CSI Extends Advantage of Virtual Observer Call Recording and WFO to Support Avaya IP Office 10 Platform for Contact Centers

Our new recording method has been developed with customer value in mind, providing an affordable licensing model and an extremely robust WFO feature set which has never previously been available for IP Office customers CSI extends advantage of Virtual Observer call recording and WFO to suppor
Call recording and WFO for Avaya IP Office 10

Say you want a resolution (FCR, you know)?

A multi-thousand seat Business Process Outsourcer (BPO) in the east has seen an increase in repeat calls for similar issues. After doing some research and analysis, it was discovered agents were not properly trained in handling specific types of customer interactions and this was leading to repeat calls.

First Contact Resolution (FCR) is a common Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in contact centers. 

Resolving customer issues on first interaction is paramount to quality customer service, reduced costs and ultimately an improved bottom line. 

However, FCR is not easily measured. It's a common KPI but what defines a repeat call is not a static data element. 

Every contact center is different. Every customer is different. Every interaction is different. 

How then can FCR be measured?

The BPO's customer service department uses a workforce optimization solution (WFO) which gathers Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) statistics from their Unified Communications (UC) platform. Among the stats gathered include Agent State Changes and Computer Telephony Integrated (CTI) metadata for enhanced data points. 

Armed with all this data, the system is capable of detecting repeat interactions, and ultimately, FCR.

The organization implemented the FCR Service and created business rules and alarms to detect and notify supervisors of customer interactions that could be classified as repeat contacts. 

Since no two contact centers are the same, management mapped out data elements in their enterprise that signified repeat contacts. 

For them, this was easily defined by their ticket number. The Interactive Voice Response (IVR) unit requires all customers to enter their ticket number prior to being routed to an agent. The WFO system reads this ticket number through CTI and attaches it to each recorded interaction. 

The FCR Service monitors recorded interactions and ticket numbers and links interactions together. Multiple interactions with similar ticket numbers are flagged as repeat contacts.

The distributor has a strong leadership team and is capable of mapping their technologies together end to end. Not all contact centers are capable of capturing IVR information, such as ticket number, and mapping it to CTI data harnessed by other technologies, such as their recording system.

Their properly enacted data sharing plan allows them to simply use ticket number to determine FCR. However, for most contact centers, the task of measuring FCR is not so simple. 

With the power of WFO and the FCR Service, this task is handled effortlessly. The FCR Service allows for contact center managers to program it using any piece of data captured from the environment. This can be via claim number, case number, ticket number, customer number, account number, process id, or even un-mapped basic telephony information such as caller id, extension, agent or even date and time. 

At its most basic level FCR can be measured by caller id, date and time. 

Has this phone number called in within a recent period of time? If so, it’s a repeat contact. At its most advanced levels, FCR can be measured using mapped telephony data.

Once the BPO had configured the FCR Services to capture and flag repeat interactions, it was simply a matter of reviewing and evaluating those interactions to determine root cause. The Evaluation Assignment Services were configured to automatically assign all interactions flagged for FCR to the next available evaluator. Evaluations were performed on those repeat interactions and the system automatically pushed the proper learning materials to the agents.

The WFO system uncovered a lack of core competency by agents in a key portion of the BPO's processes. By revising their learning materials, the BPO improved agent knowledge and noticed a considerable drop in repeat interactions over the next 60 days. This reduced their overall call volume and ultimately improved their bottom line.

However, it doesn’t stop there. One workforce optimization solution, Virtual Observer, has extended FCR through to the Speech Analytics feature set to harness the power of the spoken word to uncover repeat interactions. 

Virtual Observer's "FCR Services" look for any number of configurable words and phrases to determine repeat contacts, such as, “I’ve called before”, “I’m calling back”, “This is the nth time I’ve called”, and many more.

Connect the dots with Workforce Optimization and Zendesk

On the heels of yesterday's announcement of the integration between Virtual Observer and Zendesk, as well as Tuesday's blog post by Zendesk, it is important that we examine all the various data points which can be connected with this pairing.

