Investment company KKR has bought US-based Calabrio, a Cisco Solution Partner with expertise in customer analytics. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Founded in 2007, Calabrio provides products and services to help companies better understand their customers and leverage insights. The Calabrio ONE software suite is a unified workforce optimization (WFO) solution -- including call recording, quality management, workforce management and voice-of-the-customer analytics -- that records, captures and analyzes customer engagement centre interactions to improve the customer experience and drive top-line business growth.
"We have worked to transform contact centres into customer engagement centres and we pride ourselves on empowering everyone in an organization -- from contact centre agents to the CEO -- with easy-to-use tools that provide companies with a better understanding of their customer to help them grow," said Tom Goodmanson, president and CEO of Calabrio.
More than 4,000 companies worldwide use Calabrio with their multi-channel contact centers, including Boeing, Maersk, REI and VITAS Healthcare, it says. A 2015 PwC survey of CEOs ranked data mining and analytics as the second most strategically important digital technology and organisation capability, only behind mobile technologies for customer engagement. According to the survey, CEOs also believe that data and analytics is the most important capability for delivering a better customer experience and business efficiencies.
KKR has invested over $17bn of equity across the technology, media and telecom sectors since 1983. Recent software investments for the Firm include Darktrace (enterprise cyber threat defense software), Jitterbit (fast, agile integration solutions for the modern business), Mitchell International (technology and information solutions across the Property & Casualty industry), and Epicor (industry-specific enterprise software solutions in the manufacturing, distribution and retail sectors), a transaction subject to closing.