At Calabrio, we’ve heard the concerns from an industry that’s starved for more powerful applications that don’t feel like a science project when using them. In 2011, we made significant strides to overcome this problem by releasing a contact center software suite that is powerful yet simple Calabrio ONE takes the intuitive, easy-to-use characteristics of our favorite personal “apps” to deliver a better user experience for contact center workers by personalizing their views, simplifying how they access data, and streamlining their interaction with each other and the customer.  Industry reaction to Calabrio ONE and our own business momentum this past year truly validate that we’re on the right track.

Let me share some specifics. When we introduced the redesigned Calabrio ONE to the
marketplace in 2011, the response from our partners, customers, media and analysts was overwhelming.  We consistently heard that our hard work resulted in a software product that was a refreshing change in an industry desperate for innovation.

The positive response translated into tangible sales, industry awards and solid media coverage.  We added more than 80 new customers, exceeded the million mark in total seats deployed, and continued to attract customers from our biggest competitors at an
ever increasing rate. All of these results illustrate that the industry, and most importantly, our customers, recognize how Calabrio ONE can improve their business.

It was an honor for us to be recognized so prestigiously with awards such as the Tekne Award in the Software/Small and Growing Company category. We also received the top score in customer satisfaction and were named one of the top four vendors in workforce optimization in the 2011 CRM Services Awards by CRM Magazine. The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal also named Calabrio as one of the fastest growing companies in Minnesota for a second consecutive year.

Further product validation and recognition came from some of our industry’s most prominent media outlets. We landed on the cover of July’s Customer Inter@action Solutions, and InformationWeek stopped by our Enterprise Connect 2011 booth to talk to our own Kristen Jacobsen in a video interview, just to name a few.

Even though we’re confident we’re delivering a simple solution for contact centers, we must continue to engage with our customers to stay up to date on their future challenges. With that in mind, we topped off the year with our inaugural Calabrio User Group event in Nashville, Tenn. It was a productive and engaging three day event for us as we were able to talk with our customers on how we can continue improving the user experience with Calabrio ONE.

For 2012, we’re further developing our user interface to better tackle the challenges facing the contact center industry. We’re already off to a great start too with the release of Calabrio ONE version 8.8, which improves the contact center supervisor experience with more capabilities and tools in a simple-to-use dashboard.

I want to sincerely thank everyone who has supported us throughout the years. We have a lot cooking for 2012 so remember to sign-up for our newsletter, subscribe to this blog, send me your feedback and follow us on Twitter to keep up with Calabrio’s latest news and insights.

Tom

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

One of the most important experiences we took away from the CUG Summit was the chance to share ideas and really get to know each one of our valued users who took their valuable time to help make us better. We were so pleased with our users’ openness and willingness to provide essential input.  As I stated in Oct. 27^th’s post Coming Together Makes for Good Company and Good Design, we can’t depend on what we THINK our customers need – we must work with our customers to tailor our solutions to really meet their dynamic technology and business requests.  The summit provided us with this valuable opportunity to collaborate with our users and continue to work towards meeting those contact center challenges they face every day.

Customers can join CUG anytime; just visit our Calabrio User Group webpage.  We are already preparing for next year’s annual summit – and looking forward to it! 

Tom

We can hardly wait! In preparation for the event, I spent a few minutes with Greg talking about his perspectives on the industry in general. Here’s what Greg had to say: 

Q: How have you seen contact centers change in the past 5 years?

Greg: For one, the contact center now receives much more respect from the rest of the company and the business world in general. What used to be viewed as a mere back-office operation is now highly valued for the critical customer data and insight it gathers daily (and shares with key departments) to greatly enhance customer loyalty and revenue. No longer do contact center managers and staff get beaten up and have their lunch money stolen by big mean bullies in Marketing, Sales or other departments. If you work in a contact center and still do endure such bullying, let me know and I’ll take care of it. I’m tough like that.

