Calabrio ONE
Automated meetings scheduling has cut weekly planning time and supports real‑time staffing decisions
What is our primary use case?
My team as a whole uses Calabrio ONE for forecasting, reporting, and scheduling. In my actual role, my day-to-day usage is more focused on scheduling and tools like Intraday Adherence for monitoring agents in real-time, adding different items to their schedules such as meetings, reviewing staffing, and shift bidding.
While I'm in the real-time management position, which we call the hot seat, I use Intraday in Calabrio ONE to view what our staffing trends are for the day and see if we're coming under or over the volume that we forecasted. I assess whether we're understaffed or overstaffed so that I can make moves for agents in different contact channels. We also use the schedule tool because we change their blocks of time to different channels based on if movement is needed. We utilize the requests feature so that if agents have any time off that they've requested, and adherence to ensure that they are in the right contact channel. Those are the things that I use in my day-to-day.
We also tend to use reporting in Calabrio ONE. I don't use it in my day-to-day, but my team as a whole does use the reporting to get an idea around past trends with adherence, staffing, and volume.
What is most valuable?
My favorite feature of Calabrio ONE is the meetings feature. We used to schedule agents for their check-ins with their supervisor very manually through Outlook and then add it into Calabrio, which meant being in two tools. Once we discovered the meetings feature where supervisors add in their available time into Calabrio, it auto-schedules for us, which is my favorite tool because it definitely simplified a process that took us much longer before.
The meetings feature has saved a lot of time. Before, on a weekly basis, scheduling check-ins for the whole call center took us probably around four to six hours, whereas now it takes us about an hour a week. We just really have to go in, make sure that supervisors have their hours added, and then we schedule the meetings through Calabrio. The only thing that does take time sometimes is that the tool has issues where it doesn't schedule everyone even though there's availability, so we'll have to move a couple of people to get the remaining people scheduled for their check-ins. Overall, it's definitely way more efficient than the tool that we had.
Calabrio ONE definitely impacts our organization positively by being more efficient for us on the workforce management side. The adherence tool is a lot more efficient than going individually and seeing if agents are where they're supposed to be. We did have the self-scheduling feature before, which agents loved, but unfortunately due to company reductions, they had to get rid of self-scheduling. That was definitely a positive that agents enjoyed from Calabrio when that was an option.
What needs improvement?
The only thing I would say for improvement in Calabrio ONE is the meetings feature that we talked about. Sometimes it doesn't schedule everyone even though there are blocks available, and I'm not sure if it's due to staffing constraints or if the tool just doesn't take into account that it could move breaks a little bit. That's the only pain point that I really have.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Calabrio ONE since I've been at Zappos, which is five years. The first two years I used it while I was a customer service agent to view my schedule, and then I've been working in Calabrio ONE on the workforce management side of it for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I think there's only been one or two outages during the time that I've worked here, but overall it's pretty stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Calabrio ONE's scalability is fine. We haven't really had growth, and we've unfortunately been hit with a lot of layoffs in the last few years, but when we first got the tool, we had around 300 employees in customer service, and Calabrio ONE was able to handle it.
What was our ROI?
I would say I have seen a return on investment since using Calabrio ONE, particularly time saved from the meetings tool for me personally. Going from six hours weekly to schedule check-ins to about one hour weekly to schedule check-ins has been significant, but I don't have many other metrics to give outside of that.
What other advice do I have?
I don't know that I've seen an improvement in agent attendance, but time-wise, I would say it definitely saves a lot of time. I don't have an exact timeline to give because during our real-time management, we just bounce around and look at a handful of different things, so I wouldn't know exactly how much time it saves. I do know that it's a much more efficient way to see where agents are not in statuses or channels that they're supposed to be.
I haven't used the AI capabilities in Calabrio ONE. I know that there is a chatbot for agents that will tell them if time off is likely to get approved, but we haven't used any AI in our workforce management day-to-day tools for me to speak to that. The AI capabilities seem fine, but I haven't really experienced much with them as it's more so the agents who do, so I don't have much to speak on unfortunately.
I'm not sure about how Calabrio ONE is deployed. Our agents just use the web browser for Calabrio, and they can also have Calabrio ONE app on their phone, but I don't know what type of cloud it's saved to.
I definitely would recommend that others looking into using Calabrio ONE utilize its features. It took us some time to really look into the meetings feature and get adherence activated. We were more so just using it for scheduling and staffing for a long time, but once our team and manager looked further into things such as Intraday, meetings, and adherence, it has been more beneficial for our team and more efficient. I would definitely give the advice to utilize the full amount of tools that you have access to with Calabrio ONE. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.