Q&A: Ashley Kessler, Senior Marketing Manager EMEA – Calabrio

Calabrio – Customer Engagement Conference 2019 sponsor – is the customer experience intelligence company that empowers organisations to enrich human interactions.

What does your company do? / What is your USP?

• Through AI-driven analytics, Calabrio uncovers customer behaviour and sentiment, and derives compelling insights from the contact centre.

What’s special about the platform and your approach?

• Calabrio ONE gives you the complete toolset to unlock the tremendous value buried within your customer interaction data and use it to transform your entire business. One seamless solution combines a fully integrated workforce optimisation suite with powerful voice-of-the-customer analytics tools deployed how you choose—in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment.
• Calabrio ONE’s intuitive UI was designed to capitalise on the way the human brain processes complex and large amounts of information, and personalised reports synthesize data into visual dashboards that allow users to keep relevant and actionable insights at their fingertips.

How does a product/service implementation actually look like and how do you measure success?

• Our Professional Services team is designed to make sure that your contact centre transformation delivers great outcomes for your organisation. You can count on our project managers, certified engineers and trainers for exceptional service whether you’re deploying Calabrio ONE for the first time or launching a new initiative to get bold, new benefits from the platform.
• Every organisation we work with has a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM). This is your advocate within Calabrio, providing seamless communication and support throughout your Calabrio experience.

How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like?

Here are a ways retailers are seeing success with Calabrio ONE:

• Identifying customer issues in near real-time
  • Your contact centre is commonly called customer service, but think of it as one big focus group. Customers don’t call to say hi. They call because they have a question, a frustration or a need they want satisfied. This is all valuable information. What questions, needs and frustrations are your agents hearing most often? Which problems can you solve immediately?
  • Powerful contact centre analytics, like Calabrio ONE, can reveal trending topics and keywords in near-real time. Trend monitoring allows contact centres to take immediate action and address problems such as a malfunctioning e-commerce platform, inadequate website information or online payment issues—before they lose business or customer trust takes a hit. Remember, for every person who calls, there are dozens more with the same problem who don’t call. Fix the situation quickly and you’ll make them all happy.
• Understanding buyer habits
  • Modern shoppers are inundated with product choices. In the past, consumers were awed by limitless product assortments, but in recent years are now gravitating toward smaller, more curated collections tailored to their needs. The ability to listen to 100 percent of customer voices paints a much more complete and accurate picture of customers’ likes and dislikes, allowing retailers to provide consumers with a more personalised experience.
  • For example, one of our clients, a midsized online retailer leveraged contact centre analytics to build and refine a list of its most popular products. The retailer cross-referenced customer demographic data to build distinct top-product lists for unique segments of its customer base. Those top-product lists were then fed into the retailer’s e-commerce platform, populating its “Products You Might Like” section to drive an intelligent and targeted cross-selling strategy.
• Refining marketing strategy
  • Data mined in the contact centre extends well beyond the customer service floor and can be utilised to drive business throughout the organisation. Savvy marketers can tap into contact centre data and use sentiment analysis to discover how customers view their most recent ad campaigns, hone in on the most effective marketing messages, find out how customers view their brand or understand how customer sentiment varies by product line.
  • They can hear straight from customers what works, what doesn’t, what they like and what they don’t like. This access to near real-time market research at an exceptionally low cost allows marketers to quickly adapt their target audience profile, adjust existing campaigns and inform future efforts so they reach the right audience, through the right channels, at the right time.

What advantage does it add?

• At Calabrio, we help organisations unlock new value and drive growth by honing in on everyday customer interactions. We’re unlocking the true voice of the customer and delivering what customer-centric organisations crave: the ability to make every interaction engaging, insightful and profitable. We deliver technology and solutions that empower more human human interactions.

What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2018 / What challenges are retailers facing in 2018?

• The shift to e-commerce has been and will continue to be the biggest challenge for retailers. It’s given rise to digital disruptors like Amazon and many brands are struggling to balance their online presence with their physical footprint. Consumers are looking for a convenient experience that is tailored to them—searching, browsing and buying in a few swipes. Plus, the delivery experience is more important than ever. It’s all about speed!
• Consumers are also more open to brands personalising their experience by making suggests and anticipating their personal preferences. Hospitality brands are getting good at this and retailers could really take notes.

How will you address these challenges and turn them into successes?

• Most retail business leaders know that customer feedback must become the key driver of business transformation. In the contact centre, smart leaders have long known that a wealth of valuable insight comes pouring into their contact centres every day. First-hand intelligence, directly from customers, tells you what’s working—and what isn’t—throughout the business. Yet most retailers are only examining 2 percent of their contact centre interactions—and only 1 in 3 brands today are using analytics to extract insights from their customer interaction data. That’s because until now, these tools remained too costly and cumbersome to be practical and usable.
• Calabrio ONE makes it easy and cost-effective to monitor and examine 100 percent of contact centre interactions—without the need for dedicated data analysts. The analytics solutions offered in Calabrio ONE seamlessly integrate all customer data streams to build a single, unified picture of each customer. Moreover, these predictive and prescriptive tools are built to deliver the user-friendly functionality and intuitive outputs that make contact centre insights accessible to anyone in the organisation—bringing the deep customer-centric insights that retail leaders know they need in order to build a solid strategy for the future.

What is on the horizon for you as a company?

• Our goal is to fundamentally change the way organisations work. We are making software that easily intakes multiple streams of data simultaneously in order to equip everyone—regardless of their experience with analytics—to make fast decisions. We will continue to build upon an AI-powered and machine learning framework that has set us up to drive predictive, embedded analytics into everything we do.
• At Calabrio, our mission remains to empower contact centre agents around the world to connect with consumers in new ways and better understand their wants and needs, so agents—and every other employee—can deliver a fantastic customer experience at every level of the company.

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