CE Pro � AOL Customer Rep Shows Service Contract Providers What Not To Do

CE Pro � AOL Customer Rep Shows Service Contract Providers What Not To Do

I think everyone's experienced at least a little bit of A-O-HELL frustration, haven't they? I haven't had an AOL account in eight years, but I still remember what it was like to try and cancel...and those disks in the mail....memories...

VoIP news blog

I recently found an excellent news blog for VoIP industry happenings: http://www.asteriskvoipnews.com

As we find more industry blogs, we'll post them here and start to assemble a blog roll (like everyone else does...) of call center news and related topic blogs.

Top Ten Ways A Call Center Quality Monitoring Solution Creates Better Trained Agents

This is an overview of how to use Quality Monitoring to improve the performance of your call center team.

1) A quality monitoring solution provides the ability for agents to hear themselves speak
Even the best agents make mistakes. Most don’t even realize when they’re making them. Playing back recorded interactions will enlighten them. When an agent first hears themselves going “Uhmmmm…”, you can see the funny look on their face as they think, “that’s what I sound like?”. Chances are after they realize that there IS room for improvement, they will embrace the opportunity to do just that.

2) A quality monitoring solution’s screen capture functionality allows for greater understanding of how agents use their applications
Screen Capture technology isn’t only for nabbing solitaire players or web surfers during business hours – it can also be used to watch an agent navigate through a crm while helping a customer on the phone. Often time-saving process improvements can be made after observing CRM usage. Screen capture, and especially video-mode screen capture (where every on screen movement is captured, not just stills), can have a huge impact on ROI.

3) Evaluation functionalities speed up the learning curve
This one seems rather obvious – before the evaluation process was automated, supervisors had to sit side-by-side with employees, take notes, fill out spreadsheets, develop training material and provide feedback to employees and compile reports for management. If this process took three hours, the automated process takes three minutes. That’s not an exact calculation, of course, but you get the picture. Even worse, recording calls without an evaluation element keeps you from improving at the rapid pace that is available to you.

4) Quality monitoring reports make it easy to identify employee strengths and weaknesses, and to identify where agents need training
Typical quality monitoring systems come with agent performance reports that can identify where employees are struggling, even where entire groups falter across the board. This is key in developing relevant training materials that focus on specific problems.

5) E-learning features allow supervisors to send targeted training materials to agents
Once you’ve completed some evaluations and identified where employees need training, you then will have to set out to work on the areas they need help on. Once you’ve created your training materials, deployment of the appropriate content to the specific employee can be automated via “E-Learning” functionality. Confirmation of completion is then sent back to the supervisor after the employee has viewed his training material.

6) Quality Monitoring “packaging” features enable you to create a "greatest hits" list of the best and worst call examples
If your system has a “packaging” feature you have the ability to grab your recorded events and organize them together for training purposes. You can then publish your package to the web, a shared network drive, or burned to cd. You can create a group of events related to a similar training theme, or even a “greatest hits” collection of stellar service calls sure to impress the executives.

7) Quality monitoring can reduce turnover and stagnation by providing a measurable means of improvement
A good quality monitoring system can provide managers with the ability to focus in on skill areas where employees need help. Implemented properly, a quality monitoring program can provide a continuous improvement of agent performance. Agents will grow less frustrated and stagnant. As their skills improve, so will their ability to get to the next level.

8) A successful quality monitoring implementation enables teams to work to common goals and expectations
No QA program should be implemented without first having everyone on board with both the concept and the goals. Both management and employees should have common goals, expectations and metrics – the momentum of a cohesive team effort will often empower the ability to exceed those goals.

9) Quality monitoring can affect your entire organization. Customized reports can allow you to determine if training needs are for individuals, teams, or the entire organization
Having the ability to focus in on training requirements for individual agents is one benefit of a solid reporting mechanism, but quality monitoring reports should also allow you to examine your teams’ deficiencies, and organizational problems across the board. This will allow you to deploy individual, team and company-wide training programs and improve overall call center performance.

10) Quality monitoring can rapidly deliver a return on investment
Once a quality monitoring program has been implemented, the return on investment can be realized very quickly. This translates to the bottom line via more upsells, saves and new sales, less turnover, faster training cycle time for new hires, and much more. For tips on how to maximize the implementation process for quality monitoring, please view the article “Top ten tips for implementing a call center quality monitoring solution”

Unique Approach to VoIP Call Recording and Quality Monitoring Allows Call Centers to “Start Small and Think Big”

East Hartford based software development firm enables call centers to use a phased approach and still receive a high impact return on investment when implementing voip call recording and quality monitoring technology.

Coordinated Systems, Inc. (CSI), of East Hartford, CT, is pleased to announce that the latest release of Virtual Observer (VO) 3.0, a complete call center quality monitoring and VoIP recording suite, can provide call centers with the ability to implement their solution with a phased approach, rather than forcing customers to purchase features they’re not ready for or bells and whistles they will never use.

When purchasing the Virtual Observer call center quality monitoring suite, customers have the option to record selective calls instead of recording all calls, which requires many more channel licenses, and a corresponding higher budget. CSI differentiates themselves from the rest of the industry by providing "big budget" features at "small budget" prices, thus establishing the middle ground between low-end recording devices that simply record calls and allow for playback and high end complete call center suites that can overwhelm buyers with features they will never even use.

VO provides tremendous value to the call recording process by adding powerful evaluation and E-learning features. Using VO, call center managers have the capability to produce training media for burning onto cd, web playback, or automatic email distribution to agents who require specific help. Packaged training material can also be used to reduce the training cycle time for new agents.

Virtual Observer supports a large variety of VoIP and TDM/Legacy phone systems: Cisco, Avaya, 3COM, Siemens, Nortel, Mitel, as well as any SIP-enabled VoIP systems. CSI can implement Virtual Observer within a traditional TDM environment, on a hybrid TDM/VoIP system, or on a pure VoIP network.

VO’s strength has always been in delivering full-featured functionality at a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO). One of the reasons VO is able to achieve the lower TCO is by allowing customers to record a sampling of calls for quality purposes, rather than forcing them to log every call. Now these same cost savings can be applied for VoIP recording on Cisco, Avaya, 3com, Siemens and any SIP VoIP system.

As more and more companies choose to implement VoIP, for both cost savings and value-added functionality, they can now acquire a more affordable quality monitoring solution that will record a select number of calls needed to produce the quality assurance target goal for number off evaluations.

This also means that companies can now implement the full featured technology of an enterprise class quality monitoring system without worrying that they will be left behind when transitioning to VoIP.

In the recent call recording marketplace, you used to be able to only buy basic, feature-deprived VoIP recorders OR expensive, feature-crammed, high TCO products. Just as CSI approached the traditional analog recording world, the marketplace is revolutionized by making available a complete Call Center Quality Monitoring and VoIP Recording suite, packed with features that companies will use, for a palatable price.

Another differentiating area that separates CSI involves annual maintenance agreements. With VO, annual support renewals are not complete system re-buys, but instead a nominal percentage of the original software cost. Superior customer service at an affordable price will yield a mutually satisfied long-term relationship.

Coordinated Systems, Inc. (CSI) delivers enterprise-ready, random sample VoIP call recording and 100% call logging with quality assurance functionality at an incredible value. CSI specializes in providing solutions to mid-size and large customer service centers recording a sampling of agent calls in single or multiple locations. Virtual Observer can be up and running and creating better trained employees in rapid time.