Keith Dawson's Analyst Perspectives

Tools for contact center agent management have changed considerably in the past few years. The suite of software applications has grown from those that perform core functions in scheduling and quality control to include more advanced solutions for agent guidance, integrated desktops, and workflow and automation design. One area of intense investment by vendors has been analytics, specifically for assessing customer satisfaction and hearing the “voice of the customer.”

Analytics has become the centerpiece in this shift because organizations benefit tremendously from extracting insights from call and customer data to understand what motivates agents to perform well and what moves customers to engage and buy. The pandemic has made it particularly important to be able to extract signals of buying interest and customer sentiment and to engage agents more directly when they are no longer working inside contact centers.

Voice of the Customer (VoC) efforts also have many uses that lie outside contact centers, notably to marketers who can use VoC and other types of analytics to create campaigns and personalize messages to interested customers. Ventana Research asserts that by 2022, one-third of organizations’ marketing departments will be larger users of Voice of the Customer analytics than the contact center, to use sentiment and behavioral insights to target customers.

Calabrio is a software provider offering operational tools for contact centers with a primary focus in the agent management segment. Its portfolio includes workforce management, agent performance and quality management, along with analytics and VoC. Calabrio, which has been operating in this market for decades, released an analytics software product called Enterprise CXI in early 2021 which is focused largely on VoC. It complements the firm’s broad contact center agent suite, Calabrio One. It is worth noting that Calabrio's platform is licensed by several other major contact center vendors as an OEM component, illustrating the level of influence Calabrio has in the industry.

Enterprise CXI is produced in versions for the contact center as well as for specific users and vertical markets like finance, marketing, sales, HR and IT. Calabrio describes its software as out-of-the-box, function-specific dashboards that are added to the Calabrio One platform.

By directly addressing VoC analytics within CXI, Calabrio is attempting to broaden its user base to include those in other CX-focused departments like marketing and sales. Creating role-based views into interaction and customer data is important in helping broaden the justification for allocating resources to the contact center and ties the service experience into other elements of the customer journey. This provides Calabrio with a stronger customer base in a competitive market that has seen considerable acquisition activity in recent years.

The applications in this release enable organizations to determine agent efficiency and identify opportunities for improvement through training or coaching. CXI also provides insight into how engaged agents are, highlighting signs of burnout that could lead to turnover or poor performance. And, by including marketing departments on the platform, users can derive insights into customer sentiment.

Any organization should consider Calabrio on the shortlist for contact center analytics and Voice of the Customer systems. Calabrio is bringing rich data analysis out beyond the contact center to the many customer-adjacent departments within an organization that have a stake in how customer experiences are delivered.

For deeper looks at contact center operations and analytics, see these Analyst Perspectives:

• The Pandemic Heightens Need for Agent Management
• CX Suites Focus on Managing Customer Experiences
• The Voice of the Customer Is Really a Chorus of Voices

Regards,

Keith Dawson