• Social Media Interactions > Zendesk Support Tickets
• Zendesk Support Tickets > CRM Customer Records
• Zendesk Support Tickets > Virtual Observer Recorded Events
• Zendesk Zopim Chats > Virtual Observer Recorded Events
• Zendesk Voice Recording > Virtual Observer Recorded Events
• Virtual Observer Event Playback > Zendesk UI

I am sure there are many more data points connected which can and will be cross pollinated. This is an extremely powerful integration which extends the capabilities of all the support centers and contact centers who use this amazing Zendesk tool.

Just as the Clarity Connect integration allows Virtual Observer to be the WFO system of choice for Microsoft Skype for Business environments, our collaboration with Zendesk allows us to connect the dots for customers who are using Zendesk for support and CRM integration.

Top 5 reasons you'll love our User Interface...

1) Virtual Observer’s (VO) Web-based user interface is cleaner, modern and extremely easy to use, while maintaining predictive navigation and familiarity for users of the previous version. Users take to it extremely quickly. 
2) VO’s latest version is equipped with Dashboard Reporting, including many pre-loaded widgets which present Average Handle Time, Employee Performance Reports, First Call Resolution data and more, in real-time drill-down charts.
Please continue onto the new Virtual Observations to read the complete list of "5 reasons to love our fresh, updated WFO user interface"...

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Speech Analytics Helps Drive Customer Experience

CSI customer Cigars International (CI) is known for its' wide variety of cigars and their unflappable customer service.

One of the reasons they originally invested in Virtual Observer was because they found an affordable technology which could effectively assist them in achieving their lofty goals for the customer experience.

 With the quality monitoring process on track and continuously improving, CI decided to invest in a more aggressive technology, phonetic-based speech analytics feature of the Virtual Observer suite, to help take the quality assurance process to the next level.

 The return on investment which would come from speech analytics was a great positive change in CI's training model.

 A manager in customer service, speaking for CI, mentioned "We suffered from the 'whisper down the lane' syndrome - even though we were providing comprehensive training materials with talking points, even though we delivered those materials several different ways (classroom, desk side, email), we still found that shortly after training the talking points took on a life of their own and became something else. Often times wrong information would evolve. It would have been days or weeks before we would have uncovered this, however, with Virtual Observer Call Insight speech analytics, it was in one afternoon."

 Read more about how Cigars International surpassed their ambitions for the customer experience.

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Inside CSI: 40 years in business part three of three

Happy Independence Day!

Part 3: Challenges and Opportunities

The heart of Coordinated Systems, Inc., veteran-owned and CT-based, (CSI) begins and ends with the professionals who work here. “Each individual at CSI brings his/her own unique abilities to the table. Each and every day we face new challenges, whether it is a support call, a unique sales call, the development of new functionality to stay competitive in this ever-changing world. I have been grateful for our management, who has found a way to keep this company going through good times and bad, facing tough economic challenges,” offered Dennis Vincent from our support and training team. “We are a success because we just get the job done,” added Robert Hutcheon, CEO.

“People here at CSI are always taking on multiple responsibilities and learning new skills. As a small company, we are often thrown into the fire and forced to succeed, which we do,” said Rich Marcia, Marketing Director.

Challenges have been aplenty in the 40 years of CSI. Amidst the recessions we stayed positive but lean. During the hurricane of 2011, we forged on while battling power outages and telephone interruptions. We’ve faced numerous “emerging” competitive threats who’ve all managed to become less prevalent. We’ve stood in the footsteps of the giants of the industry and won because we were more nimble, more cost effective and more open to specific customer requirements and their diverse needs.

“CSI also has a wonderful ability to be very successful in the hiring process, finding people with unique skills and a desire to “go the extra mile” to contribute to the company’s success. It is this, above all else, that I feel has allowed us to continue to be a company that has been able to adapt to changing times,” Dennis added. One of our employees is nearly at “half-life” as he calls it. Our director of development, Dan McGrail, started at the company fresh out of college at age 22 and says, “three more years and I’ll have been here longer than I haven’t”.

