The trend towards unification is something you can see everywhere from cellular phones which now include music players, GPS and cameras to desktop software allowing communications with once disparate applications.
One company in the call center space which is surfing the wave of integration is Calabrio as they have just announced a number of improvements to their software suite. The company was spun out of SpanLink Communications about a year ago and is now firmly established as a leader in the workforce and quality management areas.
In a conversation with the company's VP of marketing and Business Development, Tim Kraskey, we got to speaking about all the changes at the company. The first was to enable a single view of the customer and each user's activities.
This includes leveraging IM, presence, Wikis, RSS feeds and tagging as well as traditional workflow processes.
As you may recall, this is not unlike what Nortel was recently discussing with me regarding customer experience 2.0.
The next goal the company has is to present the appropriate "services" to each user's desktop based on their role…agent, supervisor, evaluator, manager, executive or knowledge worker, etc.
The company has a container view allowing widgets to be used within a browser in a manner which allows integration with business applications.
Calabrio WFM is now up to version 8.3 and this 100% web-based release includes things like enhanced vacation planning, strategic planning, reusable scenarios for forecasts and distribution, project scheduling and the workforce management software works with Nortel, Avaya and Cisco platforms.
Quality management improvements include knowledge worker recording, a graphical dashboard, on-demand recording, extended screen-recording for after-call work and custom metadata for recordings which allow there to be a richer set of data identifiers when playing back and analyzing calls.
In the interoperability realm, there are now CRM integrations for Salesforce.com, Siebel Customer Relationship Management and Microsoft CRM
The call center world seems to be rapidly catching up to the web 2.0 world with myriad integrations and features which were once absent from our industry. Although the tools are coming online, I only hope call center managers and CXOs realize that the contact center can be much more useful when fully automated and this will result in higher levels of customer service and increased sales.
See also:
Calabrio Renames Its Unified Interaction Suite
One company in the call center space which is surfing the wave of integration is Calabrio as they have just announced a number of improvements to their software suite. The company was spun out of SpanLink Communications about a year ago and is now firmly established as a leader in the workforce and quality management areas.
In a conversation with the company's VP of marketing and Business Development, Tim Kraskey, we got to speaking about all the changes at the company. The first was to enable a single view of the customer and each user's activities.
This includes leveraging IM, presence, Wikis, RSS feeds and tagging as well as traditional workflow processes.
As you may recall, this is not unlike what Nortel was recently discussing with me regarding customer experience 2.0.
The next goal the company has is to present the appropriate "services" to each user's desktop based on their role…agent, supervisor, evaluator, manager, executive or knowledge worker, etc.
The company has a container view allowing widgets to be used within a browser in a manner which allows integration with business applications.
Calabrio WFM is now up to version 8.3 and this 100% web-based release includes things like enhanced vacation planning, strategic planning, reusable scenarios for forecasts and distribution, project scheduling and the workforce management software works with Nortel, Avaya and Cisco platforms.
Quality management improvements include knowledge worker recording, a graphical dashboard, on-demand recording, extended screen-recording for after-call work and custom metadata for recordings which allow there to be a richer set of data identifiers when playing back and analyzing calls.
In the interoperability realm, there are now CRM integrations for Salesforce.com, Siebel Customer Relationship Management and Microsoft CRM
The call center world seems to be rapidly catching up to the web 2.0 world with myriad integrations and features which were once absent from our industry. Although the tools are coming online, I only hope call center managers and CXOs realize that the contact center can be much more useful when fully automated and this will result in higher levels of customer service and increased sales.
See also:
Calabrio Renames Its Unified Interaction Suite
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