Another big and very positive change in our industry is the increased use of home agents. After years and years of contact centers just tinkering around and testing the home agent waters, many are finally fully embracing this powerful staffing model, which studies have shown to improve agent recruiting, retention and performance, as well as decrease facility costs and enhance staffing flexibility. Add in the obvious “green” benefits the home agent model affords, and it’s easy to see why more and more companies are kicking their agents out of the contact center. 

And of course, no conversation about big changes would be complete without mentioning the emergence of social media and its impact – both real and imagined – on customer care. Just when contact centers were starting to get a handle on the phones, email, chat and web self-service, social media comes barreling in and forces managers to return to therapy.  

Q: What are a couple of the biggest challenges facing contact centers now?

Greg: One of the biggest challenges contact centers face now is one that they have always faced: Keeping agents in place and inspired. While with ICMI from 1994-2010, I was involved in several research studies and reader surveys in which we asked managers to list their biggest concerns and challenges. Agent turnover and burnout always topped the list. Fostering agent engagement and retention is especially critical in today’s crazy competitive business climate, where top-notch service and support is often the differentiating factor – the thing that determines what company a customer sides with.

I’ve already alluded to what I see as the other major challenge in today’s contact center: Managing the multichannel madness. Have you ever tried accurately forecasting and scheduling for phone, email, chat and social media contacts – and ensuring that customers receive consistent, efficient and effective service regardless of which of those channels they choose? Scary. It’s why I merely analyze and write about contact centers rather than actually RUN one!

Q: You’re a humorist in a unique industry. Can we use a little more comic relief in the world of customer service?

Greg: Absolutely. Just look at what we’ve got: An industry full of managers being pressed by execs to constantly do more with less; agents being measured on a multitude of performance metrics while sitting in a cubicle that’s the same square footage as their body; and the entire center having to handle a seemingly endless stream of calls and other contact types from highly demanding customers who are often abusive even though they know that you know where they live. If that’s not an industry begging for comic relief, I don’t know what is.

Managing a contact center is no laughing matter. But if you want to survive in this business, laughing matters. Humor defuses. Humor relieves. Humor inspires. And if we can’t laugh at ourselves, who can we laugh at – besides the guys over in IT.

Q: What can Calabrio User Group Summit attendees look forward to hearing about during your keynote? What are the takeaways you want to leave with them?

Greg: Anybody who dares attend my keynote will hear me manically go on about a whole bunch of key practices and tactics for keeping agents motivated and engaged, including real-world examples of contact centers that have embraced those practices and tactics with great results.

Attendees won’t be permitted to leave the room until I feel confident they will return to their contact center to do what I talk about in my presentation, namely: 

- Implement fair and feasible performance objectives that enable agents to focus on the customer rather than the queue;

- Empower agents to use their collective skills and experience to continuously improve the contact center and the customer experience;

- Reward and recognize agents in meaningful ways;

- Invest in agents’ physical and emotional wellbeing; and, last but not least…

- Let agents work naked (from home).

Kristen

Our company’s commitment to good design also inspired us to retool Calabrio.com with the same creative principals we used when creating Calabrio ONE. Inspired by the flexible, intuitive Web 2.0-based design of our own software, we re-launched Calabrio.com so that customers and other visitors could access information and resources quickly in only a few clicks. The new Web site still features a library filled with demos, case studies, product brochures and whitepapers, but now visitors can obtain this information in multiple ways within the site. The goal is that visitors using our Web site will have a consistent experience when working with our Calabrio ONE workforce optimization suite.

As proud as I may feel about the design quality at Calabrio, I know our creativity can’t stop after our latest product launch or Web site makeover. We also can’t depend solely on what we THINK the customer needs when developing our strategy. We must work in conjunction with our customers to evolve our solutions to meet real needs, offer fresh ideas and drive success in their business.

With collaboration in mind, there is a designated Web community page on the new website that will provide a portal for Calabrio users to share industry’s best practices, educational materials, and business and technology needs.