Personally, working in a family-like environment means learning quite a bit about your co-workers. You see them through all of life’s milestones: weddings, children, grandchildren, new cars and homes, sports events, etc. “My son, who turns four this week,” Rich said, “knew that “C-S-I” is where his Daddy worked when he was only two years old. “ You also get to experience life’s tragedies with the support system a close-knit family-like organization will provide. Unspeakable events such as 9-11 come to mind. One of our owners, a storied Vietnam veteran, remembers the toils of war as well as the turbulence of an economic downturn. “If you’re to remember anything about CSI, it’s that we are survivors,” he exclaimed.

As we’ve grown, we’ve had to keep up with the growing demands of a similarly-growing customer base. A big part of our ability to keep up has been the addition of our support management system. It’s allowed us to become more efficient and really streamlined our support processes.

Being at CSI for a long time has other perks as well. Company outings are always memorable, whether it’s a hockey game, a trip to the ballpark or a college football outing, the common thread here is work hard and play hard. Every Friday morning the company eats a home-cooked breakfast. We rotate menu choices and dish-cleaning duty. It’s a culture we’re proud of.

Some of the best memories of the 40 years come from our own customer interactions. We still support many long-time customers from the early days in manufacturing. With VO, we’re on 10+ years with a lot of customers, including many global enterprises, recognizable brands, healthcare institutions and a diverse array of other vertical market customers, both large and small.

Thinking back on 40 years brings back many memories and also presents a great sense of accomplishment, laying the foundation for a bright and innovative future. We’ll continue to evolve the Virtual Observer platform, adding features, functionalities and connectivities as our target markets, and most importantly, our customers have demand for them. We’re big on waiting for the industry giants to launch their new buzz features at big prices. We’ll then apply our “simple, effective and affordable” philosophy to it, and disrupt the marketplace with high value and breakthrough affordability.

“We’re certainly researching new technology and new spaces to see where else we can provide value to our customers. I see VO being in a great position to make evolutionary transitions, thanks to our agile development and our ability to stop on a dime and make the changes needed,” added Marcia. “In the recent years we’ve seen VO move swiftly to virtualized servers in many environments, and we’ve created a web-based interface. The global footprint will continue to be flattened, as will our customers’ true cost of ownership.”

Read part one of three

Read part two of three

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• Inside CSI: 40 years in business part two of three

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• Inside CSI: 40 years in business part three of three

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Inside CSI: 40 years in business - part one of three

Building a foundation for the future: 

Many of the people here at CSI have had long tenures within the organization. Half of the current staff started here pre-1995, when we were transitioning from manufacturing control software to the call center. The younger people all have been here since 2005, creating their own tenured careers. We hire great people. They fit in, they excel, they stay. Originally a UNIX shop, we brought our manufacturing control software to Windows with Version 6. It was a big deal, as the user interface was overhauled to take advantage of the graphical capabilities.

“We actually were very ahead of our time: we had come up with a model to “rent” the software and make most of our revenues from customization. It was kind of a precursor to the "freemium" marketing model which so many technology companies use today, especially in the SaaS world,” said Rich Marcia.
“I can also remember our top sales guy walking out of a first sales calls with a check. These are such different times, 40 years later.”

Everyone was so terrified of the Year 2000 “problem”, except for our developers. They tackled the issue with swift and confident logic, making sure it was a non-issue for our JSM customers. Dan McGrail, now our Director of Product Development, even wrote 3 books on the subject. It was a challenge which the CSI team handled admirably.

