MLB.com is the official website for Major League Baseball, and serves as an essential resource for fans to keep up on their favorite teams and players throughout the year. The site hosts an impressive and sophisticated system which expertly tracks statistics in a data intensive sport. Anyone who follows baseball knows that there are literally hundreds of thousands of ways to slice and dice the data surrounding American’s pastime, yet the ingenious software design of MLB.com masks the complexity of the innumerable numbers to serve up a precise portion of stats to match the point of interest for each user. Here’s an example.

My son and I both love MLB.com, but we have a very different level of interest in baseball, so the manner in which we use MLB.com varies. My son is a fantasy baseball guru. Every season he spends countless hours managing his team, picking his players and researching waiver moves. He’s a stats junkie, tracking and researching individual players’ performances throughout the season. So when he visits MLB.com, he prefers the site to launch into Player Statistics immediately.

I’m not as much of a fantasy baseball savant as my son. I would rather see how teams are performing and how overall standings are playing out in the league. I’m less concerned about the on-base percentage of Albert Pujols as I am in the Twins’ standing in the American League Central. When I visit MLB.com, I prefer it to immediately launch into the standings for an overview of the rankings throughout the league.

In a way, the differences are similar to how an agent consumes information about contact center statistics as compared to a supervisor or manager. That’s why, with our Calabrio ONE suite, there are different views to suit different needs.

My son’s interest in player stats is similar to a contact center agent who personalizes their dashboard to view their daily performance, for example. That same dashboard can be further customized to allow them to monitor their performance evaluation scores with a desktop widget. With just a click, agents can also access work schedules and view their assigned shifts and request vacations or swap shifts with other agents.

My interest in overall league standings is similar to a contact center manager or supervisor who needs to monitor the contact center’s overall performance. A supervisor needs a dashboard view that shows performance scores on an individual agent, team and organization level. The supervisor can set their desktop to display scores to easily assess whether or not they are meeting business metrics, and they can compare scores between agent teams to determine any problems. With scheduling, supervisors are a click or two away from knowing in real-time if contact center activity is matching up with the forecast and whether they need to adjust staffing levels.

Like the sport of baseball, contact centers are driven by the numbers. The amount of data surrounding customer contact activities is dizzying, and the way in which different types of centers consume that data is as varied as the individuals who staff and manage them. So truly effective software must provide a focused view of the stats and tasks that each individual cares about – nothing more and nothing less.

My son and I both use MLB.com, but we’re able to cater to our individual interests by customizing our own immediate webpage views.  Calabrio ONE is designed with this same principle at its core, having the right view for the right person according to their specific role and responsibilities. Everything should be immediately accessible according to the person’s need. As our clients get to this level of personalization, we’re helping them hit the ball out of the park.

Tom

2012