Calabrio Leads the Way in Delivering True-Cloud WFO Data Sovereignty Worldwide

Following successes in the USA, Europe and Southeast Asia, Calabrio expands to the first full-suite contact center Workforce Optimization (WFO) cloud offering in South Africa. JP Aubineau celebrates the company’s cloud-first strategy and shows how to distinguish a true-cloud WFO solution from a fake one by asking the right questions.

When it comes to digital transformation, South Africa is seeing huge potential that is fast becoming a reality thanks to the new Amazon Web Services (AWS) Region and availability zones in Cape Town. Calabrio has added to the momentum and responded to local and global enterprise demand by introducing availability of all Calabrio ONE’s capabilities, via AWS cloud services in the region. For the very first time, South African businesses of all sizes can achieve true data sovereignty by reaping the benefits of a complete, fully integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enabled Workforce Optimization (WFO) solution alongside their Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) platform.

Global Ambitions, Local Outlook

The expansion of Calabrio’s cloud footprint in South Africa reflects the company’s global ambitions to deliver the best WFO technologies to organizations, wherever they are. We are a truly international community with over 7,000 customers in 100 countries around the world. Our integrated suite of intelligent solutions, when combined with our local knowledge and on-the-ground support, are designed to provide all the tools employees need to deliver a great agent and customer experience.

Take Spark, New Zealand’s largest telecommunications and digital services company. It recently selected Calabrio’s cloud-based Workforce Management (WFM) solution to manage the workload of some 1,500-frontline staff in over 80 different locations, knowing all their data is stored and protected locally in the cloud. It’s all part of Spark’s Unified Front-Line initiative, a new way of working where employees are cross-skilled across multiple customer touchpoints so that resources flow to where the customer is. This includes contact centers, retail stores or at-home customer visits – as demand requires. Customers receive a consistent response and high level of service whichever channel they select, and employees have the opportunity to become multiskilled by working in different environments.

Build trust and performance through data sovereignty

All customers want control over their data and protecting this data locally is essential to building trust. That’s exactly what Calabrio achieved in 2021 when we announced our roadmap for data sovereignty across Southeast Asia with a local data center in Singapore after successfully on-boarding many new cloud customers in the APAC region in the previous 12 months. The launch effectively introduced a blueprint for data sovereignty that could be replicated in other parts of the globe. It also made Calabrio the first in APAC to offer an enterprise-grade, true-cloud WFO suite that delivers true data sovereignty for Singapore-based customers. Using local AWS data centers also provides lower network latency, superior performance and data privacy to other organizations in the Southeast Asian region.

Other customers around the world appreciate the tangible steps we are taking to address data sovereignty. For example, Standard Bank in South Africa, the continent’s largest bank, recently chose to engage with us primarily for our reputation as a cloud-first organization with localized data centers in South Africa to support 4,000 contact center agents while accelerating business growth and digital transformation.

True or Fake Cloud – How to spot the real deal

Forward-thinking companies all over the world recognize the benefits of a cloud-first approach. One-in-four contact centers are now fully cloud-based – a substantial jump from 2020, when a Calabrio survey found just 1 in 10 had fully moved to the Cloud. What is more, the numbers speak for themselves. In 2021, 80% of Calabrio’s new business was for cloud-based implementations and that figure has already risen to 90% in the first quarter of 2022.

So, you may have decided to join the trend and no longer want responsibility for maintaining and supporting your WFO solution in-house. That’s a wise choice – but buyers beware: not all hosted software offerings marketed as “cloud” are true-cloud solutions. Recognizing a lucrative chance to create an additional revenue stream, many on-premises vendors are trying to cloud your judgment by “cloud-washing” their applications.

True-cloud solutions automatically serve all customers simultaneously across a shared, integrated platform for fast, efficient service. New features are added and available to you continuously meaning the most advanced functionality is always powering your contact center operations behind the scenes – you don’t even have to think about it. True-cloud solutions offer vastly superior levels of scalability to meet the rapidly changing needs of your business while guaranteeing high availability and uptime. They also provide enhanced security to make changes and updates in real-time while protecting customer and end-user data.

So how can you be sure you are buying a true-cloud solution versus a fake? The secret lies in asking the right questions to select a true-cloud WFO vendor. To discover more along with the top seven questions to ask, visit Calabrio’s new guide.