It is no coincidence that we launched the new Web site in anticipation of our first formal Calabrio User Group.  This organization will serve as a community where Calabrio customers can come together to share their experiences, best practices and valuable input on our product strategy.  We are hosting our inaugural Calabrio Users Group summit this November 7^th-9^th in Nashville, Tenn. to spark robust discussions and learn from our customers about what is working well and where we can make improvements. Customers attending the event will get an exclusive peek at our plans for Calabrio ONE and meet many of the thought leaders and experts behind the scenes at Calabrio.

Collaboration takes many forms and inspires the best of ideas. By coming together with our customers, we can strive towards our mutual goal of tackling future contact center business challenges through an ever-evolving and distinctively effective suite of software.

Tom

I apply a similar strategy to my finance team at Calabrio. I ask them to close our financial books from the previous month within the first week of the new month. I want my finance team to spend the rest of the month analyzing financials, identifying trends and making predictions on what the company should expect. I want 20 percent of their efforts spent on looking at what happened the month before and 80 percent spent on analyzing and predicting what will happen in the future.

Speech analytics functions within a contact center much like the Pareto principle. It’s a tool that flags calls for supervisors to identify trends or potential issues affecting a larger share of contact center callers. Before speech analytic tools existed, contact center managers conducted quality control and searched for trends by sampling as many calls as possible during a specific time of day.  Supervisors typically spent the majority of their time listening to calls, missing the opportunities to react to trends and efficiently manage their staff.

Phonetics-based speech analytics flags a modest sample of calls-of-interest for contact center supervisors. From this sample, the manager may focus in on one or two common issues. Recalling the Pareto principle, finding the identified problems from a group of calls that has been intelligently flagged will most likely reflect the issues affecting the majority of your contact center agents, as well as other operational challenges or opportunities. This analytics sample provides far better insight into the business than a random manual sampling.

Speech analytics frees supervisors from the restrictions of finding calls manually. Utilization of this tool allows supervisors so focus their efforts on addressing identified issues and guiding operations. Following the Pareto principle, the supervisor will ideally spend only 20 percent of their time analyzing calls and 80 percent of their time managing the contact center.

It’s far more important to quickly understand the potential business impact of the ever changing conditions of a call center operation. Integrating speech analytics into your call center will free your supervisors to focus on customer concerns that may impact business and improve customer satisfaction where it is most effective. 

Tom

WFM has earned a reputation for being the most difficult contact center tool to use. Managers tend to spend valuable time managing the tool rather than actually managing their contact center.

A couple of key factors are driving a need for that to change. The present economy’s dynamic nature may leave consumers anxious and unforgiving of poor customer service. And newer communication channels serve as a progressively more public forum for customers to interact with businesses and share their experiences.  So contact
center managers must devise a new plan to tackle these circumstances, which plays right into the benefits of WFM.

Enter a new generation of WFM solutions with a renewed focus on improving usability, a significant advance from the clunky interfaces that plagued the tools in the past. Calabrio is at the forefront of that change, offering a modern WFM solution that aims to remedy the complexity challenges, giving managers more time to oversee their agents.

When well designed, WFM lives up to the promise of helping supervisors improve contact center performance with insight that will aid in forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, and strategic planning. Keeping staff in balance is even more essential when dealing with age-old challenges, such as employee turnover, and will help managers better tackle the latest communications channels, including social media.

With WFM, for example, managers can coordinate and validate their operational strategies by tracking when agents are taking calls. If an agent is out of adherence, a manager can dive into the WFM data to find trends and possible cause of the issue.

WFM can also save time when developing strategies during a crisis.  Critical time in a contact center is dynamic. If a hurricane damages a city, for example, an insurance company’s contact center needs to make immediate decisions on incoming inquiries to staff appropriately. In these situations, an insurance company can incur huge losses and liabilities for not handling claims properly. If the contact center mishandles claims because of understaffing, the business may lose customers and damage its reputation long term. WFM helps prepare for these critical moments.

