Corporate Performance Management

Corporate Performance Management

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February 22, 2011

Work Smarter, Not Harder: Calabrio's Redesigned CalabrioOne WFO Solution Mantra



The bottom-line requirement of any product or service is whether they permit their users to more easily accomplish their tasks and take on additional ones in less time. Calabrio, which makes workforce optimization (WFO) solutions, has taken this mantra to heart with its redesigned Calabrio (News - Alert) ONE enterprise software suite.

The updated CalabrioOne is now being launched for agents. A version for supervisors, containing features such as analytics, will be released later this year.

Calabrio has rearchitected CalabrioONE to enable employees to login once and from there they get one or two-click access to all of the applications they need, as dictated by their roles, presented consistently and intuitively. Agents could see scores and their schedules while supervisors can retrieve recordings and performing intraday schedule management. No more repeated, annoying and time-consuming exiting and entering separate applications.

Calabrio cut the number of screens from 50 to less than 20 for agents, saving access time and training on the applications. The upcoming supervisor module will feature a more radical shrinkage: from 150 to less than 50 screens. The new interfaces have a similar, clean, viewable minimalist look and feel to iGoogle. Easily seen on tablets as well as desktops and laptops, Calabrio is working on smartphone-optimized screens.

The Calabrio ONE suite provides personalized dashboards, which are presented as a series of widgets, in an OpenSocial framework embraced by popular social media sites. Each user can choose from the widget library of performance graphs and activities, then position and configure the dashboard according to their own needs and preferences.

The OpenSocial framework will provide the opportunity for contact centers to integrate with third-party platforms like Cisco Social Miner, which allows enterprises to monitor and respond to posts on social networking sites like Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter and on corporate-hosted social collaboration sites. Calabrio ONE could also incorporate widgets directly from these and other sources, including industry blogs and forums. The widget-based design also allows for WFO components to seamlessly integrate within other frameworks, such as Cisco (News - Alert) Finesse, Cisco’s next generation agent and supervisor desktop.

The Calabrio One solution ties applications with workflows. If a supervisor finds a call that an agent needs coaching on they can send an alert to the workforce management engine that would look for the appropriate time and if accepted automatically updates the agent’s schedule and pulls them out of service for the session.

The updated Calabrio suite supports the new 8.6 versions of Calabrio Call Recording, Calabrio Quality Management and Calabrio Workforce Management. Others features include:

  • A “speech energy bar”, including a timeline, visual comments and metadata tagging, which speeds the process and provides additional context to the evaluations;
  • Speech energy data for talk over and silence, which allows evaluators to quickly flag potential service issues;
  • Agent hot-desking or hoteling and extension mobility for non-agent, which frees a user from having to work at a particular location or on a particular device: and which saves on facilities costs;
  • Hyperlinking to any third-party applications, which supports integration for training and eLearning, for example;
  • Service alerts, previously available for recording capture, now extended to the full suite.

“Contact centers are struggling to keep pace in an environment where customer interaction spans everything from a phone call to a Twitter post, and an incoming agent workforce expects the instantaneous connections they get through texting and Facebook,” said Tom Goodmanson (News - Alert), president and CEO of Calabrio. “Enterprises simply can’t afford to have complex contact center solutions slow them down. Now is the time to provide customer service professionals with WFO tools that are as powerful in their simplicity as those ubiquitous social media sites.”

“Calabrio’s new user interface is highly innovative and a game changer for the contact center workforce optimization market,” says Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting LLC. “The widget-based design is very flexible, but more importantly, it significantly reduces the number of steps and complexity of performing quality assurance and workforce management functions.”


Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Tammy Wolf
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