Showing posts with label google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label google. Show all posts

Monday, July 19, 2010

Innovation in the Call Recording Space

Potential new customers may not ask "How Innovative Are You?" during the sales process, but perhaps they should.

Businesses who innovate well and often, such as Apple and Google, don't typically need to be asked because their audience just knows they do, from the constant PR and web buzz that surrounds each new release.

At CSI, we're excited about the next wave of product announcements and innovations we have planned for our customers, partners and potential new customers.

These announcements are truly groundbreaking.

I can tell you this, right now, there will not be one call center supervisor or manager who won't want to get their hands on these new time-saving features.

For a long time, CSI has kind of flown under the radar, content to be the "best kept secret in the call recording industry." However, we have been doing this innovation thing for a long time.

Let's quickly review:

Virtual Observer was one of the first integrated call recording and quality monitoring solution designed to deliver robust QA features AND call recording.

At the time, the industry giants were priced way beyond the reach of the small and mid-sized call centers.

We saw our opening.

The marketing opportunity is not where the innovation was, however. The innovation was in designing our system with a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), meaning we'd be delivering an enterprise-ready solution for everyone.

SOA makes Virtual Observer a true enterprise-ready solution, translating to an extremely scalable platform for mid-sized centers with seasonal spikes in activity or global multi-location enterprises who are adding locations through growth and acquisition.

Delivering true enterprise scalability and aggressive quality assurance feature set truly shook up the call recording industry, which previously froze out the non-fortune 500 companies from similar  suites because of an amazingly expensive price point and upgrade path.

Virtual Observer’s competitors have since multiplied as the industry has noticed the success of our business model.

Virtual Observer was also the first vendor in the call recording space to offer lifetime free full software upgrades for customers on active maintenance contracts.

Bringing customers along to the latest release of our products made sense, and was in direct contrast to the "re-buy" proposition upgrade path offered by our larger competitors.

Many other vendors in our space have copied this model as well.

Virtual Observer was the first call recording suite to assist customers in becoming PCI Compliant by encrypting recorded media. We’ve broken through again with additional tools to assist in the PCI process and we will continue to stay at the forefront of the standards committee, as they continually update their rule set.

Virtual Observer was the first quality monitoring suite to include an advanced real-time supervisor-agent assistance tool, called "VO Live", which enables supervisors to view thumbnails of all agent desktops where they can then assist via chat or by taking control of the desktop.

Competitors are still attempting to knock this off.

We will continue to blaze trails for call centers, giving them the tool sets needed to exceed quality assurance objectives and meet organizational goals.

Stay tuned on this blog and on our Twitter page for all of our exciting forthcoming announcements.
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Thursday, July 05, 2007

Will Business users ever adopt Google's phone and web apps?

Google recently purchased unified-telephone service provider Grand Central for an awful lot of money. Grand Central allows users to take all of their phone #s and centralize them in one place, with one unified number. Grand Central offers a ton of features, including the ability to view voicemails as text on the web, to playback voicemails on the web, to customize greetings, ringback tones and much, much more from the control panel, which is now run by Google. It's in beta.

Google buys companies and then incorporates their services into their own free services as part of their advertising-supported ecosystem. They recently did this with Feedburner, who used to offer a "Pro" package of stats about your blog, for a nominal fee. Now that Google's in the house, everything is free.

Google offers free web-based word processing, spreadsheet, presentations and calendar apps. Right now it seems unlikely that many businesses will use that as their core business apps standard, but Google is betting they will at some point. Of course, Gmail is free and along with all the other apps, they can give Microsoft Office a run for the money, functionally. Plus, all work is saved on the web, accessible from anywhere you can log in.

Let's hypothesize a bit: say 20% of small businesses starting using Google Apps instead of MS Office. The primary reason may be to save money on MS licensing fees. They then would be very likely to use a telecom app from Google for the very same reason: not only will it be free, but also it will be integrated with the web apps they use. Address books will be shared, Voicemails and Emails together in one place.

It seems that if 20% of small businesses adopt the Google software-as-a-service model, eventually, mid-sized and even some larger sized companies may do the same, once they trust the security of the concept. Google's betting that if one of its' services is tried, it will only attract users and businesses to its' other services.

Did I forget to mention that Google has long been rumored to offer free wifi access? Can VoIP services ala Skype be far behind?

We've added a new poll asking "Will Businesses Ever Use Google Apps?". The poll is located in the sidebar, on the right ------>

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