Cover Story

Green Mountain Coffee sells a wide array of coffee, tea, and other hot beverages, as well as the Keurig machines to prepare them. Its single serving canister approach to brewing is unique, and Green Mountain continues to expand on the consumable brand and flavor options it offers. The company also has a forward-looking approach when it comes to its contact center, which relies on analytics, quality management, and workforce management solutions from Calabrio (News - Alert).

In fact, Green Mountain Coffee has embraced the entire Calabrio ONE software suite. Additionally, says Nate Isham, network engineer III at Green Mountain Coffee, the company signed on to be the first user of Calabrio’s latest feature – text analytics – even before it became publicly available.

The relationship between Calabrio and Green Mountain Coffee began around 2007, when the Waterbury, Vt.-based beverage company started its search for a workforce optimization solution. At the time, the company was still using spreadsheets for agent scheduling and had limited ability to gauge agent performance, so Isham was seeking an offering that could do workforce management as well as call recording/quality management. It also wanted a solution that was cost effective, simple to use and maintain, and could work in an integrated fashion. And because Green Mountain Coffee is a Cisco (News - Alert) voice shop, it was seeking QM and WFM tools that could work with its existing Cisco gear.

In 2008, Green Mountain Coffee became a user of the Calabrio Workforce Management Suite and Calabrio Quality Management Software.

Calabrio fit the bill then, and it continues to deliver for Green Mountain Coffee as the company’s business and contact centers have grown, says Isham. Calabrio provides reasonably priced solutions for the functionality available; offers great support through the customer lifecycle; an integrated login dashboard with various levels of access for different titles in the organization; and ease of installation, maintenance and use, he says. Green Mountain Coffee looked at competing solutions, and talked to some users of those products, says Isham, but Calabrio competitors didn’t offer the same level of integration. Competing systems, he explains, also required users to log into multiple systems to view data. And maintenance of some competing systems “can be a bear” and thus require the IT staff to constantly babysit, says Isham, who wanted to allocate the time of his small IT staff to more strategic pursuits.

Green Mountain Coffee today uses the full array of Calabrio solutions at its eight contact center groups within the company as well as at its corporate offices.

Each of those groups has different call recording and quality management requirements. For example, Green Mountain’s Montreal contact center records every agent-based call. While some Green Mountain Coffee call centers capture both inbound and outbound interactions, others record only inbound calls. In call center applications of Calabrio Quality Management, calls are recorded and scored to assess agent performance, assist in agent training, help understand the customer experience, and identify potential areas for business process improvement. Green Mountain Coffee, which Isham says spends a lot of time building agent scorecards and measuring agent performance, can use the Calabrio dashboard to review call center performance from the agent level, the team level, and based on various parameters. The beverage company also leverages Calabrio Call Recording for calls coming into the corporate receptionist; in this case, compliance is the goal.

Green Mountain Coffee also uses Calabrio Analytics. It uses the speech analytics module to help uncover trends and pinpoint call center systems issues. For example, if a customer complains about an IVR prompt that’s linked to a particular call center campaign, but that campaign is no longer in operation, Calabrio’s Speech Analytics can help Green Mountain Coffee identify that and update its IVR script to promote only current campaigns. For corporate calls, Green Mountain Coffee similarly uses speech analytics to ensure its IVR prompts are correct and useful. Isham says his company has seen a 5 percent reduction in calls to its receptionist as a result of IVR improvements tied to the Calabrio Speech Analytics implementation.

Finding the right balance between customer incentives and margin protection can be tricky. Green Mountain Coffee sought to uphold customer satisfaction by empowering agents to present coupons and other special incentives as a remedy for customer issues, yet it needed a system of checks and balances so agents had guidance and direction about when such offers were truly required. By applying voice analysis to customer service transactions, the company is correlating coupon and incentive offers to the root cause of complaints. This allows the business to provide clear direction to agents so they can remain empowered while still protecting margin.

Seeking additional improvements, the company recently deployed Calabrio Desktop Analytics as well. It is using this software both for PCI (News - Alert) compliance and to assess what agents are doing with their time both while on calls and while between calls, says Isham, who adds that Green Mountain Coffee was able to get this solution up and running in just a couple of days.

Using Calabrio’s Speech and Desktop Analytics Green Mountain Coffee was able to identify a handful of positive practices by select contact center agents, which it then added as best practices. For example, Calabrio Desktop Analytics revealed that some Green Mountain Coffee agents were using the Sticky Notes accessory within Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows, as opposed to a sheet of paper, to write down details about their interactions with customers. That is a good idea, since it allows data to more easily be moved into Green Mountain Coffee’s CRM system for future use. So Green Mountain Coffee made that a company best practice. 

Green Mountain Coffee’s implementation of Calabrio Text Analytics was also just getting off the ground at press time in early October, but this effort involves applying text analytics to the e-mails that Green Mountain Coffee agents send in reply to customer inquiries. The endgame, Isham explains, is to find areas in which the company can improve agent performance and marketing campaigns.

“Up until a couple weeks ago, we didn’t realize Calabrio Text Analytics would allow us to take e-mails and score agents’ experience with that e-mail,” says Isham.

“There’s so much talk about phone calls,” he adds, “but we need to put tools in place to monitor and score against e-mail. So at the Calabrio User Group conference we learned about Calabrio Text Analytics, which we’ll be implementing with e-mail in the next couple months.”

Calabrio has been more than just a software provider to Green Mountain Coffee, adds Isham;, it’s been a partner in helping Green Mountain Coffee and other customers meet their business goals. Customers such as Green Mountain Coffee express their needs and opinions to the company via the Calabrio User Group. The group has regional meetings as well as a nationwide annual conference at which Calabrio, its vendor allies, and customers, talk about their needs and discuss product roadmaps. C-level management at Calabrio actively listens, Isham says, adding that 64 percent of the new features in Calabrio’s latest product release are things customers specifically requested.

Indeed. Calabrio continues to enhance its products to better meet customer needs and market demands. For example, the Calabrio ONE Workforce Optimization Suite, which is ranked as a visionary solution by the Gartner (News - Alert) Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Workforce Optimization, in its latest release was enhanced to embrace social and mobile technology. The software now can run on an iPad or other wireless device. Calabrio also improved and simplified the software’s user interface, consolidating 140 screens to just 40, and instituting wizard technology to help users avoid mistakes during data input.

"With more channels, more devices and more systems to connect to, the tasks of planning and analyzing today's contact center interactions continue to become more complex," says Paul Stockford, president and chief analyst at Saddletree Research. "Calabrio has established itself as an industry leader in terms of making contact center optimization simple and attainable."

Calabrio President and CEO Tom Goodmanson comments: “I don’t want to have my customers to need data scientists to use our tools. We employ data scientists here.”

Those Calabrio data scientists build software that is easy, personalized and smart, so customers like Green Mountain Coffee can spend more time on what they do best.