1. The Calabrio One TM Workforce Optimization suite of software for contacts centers includes workforce management, speech analytics, monitoring and recording, and performance management.   Are there any specific areas that Calabrio focuses on?

Calabrio focuses on providing software that helps our customers to a better job of managing their contact centers. That includes planning, measuring and evaluating staff and operations with the goal of improving efficiency and performance. Most of our customers use our quality management and/or our workforce management software to achieve those goals. Today, more customers are evaluating and implementing technologies and tools like speech analytics and performance dashboards to enhance these core capabilities. Speech analytics, for example, helps customers identify trends and pinpoint issues without listening to and evaluating every call. By providing a suite of applications that work together, we can meet the dynamic needs of each customer at a lower cost. And, we’ll continue to add technologies and tools that enhance those core capabilities to help our customers work smarter.

2. There are many vendors that provide similar suites of applications.  How do you differentiate your solutions from your competitors, i.e. workforce management, monitoring and recording? 

It’s simple – Calabrio is easier to use. While many WFO suite vendors make that claim, we can point to numerous customers, partners and industry vendor comparisons that support what makes us different. Our software goes in faster and easier, is faster and easier to learn, and is more reliable to support, which cuts down on administrative time and support costs. That means Calabrio customers are able to achieve their goals without the unnecessary complexity of other solutions. There are a couple of reasons for that. First of all, Calabrio is a 100% software-based solution. We don’t sell hardware and our solutions are not dependent on any proprietary hardware to run, making installation, maintenance and upgrades much easier. Also, we’ve invested heavily in the “user experience” to ensure that our software interface is intuitive, eliminates steps, and can be personalized for the needs of each individual user.

3. Several workforce management vendors are attempting to apply their solutions to the back offices of companies. Is Calabrio going in this direction?  Please comment on the feasibility of these efforts.   Who would be responsible within the enterprise for these implementations?

There are other vendors offering back office solutions, and while the underlying technology may be similar, the practical applications are not. Back office requires different underlying calculations, processes, management, and it is often a different buyer. While it is possible that we would look to this as an expansion area in the future, our focus today is in providing the most excellent contact center software capabilities that we can provide to serve the needs of our customers.

4. What new products and/or services can we expect from Calabrio in the remainder of 2010 and 2011?

The next release of the Calabrio One suite features a revolutionary new user experience. We’ve taken our suite to the next level of integration and personalization. Each user will log in to their own personalized dashboard, which incorporates widgets that they select to display performance metrics, alerts, and work activities in a one unified view. From there, users can drill down into the component applications to complete their tasks for the day. Calabrio has focused on unifying views, streamlining workflows, and providing a level of personalization that will turn workforce optimization software from an application contact center personnel have to use, to one they will want to use.

Next year, we will continue to focus on feature enhancements for each of our individual products within the suite – always based on input from our customers and our vision of capabilities that will take them to the next level of performance. We’ll be working on adding application widgets that will strengthen the power of the core functions for our customers by increasing collaboration, enabling some of our applications to support a mobile device environment, and further enhancing our analytics capabilities.

5. What do you consider are your greatest challenges in penetrating the contact center market?

Calabrio quite recently entered an established market with a strong set of capabilities and virtually no name recognition. In addition, we’ve been focused on very tight integration with the Cisco Unified Contact Center market, so our software has really only been available to a subset of the market. The advantage of that is that our Cisco customers have access to the most tightly integrated solution available on a Cisco platform, which is a big reason why Calabrio installation, administration and support is so automated and painless. We’ve made a business decision to expand our capabilities to other platforms, beginning with Avaya. While our workforce management applications have been available on the Avaya ACDs for some time, our recording and quality software has not. That capability is now scheduled for general availability by the end of the year. By approaching ACD expansion very systematically, we are able to focus our attention on providing that same tight integration and quality as we expand. As we look at adding ACD platforms in the future, but we will not merely offer the connection, we will introduce integration when we can effectively support it, and know how to optimize the capabilities of our software for our customers running in that environment.

6. Calabrio One is integrated with the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise platform.   Please explain your relationship with Cisco.

Calabrio is the OEM provider of Cisco Unified Contact Center Express. Our Calabrio One suite is available through Cisco integration partners. Our long history and relationship with Cisco on both the business and technical side provide us with the ability to keep our solutions in lock step with Cisco capabilities. As a result, we offer capabilities that other vendors simply can’t match.

7. Please identify some recent trends in our market.  What do you anticipate will be the areas of growth in the next twelve months?         

We are seeing speech analytics turn from a technology to watch to a technology to use. Much of that is due to the availability of technology, tools and pricing models that make the otherwise daunting capabilities more accessible to more customers. Calabrio Speech Analytics is an example of that, and we are working with customers to understand how it applies to their business to leverage the power of the technology in very focused ways. Mobile applications and SaaS delivery are other areas that are positioned to grow, as contact centers look to deliver more services more accessibly and in more flexible ways. Those are areas two areas that we’re looking to stay ahead of. We also believe that usability and supportability are real problems in the call center software marketplace today, and that customers are increasingly frustrated with solutions that are just too difficult and costly to maintain. I think you’ll see many vendors scramble to address those problems. Calabrio is leading that revolution.