Calabrio business partner?

What makes a perfect business partner?

Johan Duisters, VP Partner Sales EMEA, Calabrio

Lots of businesses are looking to build successful relationships with partners. However, it takes particular ingredients to make a partnership invaluable.

Following is a list of the top five most-valued Calabrio attributes, as offered up by our partners.

1.     A consultative approach

Any company can provide a technology solution that works. However, partnerships are about providing consultative advice to find new opportunities that will impact the bottom line.

For example, Calabrio offers call monitoring but ultimately, we want to support our partners in helping their customer base understand the nature and impact of these calls using analytics. The data gathered can be used to develop insights that will make a difference to the business at a strategic level. The contact centre analytics team can feed that information back into marketing and sales to ensure that the company continually improves the customer experience.

2.     A focus on people

In Calabrio’s field, workforce optimisation (WFO), you can optimise as much as you want but if you don’t change the human behaviour within your organisation you will never get the most out of the technology.

What will make the biggest difference to the business is not how cheaply it can record customer calls, or how easy it is to create schedules. The value comes from the ability to forecast and schedule changes to how the contact centre operates based on what happens on those calls. Then, you’re able to duplicate that across the rest of the business in order to make real strategic impact.

It’s crucial that partners help customers take an analytics-driven approach to workforce optimisation and that they drive it through their organisations. If they’re unable to do this, they won’t change anything, as customers might not see the “big picture.”

In a contact centre setting it may be helpful to refer to analytics as “customer interaction analytics,” which describes the analysis of all interactions between contact centres and customers, whether that interaction is via telephone, email, a web chat session or social media.

3.     Reward based on selling capabilities

Another benefit of taking an analytics-driven approach to workforce optimisation is that it enables the contact centre manager to see the overall health of the contact centre and understand how its team is performing. Whilst this may sound as though it exposes the team, it allows them to show how and where it is improving. It can also diagnose problems, for example if the website is down so more enquiries come into the contact centre team.

4.     Speed and agility (easy to do business with)

Businesses are looking for technology partners that can deploy their system fastest. They must be agile and lean in their working relationship. Calabrio partners deploy in weeks, where other companies can take months to get a customer engagement solution up and running.

Investing in a new technology can be a heavy lift; back-end systems need to be updated and new processes need to be learned.

Customers expect consistency in the outcome of the contact centre. So during the deployment of new technology the contact centre still needs to run smoothly. The company, internally, also needs a guarantee that the system will be an improvement; if it doesn’t work for customers, they will revert back to the old way of contacting the business.

5.     Constantly innovating

Innovation should be a number one priority for businesses today. The ability to adapt to the changing marketplace is essential to support businesses as customer behaviour changes. Many companies innovate by adding solutions to their portfolio, but it’s also important to be innovative from the ground up.

For example, contact centres can be made even more effective through artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). The future will be about “people to people” AND “machine to machine,” especially as companies automate simple queries to free up resources that can then work on more complex customer requests.

Want to learn more about Calabrio and how you can modernise your WFO software? Visit Calabrio at CCW 2017 between 20 and 23 February 2017 at the Estrel Congress Center in Berlin.