intelligence: Additional CI tools for transcribing, translating, summarizing, and analyzing calls and conversations are excellent for detecting sentiment changes, engagement issues, and even signs of burnout in employees.
Modern business isn’t just about headcount; it’s about talent agility. AI-driven Smart WFM captures signals of overload and stress and empowers leaders to pivot resources instantly.
Managing Workforces the Smart Way
Describing today’s workplace as a “high-pressure” environment is almost cliché at this point, but that doesn’t make it any less true. These days, you can’t afford to wait until morale collapses or turnover spikes; the cost of falling behind is too high.
Smart WFM delivers something powerful and rare: real-time awareness of your team’s emotional and operational state, linked directly into your unified communications fabric.
Drawing from behavioral cues, tone trends, and occupancy spikes, it turns empathy into action before metrics flash red. That’s the kind of leadership that retains top talent, sustains customer trust, and builds enduring performance strength.
If you want to operate with clarity, care, and confidence, investing in smart WFM is your next move.