A WFM solution may seem like a “Big Brother” tool, but it’s truly a performance enhancement instrument to help supervisors and agents manage schedules, tackle tricky customer service situations and improve overall operations. Many contact center managers have made these strategic decisions in the past without WFM, however, without clear data, these decisions lacked perspective and consistency. WFM provides the intelligence needed for call center managers and supervisors to make valuable and informed decisions about the future based on the reality of the past.

Tom

The information we gained after finding this post was extremely valuable. We learned about a problem with our system that we didn’t know existed, and we were able to rectify the issue for our entire customer base. Best of all, we turned one disgruntled customer into a potentially loyal and long-term customer.

There’s little doubt that social media is dramatically changing how people communicate, whether that is sharing thoughts and opinions or harvesting information.  Forums, tweets, and blog posts have become soundboards and sources of information for customers and their peers—your target audience. With the growing ubiquity of communication through social media, businesses and their contact centers are faced with a transformational change in customer interaction which they haven’t experienced since email hit the masses. 

Whether contact center supervisors like it or not, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs are the new digital communication channels customers are using. Ignoring these sites won’t make them go away and will likely result in countless lost opportunities to address vital customer issues and build relationships. Contact centers must think seriously and strategically about how to capture social media conversations related to their business and how to respond accordingly. Not doing so can have negative ramifications to the organization. Your customers are tweeting about your business and you need to @reply.

In the near-term, the volume of customer service delivered through social media won’t overtake the volume of calls handled over the phone. Long-term, we will probably see that pendulum swing the other way as some companies think about shifting more of their customer service to a social media platform.

 Either way, the transformation means that contact center supervisors must better train and hire agents to handle multiple communication channels beyond just phone and email. Similar to how some contact centers in the southern United States require agents to be multilingual, social media requires agents to be much more tech savvy. More important, however, will be the proper training of agents and other company employees on how to respond correctly. An overreaction can be more troubling than the customer’s original criticism.

In my opinion, if somebody takes the time to complain about a product or service, it’s the company’s responsibility to take the time to respond to it. By not listening and responding, you are missing an opportunity to make a difference and strengthen a relationship. It’s completely unreasonable to have a business ignore customer complaint calls. Why ignore it if it comes in a tweet?

Tom

Now, some employees will abuse their social media privileges no matter how well contact center software tools are utilized. However, my view is that a minority of challenging employees should not take away the privileges of the general workforce.

This ties in to the broader theme of agent motivation. To maintain a productive and efficient contact center, managers should manage to their best employees while helping underperforming agents improve or move on.

If contact center leaders lower overall goals and expectations and manage to the underperforming agents, they may inadvertently hinder the performance levels of other agents. It’s not unlike the teacher who tailors the classroom curriculum to the needs of a struggling child. The result, I’ve seen, is the entire class’s level and pace of learning begins to decline. The same effect can happen in a contact center if performance goals and expectations are lowered to match the level of a struggling few.

In my opinion, business leaders should study and manage to their best employees to maintain an engaging work environment. Managers can apply contact center performance analytics tools to analyze their best agents then take what they’ve learned to help underperforming employees improve. These tools will also help managers zero in on the problem areas of each agent, which will allow them to plan ways to address them. The approach can help managers foster a healthy and challenging workplace, properly motivating all agents to achieve.  Challenging underachieving agents to improve can greatly impact a contact center’s efficiency and effectiveness. Managers can then overcome distractions and underperformance, while utilizing WFO tools to study the strengths and weaknesses of each employee.

Tom

To top it all off, we were featured on the cover of July’s Customer Inter@ction Solutions. A couple months ago, I had the opportunity to talk in-depth with Senior Contributing Editor Brendan Read about Calabrio and our company’s direction. We talked in detail about our philosophy on developing dead-simple enterprise software for the contact center, our work in creating an industry-first user interface with Web 2.0 applications, and the future direction of our company. I am grateful for Brendan’s time in speaking to me and his interest in telling our story.

Also, a special thanks to Minneapolis-based photographer Scott Streble for coming by Calabrio’s offices to set up the cover and inside shot for the issue. The iPad never looked better! Stay tuned for more blog posts and updates.

-Tom