Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

October 30, 2007

Calabrio Releases Workforce Optimization Enhancements

By Tracey E. Schelmetic


One of the most important things the call center marketplace has ever done is to take steps to increase the usability and availability of workforce optimization products to suit smaller businesses and niche markets. By decreasing costs and implementation times, workforce management/optimization providers have allowed companies with scattered and unprofessional customer service to pull together into a cohesive, customer-focused whole.
 
Calabrio (News - Alert), Inc., a provider of workforce optimization and unified contact center desktop software, announced today its new releases of its Calabrio Quality Management and Calabrio Workforce Management software. According to the company, the products are built from the ground up to be simple to deploy, learn and use in virtual, IP-based call centers of all sizes. The new enhancements were added to reduce server hardware, database licensing and client software requirements, decreasing the time and cost associated with deploying and managing a workforce optimization solution.
 
Formerly a component of Spanlink (News - Alert) Communications, the Calabrio Software division was recently spun off into a separate, independent company with a focus on workforce optimization software for the contact center.
 
“Our partners, prospects and customers consistently tell us that usability and operational ease are critical factors when selecting a software solution,” said Paul Lidsky (News - Alert), president and CEO of Calabrio, Inc. “These new enhancements speak to this demand, and we will continue to engineer and improve upon what we believe to be a superior choice for our customers — feature-rich software that has high-value at a lower life-cycle cost.”
 
With Calabrio Quality Management 2.4, voice and screen recording can now be hosted on a single server. The new architecture is expected to provide a significant initial investment savings for Calabrio customers, as well as less hardware and system software to support. Rather than purchasing, managing and maintaining multiple servers to support voice and screen recordings, customers can use a single server for every 300 agents simultaneously logged into the automatic call distributor (ACD).
 
Calabrio Quality Management 2.4 also supports use of an external SQL database, which allows customers with an existing enterprise SQL license to avoid buying a separate license. Moreover, it allows Calabrio customers who also have Calabrio Workforce Management to share the database license. Additionally, new features include outbound quality recording and Windows Vista support.
 
Calabrio Workforce Management 8.1 provides 100 percent browser-based access to all product features, enabling the contact center to be managed from anywhere in the world. Contact center managers can generate forecasts and schedules, while supervisors get a single view of all contact center key performance indicators (KPIs). Real intervention tools enable contact center managers to be proactive. From anywhere, contact center managers can track actual customer service levels and call volumes to optimize staffing while improving customer satisfaction.
 
With Calabrio Workforce Management 8.1, contact center agents can view schedules, request vacations and trade shifts at work, at home or at any contact center virtual location. They can monitor their own productivity indicators on a daily basis, which can help keep their performance on track.
 
“IT managers we talk to like the concept of a completely browser-based user interface,” said Paul Martin, vice president of product engineering of Calabrio, Inc. “They don’t have to deal with deployment and support issues on each individual users PC because all set up, administration and maintenance is isolated to the central servers.”  
 
Calabrio Quality Management and Calabrio Workforce Management comprise the Calabrio Workforce Optimization suite, which Calabrio distributes through certified partners globally, as well as through an OEM relationship with Cisco (News - Alert) for the Cisco Unified Contact Center Express platform. Calabrio Workforce Management 8.1 is generally available now. Calabrio Quality Management 2.4 will be generally available on Nov. 15, 2007.
 
 
Tracey Schelmetic is editorial director for CUSTOMER INTER@CTION Solutions. For more articles please visit Tracey Schelmetic’s columnist page.
 


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