The enhancements include ease-of-use things like flipping the media player from horizontal to vertical, so that it, and the text to speech and associated analytics, run top to bottom instead of side to side, like everything else in mobility.
The new media player in Calabrio ONE Version 11
Calabrio, which makes customer engagement software for contact centres, has announced Calabrio ONE Version 11, the latest version of their Workforce Optimization flagship suite. While artificial intelligence has always been a core part of Calabrio ONE’s capabilities, it has been upgraded significantly here, both in terms of what it can do, technically, and in terms of what the user sees, with the interface getting a major redesign.
Calabrio has been in business since 2007, when it was spun out of Cisco-focused systems integrator Spanlink Communications to focus on this specific business. Calabrio ONE handles a number of different elements of workforce optimization in the contact centre – call recording, quality management, workforce management, scheduling and forecasting, analytics and business intelligence. They typically do a major release in the spring and an update or updates later in the year, so the launch of Version 11 is the big one for 2019.
“Improving the analytics has been the focus of this release,” said Ross Daniels, VP of Strategic Partnerships at Calabrio. “Analytics is now the hot thing. What has excited us about this release is how accessible we now make it.”
Fundamental improvements have been made under the hood to the artificial intelligence and machine learning frameworks that drive the predictive analytics.
“We have updated the speech-to-text engine,” Daniels said. “It is now GPU-based rather than CPU-based, so that it is super-fast. We have also improved the core understanding algorithm so that it is more accurate. The framework is now more purpose-built and has done very well in our own internal benchmarking that we used in our own evaluations.”
Users will see that Version 11 brings analytics much more to the forefront of the user experience. A redesigned user interface is a big part of this.
The new analytics dashboard
“From the analytics and BI side, it’s about bringing our dashboard technology forward a full generation, to make it more flexible, more self-service, and more personalized,” Daniels said. “It is now designed to that each user can set up their own home page. For example, they can pull in weather information onto the dashboard, which would be helpful for a logistics company. They can also personalize it with their own pictures.”
Very specific types of non-static analytics can also be added to each user’s dashboard. This does not give the users access to any information they could not get before, but it does make it easier to get the information.
“Before version 11, you had to drill into the analytics part of the application,” Daniels said “Let’s say you want to get the sentiment of all callers in the Platinum queue in the last 20 days, which would make sense, since it’s your most high-value callers. Now you can make that part of the dashboard and it’s always there. You can do this for things you want to see every day. You can mix, match and combine data, and use data from the contact system or any other third-party system.”
The presentation of the data has also been fundamentally rethought, beginning with the Calabrio ONE media player.
“The media player is a big piece on the recording and quality management side,” Daniels said. “If a quality analyst wanted to identify contacts they want to listen to, like for instance all calls from those high-value Platinum callers that were a minute over call average, the analyst would play and listen to them to see if there are any common patterns that can be acted on. We have significantly improved their experience when they do this by flipping the playback mechanism on its side. Usually the audio player runs left to right, but everything else in the mobile world is vertical. We flipped it vertical, so that the speech to text runs right beside it. People read from top to bottom faster than side to side. So now you have the code flowing down the screen like in the Matrix. It makes it easy to follow along with the transcript, and easier to jump to the part of the recording you want to hear.”
In addition, natural Language Processing-driven search capabilities extract sentiment scores from customer interactions, and present the results alongside call and email transcripts, allowing business users to examine not only the words but also the feelings behind their exchanges.
Changes have been made to enhance the proactive suite-wide monitoring, notification and configuration capabilities.
“You will be able to do things like see if a person is put on hold so that the agent can check the status of their bid on eBay,” Daniels indicated.
Other administrative improvements include additional auditing and alerting functionality, as well as new scheduling tools.
“These enterprise maintenance capability enhancements are important for partners,” Daniels said. We have partners who host our application, and for a hosting partner, any improvement around administrative use is a major value for them.”
For partners who sell the application, the analytics improvements are a major plus.
“A seller looking to show value to customers, now gets a compelling demo to show and a set of features that’s easy to understand,” Daniels stated. “The industry has done a better job in the last year or two of demystifying analytics, but there is still room for improvement. These enhancements allow the partner to have a really compelling business conversation with a really compelling demo.”
