New Self-Scheduling Package From Calabrio Empowers Agents to Have Greater Influence Over Work-Life Balance

Today, Calabrio, the customer experience intelligence company, announced the extension of its self-scheduling features available in Calabrio Workforce Management (WFM). Addressing the increased demand for greater flex time and more employee autonomy, the new Calabrio Self-Scheduling expands the schedule areas an agent can have influence over such as adding days of work, moving work hours and partial-day shift trading. Calabrio’s intelligent automation allows agents more freedom to create their ideal work-life balance, while contact centers can keep control of overall staffing levels.

“The evolved world of work needs technology to simultaneously humanize experiences and automate and optimize business processes. While sometimes considered mutually exclusive actions, expanding the realm of agent autonomy through intelligent automation is the way to achieve this, and it’s why Calabrio continuously develops features like these”

The comprehensive offering launches as employers are still feeling the effects of the 2021 Great Resignation – where millions of employees left their jobs seeking new work. In the contact center industry, one in three agents reported that they were planning to leave their job within one year. Departing agents cited higher-than-ever levels of stress as a primary industry challenge driving agent-retention issues. According to a recent Calabrio report, Health of the Contact Center 2021: Agent Wellbeing and the Great Resignation, the top source of agent stress in the modern, digital contact center is managing work-life balance. The report also found that other than “higher pay,” “more flexibility” was agents’ top demand.

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The new Calabrio Self-Scheduling package will allow agents the new ability to:

• Add work hours on either unscheduled or scheduled days
• Make partial-day shift trades with other agents
• Move scheduled working hours more easily

This is in addition to existing Calabrio capabilities where agents can:

• Move their lunch and break times for that day or in any of the following seven days
• Access voluntary time-off or overtime opportunities thanks to Grant, the virtual assistant
• Trade entire shifts – this can be configured to be approved with or without team leader intervention
• See the probability of their absence or overtime request being approved without having to contact a supervisor

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“The evolved world of work needs technology to simultaneously humanize experiences and automate and optimize business processes. While sometimes considered mutually exclusive actions, expanding the realm of agent autonomy through intelligent automation is the way to achieve this, and it’s why Calabrio continuously develops features like these,” said Matt Matsui, chief product officer at Calabrio. “Our dual approach to software is also a key factor in why over 80% of surveyed customers said that Calabrio WFM increases their ability to balance both business and agent needs.”¹

Natalia Brown, chief client operation officer at National Debt Relief, an early adopter of Calabrio’s Self-Scheduling functionality, said, “What’s great about Calabrio’s self-scheduling capability is that it lets agents manage and change their own schedules as unexpected things happen throughout each day, without negatively impacting the contact center’s service level.”

Calabrio Self-Scheduling offers businesses the ability to better tackle agent stress, while also giving agents the work-time flexibility they need to focus on customer service excellence. The first phase of the new Self-Scheduling feature set will see agents’ ability to add work hours on an unscheduled or scheduled day.

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