Calabrio rolls out contact center self-scheduling technology

Calabrio recently introduced Self-Scheduling, a new workforce management technology, to Calabrio Workforce Management platform. The new technology offers planning optimization, intraday automation and self-scheduling for contact center agents.

Calabrio said the new addition is intended to increase human interactions within contact centers while keeping track of employee performance. The update follows Calabrio's recent acquisition of Teleopti, a workforce management software provider headquartered in Sweden.

Call agents can now change their schedule without affecting service in the contact center through Self-Scheduling; the tool is available both in the cloud and on premises, and accessible via a mobile app or on a desktop, according to the company.

The Calabrio platform previously offered features to enable supervisors to adapt the schedule of the day in case of an emergency; the agent themselves, however, did not have such flexibility. Self-Scheduling now gives agents the ability to change the schedule that had been assigned to them by their supervisors. Allowing agents to have more freedom over their schedules can help reduce employee turnover rates and reduce recruitment and onboarding costs for companies, according to Calabrio.

In addition, the new workforce management technology enables automatic checks of staff performance against key performance indicators (KPI), service-level agreements and skills requirements. Agents can see their own personal KPI dashboards to see how they are doing, according to the company.

Lastly, Self-Scheduling technology enables managers to set certain activities to non-overwritable. This helps reduce the workload of daily monitoring and requests handling for resource planners and managers, and enables them to manage their contact center environment with less manual monitoring, according to Calabrio.

Self-Scheduling technology is an additional feature of Calabrio Workforce Management platform, and is available with no extra fees to customers with this product.

Calabrio's competitors in the workforce engagement management market include NICE, Genesys and Aspect. NICE Workforce Management enables multi-site contact centers to maintain different scheduling methodologies for different branches or departments, and allows agents to automate time off and holiday planning. Genesys PureCloud platform aims to increase efficiency and reduce costs associated with undesired overtime by enabling companies to manage employees and distribute work based on their skills and schedule, according to Genesys. Aspect Workforce Optimization software enables supervisors, agents and automated analytics systems to evaluate customer interactions to identify areas for improvement, according to the company.