Calabrio One Makes Banking with Columbia Easy

Columbia Bank prides itself on being "the business bank of choice" and "the easiest bank to do business with."

Those concepts were challenged when the Tacoma, Wash.-based bank bought Pacific Premier Bank a little more than a year ago, creating an influx of new customers and customer data. It also meant that Laura Green, the bank's senior vice president and director of digital onboarding and contact center, would need to ensure any call center decisions she made were being based on real customer preferences and factual information.

That was a challenge because customer feedback sample sizes were small and wrap-up codes for the end of each call weren't always accurate, particularly if the customer discussed multiple items.

"I wasn't focusing on the issue. I was focusing on what I could get my hands on," Green explains. "I wasn't looking for a solution from a vendor. I was looking for a root cause of the issues that we were experiencing: High volume of calls, long wait times, long call times, etc."

The bank had already been using Calabrio for workforce management and call recording, so Green went back to Calabrio (which has since been acquired by Thoma Bravo and merged with Verint) in her search for a solution to the above issues.

Green met with Shal Choudhary, who at the time was Calabrio's senior enterprise sales executive. Choudhary introduced her to the Calabrio One Suite of workforce management, quality assurance, and analytics solutions.  Also included in the suite is Calabrio's Analytics Plus, which adds the following elements:

• Trending topics and AI tags that automatically identify fast trends and risks;
• Interaction summaries;
• Automatic call quality scoring;
• Speech and text analytics for recorded interactions to find key topics and customer sentiment; and
• Custom dashboards for teams to share data views that track performance metrics.

Calabrio "took the time not just to pitch a bunch of products but to explain how they could help and the expertise that they could provide," Green recalls. "Calabrio made me feel like I was their only customer, whereas when I go to a different vendor, it can sometimes be weeks before I get anything back."

Columbia Bank upgraded from Calabrio's basic workforce management and call recording to the full Calabrio One Suite in September 2025. The full solution suite went live within a month.

"That just doesn't happen," Green says of the speed of implementation. "It felt like I turned on a switch and it showed up as available."

The bank also added Premium Customer Care, a managed service that gives clients access to a business-outcome coach and senior-level technical experts, integration support, and enhanced proactive monitoring.

With the advanced technology, the bank has reduced wait times from two-and-a-half minutes to 20 seconds; cut call abandonment rates from 9 percent to 1 percent, and increased customer referrals for services like online banking, electronic bill pay, and new accounts, from 350 per month to 500.These improvements have helped the team serve customers more effectively while continuing to manage staffing. It reduced headcount from 223 to 192 in the first half of 2026.

"Greater efficiency is allowing us to do more with the team we have, while giving employees easier access to the information they need to support customers," Green says.

Following the customer service improvements, Columbia plans now to go further into the Calabrio technology to aid employees. "I don't want it to be easy to bank with us but hard to support customers. I want both to be easy," Green states.

Green plans to use customer sentiment features of the Calabrio solution to help with employee coaching, identifying representatives in need of coaching and those with the highest sentiment scores to help with coaching the others.

The Payoff: 

Since adding the full Calabrio One Suite, Columbia Bank has done the following:

• Reduced call wait times from 2 minutes, 30 seconds to 20 seconds;
• Cut call abandonment from 9 percent to 1 percent;
• Increased service and product referrals from 350 to 500 monthly; and
• Reduced headcount from 223 employees to 192.