Calabrio held its annual user meeting, Calabrio Customer Connect (C3), in Las Vegas September 15-18. I had the privilege of being a speaker at the event and the opportunity to attend keynote and breakout sessions. One of those, Transforming Your Business with Managed Services: Insights from a Leading Athletic Apparel Company (referred to here as Apparel Company), was particularly insightful. The company, while happy to share their story, prefers to stay anonymous.
The managed services session was delivered by Vinay Devanira, Director, Managed Services, Calabrio, and an executive (referred to here as Apparel Exec (she/her) from a well-known apparel company that is a user of Calabrio Managed Services. Devanira spent five-and-a-half years with Wysdom before joining Calabrio post-acquisition. Apparel Speaker described herself as a product executive, dedicated to leveraging emerging technologies to transform customer support and drive operational efficiency.
Vinay Devanira, Director, Managed Services, Calabrio
What is now Calabrio Managed Services began as part of Wysdom, an AI bot and analytics company acquired by Calabrio in January 2024. (I wrote about the strategic implications of the acquisition here.) The application acquired from Wysdom is now marketed as the chatbot analytics software Calabrio Bot Analytics. The chatbot analytics platform helps companies monitor and improve the performance and quality of their customer service chatbots and voice bots.
There are two paths that Calabrio customers can take to take advantage of the Bot Analytics software offered by Calabrio. The first is a subscription to Bot Analytics. Customers use their own teams to self-serve and drive value with the software. They have access to a Calabrio Customer Success Manager and Calabrio support for upgrades.
Post-launch of the Bot Analytics software, customers can also choose Calabrio Managed Services. With this offer, Calabrio:
Devanira began his C3 presentation by explaining the goal of the company’s managed services offerings – to help companies maximize the value from the Calabrio software investment.
The issues customers have that drive them to engage with the Calabrio Managed Services are:
The managed service team helps companies address these issues by:
After explaining Calabrio’s Managed Services offer, Devanira introduced the customer speaker. He explained that Apparel Company has been a customer of Wysdom, and now Calabrio, since 2021. The session proceeded in fireside chat mode.
Devanira first asked why Apparel Company decided to enlist the services of Wysdom. Apparel Exec explained that in 2021, the company had a chatbot program and moved to a solution and immediately saw performance “plummet.” Containment/deflection rates, guest resolution rate, and how customers felt about bot decreased dramatically, and “we knew that we had to do something.”
Apparel Exec went on to say that most of Apparel Company’s volume is via messaging or live chat. In addition, Apparel Company’s wanted its digital guest experience to mirror its store experience. Note that Apparel Company initially engaged with Wysdom during the COVID pandemic, a time when the company saw its digital volume skyrocket.
Devanira asked Apparel Exec how Calabrio and Apparel Company work together. She responded that, “We basically use Calabrio as a super scrum team (i.e., development team).” Apparel Company has a product manager for chatbot and messaging, and most recently channel strategy, who is responsible for the roadmap. The product manager prioritizes activities, with recommendations from the Calabrio managed services team from their monthly reviews. Calabrio then builds and delivers the projects, evaluates the results, and continues to work with Apparel Company to improve the results over time.
So how has Apparel Company benefited from its use of the Bot Analytics tool? Apparel Exec reported, “I think my big takeaway is that context matters. Knowing the top line category or what the option the guest chose is not enough. If you do not understand the intent behind the intent, you only treat symptoms and not the root causes.”
Using AI, software can report the “intent” of a call, e.g., requesting refund. The intent behind the intent is WHY do they want a refund. Is the product defective? Did it not perform as expected? Does it not match the description? Calabrio Bot Analytics helps Apparel Company find the reason for the customer interaction, so that corrective action can be taken if necessary. As a result, Apparel Exec said the company is making faster progress in their digital program than they would have without it, to “double our goals in the last few years.”
The promise of the Wysdom acquisition by Calabrio was to support a customer base who had deployed bots by allowing them to add Bot Analytics to an existing Calabrio deployment that primarily supported live agent operations. With the increase in digital engagement – as described by Apparel Company – these tools are essential to allow brands to provide improved automation experiences.
