Calabrio, a
privately held customer experience intelligence company, focuses on a human approach to contact centers. After all, agents represent a brand, and nowadays they’re expected to do much more than provide resolution on basic inquiries, as Brad Snedeker, quality management product manager at Calabrio, shared in a recent No Jitter briefing.
“The more automation and deflection we put in contact centers, the tougher the calls remaining for humans to deal with become,” Snedeker said.
To assure agents are adequately handling those tough calls, many organizations have assigned quality analysts to listen in on customer interactions — three calls per agent per month, for example, Snedeker said. While this is a “relatively small sampling,” he added, it’s really all they have time for: At 10 minutes per call, “that’s a half an hour for one person,” he said.
Nonetheless, quality analysts must make sweeping judgments based on those three calls to determine if the agent’s performance is good, bad, or improving — even as the stress of knowing that somebody is listening in may make it difficult for an agent to do their best work, Snedeker said.
Here’s where Calabrio’s analytic engines can help, continuously running in the background and analyzing call data to score agents, Snedeker said. With this data-driven insight, quality analysts can choose which ones to listen to — i.e., one that looks troublesome or one that went extremely well, “making their time much more productive.” If given permission, Calabrio's software also allows supervisors, managers, agents, and team leaders to listen in on calls for coaching and improvement purposes, he added.
Analyzing call data also provides “all kinds of great brand insights,” Snedeker said. As an example, he pointed out FedEx’s ability to capture brand sentiment by applying analytics to the 40,000 to 50,000 calls it receives daily and viewing within a Calabrio dashboard to glean insights. “We can do things for marketing that we never could do before — the CMO gets all these great insights directly from the voice of the customer,” he added.
Too often, valuable information shared during customer service interactions gets trapped inside the contact center, and unless someone in marketing, sales, finance, or another part of the organization wants to sit down and listen to phone calls, “you never understand what customers are saying,” Snedeker said. To that end, as announced earlier this year, Calabrio bulked up its reporting portfolio with Enterprise Customer Experience Intelligence (CXI), a set of function-specific dashboards, beginning with the contact center, marketing, and finance, he said.
Enterprise CXI is an out-of-the-box solution that allows “people outside the contact center to get the benefit” of customer intelligence, Snedeker said. From the Enterprise CXI dashboards, stakeholders get a view of data synchronized across channels, including phone, emails, chats, texts, and social media, he added.
Looking forward, Calabrio is working on performance management in the contact center, including agent engagement, agent improvement coaching, and resource management, as well as a sales dashboard for Enterprise CXI, Snedeker said.
Learn more about contact center and customer experience strategies at Enterprise Connect, Sept. 27-29, in Orlando, Fla. Use the promo code NJAL200 to receive $200 off your registration.
