In an effort to help customer service organizations sharpen their skills and expertise with training and necessary resources and tools, the contact center technology expert Calabrio, Inc has opened a new training and consulting center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Called the Calabrio (News - Alert) Innovation Center, this state of the art facility aims to build up contact center best practices through teaching, sharing and collaboration between industry experts and a community of customers.

In order to be competitive, today’s contact centers need to stay updated on the latest contact center methodologies and technologies. The new training center will provide participants with just that, through its hand-on training programs. Participants will also gain access to real-world contact center data and get introduced to forward-looking business practices. Overall, the participants are expected to find here everything that they need in order to thrive in today’s market.

The Calabrio User Group community has been given the opportunity of being the first participant to receive training at the facility.

Aimed at educating, enabling and empowering customer service organizations, the Calabrio Innovation center has designed the following types of programs for executives, supervisors, managers and agents:

Workshops – The Calabrio Innovation Center workshop focus on applying best practices in order to achieve optimal results as a result of implementing Calabrio ONE workforce optimization and analytics products. The participants can expect to get a glimpse of Calabrio’s strong industry knowledge, which it will share throughout the workshop.

Training Modules – Calabrio plans to conduct a series of standardized training sessions for contact center agents eager to brush up on their skills and increase their familiarity with Calabrio products. These inexpensive training classes are led by a team of professional Calabrio trainers. Participants will become familiar with the tools needed to become more efficient and provide the best customer service possible.

In-depth Engagement Consultation –This program teaches contact center professionals how to take advantage of new technologies, methodologies and other service techniques for driving the business forward. The program builds on analysis and recommendations based on an actual, live contact center environment.

E-learning Opportunities – This program is intended for contact center teams who need more training but are unable to get away from the day-to-day operations of the contact center. The program is designed to enable remote, flexible learning access for contact center professionals.

All programs and workshops offer opportunities to interact with industry experts and gain insight them.

“Innovation is about more than technology, it’s a way of continuously learning and improving to keep the customer service organization current, relevant and strategic to the business. Through the Calabrio Innovation Center, customers can now tap into the Calabrio community of knowledge with access to seasoned consultants, experienced professional trainers, leading-edge development teams and the Calabrio partner network to achieve better business results,” Calabrio’s vice president of product and marketing Matt Matsui noted in a statement.

The Calabrio User Group (CUG) Board of Customer Directors recently announced an expanding agenda to accommodate growing interest from Calabrio users to network, learn and share insight into solutions that will have the greatest impact on their business. To support an organizational growth of more than 500 percent over the past year, the CUG Board of Customer Directors has added two regional events, providing more opportunities for customers to collaborate with Calabrio product and services executives, and with each other.