We’ve seen a number of milestones and achievements over the forty years, in terms of major development efforts, like the initial creation of Virtual Observer (VO) in the call recording and quality monitoring space. We had largely been a custom programming consultancy and developers of “Job Shop Manager”, an MS-DOS based solution which enabled many of the smaller manufacturing job shops and defense suppliers, as well as injection molders, with a way to automate their billing & inventory processes. We did it with a low-overhead, nimble, “simple, effective and affordable” operating philosophy which established a formula for how we would disrupt the call center industry. Read Part Two of "Inside CSI: 40 years in business"

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• Inside CSI: 40 years in business part two of three

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Leading Publisher Leans on Call Recording System For Training New Reps

HarperCollins Publishers is one of the world’s leading English-language publishers. Headquartered in New York, the company is a subsidiary of News Corporation.

HarperCollins was founded in New York City in 1817, publishing a range of Bibles, atlases, dictionaries, and reissued classics, expanding over the years to include legendary authors, such as H. G. Wells, Agatha Christie, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis. In 1987, as Harper & Row, it was acquired by News Corporation.

Founded in 1819, William Collins & Sons published a range of Bibles, atlases, dictionaries, and reissued classics, expanding over the years to include legendary authors, such as H. G. Wells, Agatha Christie, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis. HarperCollins has publishing groups in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia/New Zealand, and India.

Today, HarperCollins is a broad-based publisher with strengths in literary and commercial fiction, business books, children’s books, cookbooks, and mystery, romance, reference, religious, and spiritual books. Consistently at the forefront of innovation and technological advancement, HarperCollins is the first publisher to digitize its content and create a global digital warehouse to protect the rights of its authors, meet consumer demand, and generate additional business opportunities.

"At HarperCollins Publishers, Virtual Observer has become an important means of training our new customer service reps as well as keeping the experienced ones up to par. We use the VO system to demonstrate how a call could have been handled differently, and we share calls that were handled excellently as a training tool. The system is a must for companies that are serious about proper and professional customer service."

- Roberta Clemens, Manager, Customer Service
HarperCollins Publishers

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Nothing Casual About This Massachussets Company’s Growth

Recently I visited Casual Male XL in Canton, MA and toured their corporate headquarters. I was really impressed by the catalog showroom, located next to their call center hub.

Casual Male XL is transitioning its’ call center agents to become "wardrobe assistants", where they have stocked a fully-inventoried showroom to provide the agents with a means of making stylish suggestions and complimentary add-on offers to customers placing orders. "It really helps to have all of the materials and colors in front of you," said Christina Shortall, Call Center Director at Casual Male XL.

Casual Male XL has expanded quite a bit since it’s early days. They operate 5 different lines of business featuring upscale, contemporary & economical clothing, shoes accessories, all for the big & tall male shopper, a growing demographic.

Casual Male uses Virtual Observer to assist in training the agents, or "wardrobe assistants", as Shortall’s staff of supervisors score calls and provide feedback and reporting back to the agents on where they can improve.

"Since Virtual Observer is very scalable, it helps during the peak holiday seasons, when both call volume and staffing spike," Shortall added. "Virtual Observer also helps us in our training sessions, as we can play back calls so employees can hear themselves on the phone."

Christina also mentioned big plans for the business, announcing plans for a combined superstore in Chicago, Houston, Memphis and Las Vegas this summer. The store, Casual Male DXL, is a new lifestyle super-store which caters to all big & tall men's needs under one roof. We actually shared exciting announcements as I discussed the Virtual Observer product roadmap with her.

As I left, I felt very proud of the way Virtual Observer had helped Christina meet aggressive performance goals and how her team of supervisors and agents were handling their transition to becoming "wardrobe assistants".

More information relative to the new super store announcement can be read here.

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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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The Rewarding, Renewing Cycle of Sales-Technical-Sales

We at CSI are coming off another solid quarter of new business.

The success of our sales teams directly fuels the workloads of our project management, support and training teams.

Ironically, it's the performance of those same technical folks which gives our sales teams added confidence and gives us marketing staffers the customer retention stats, success stories, and testimonials which we so proudly speak to.

It is always a pleasure to open my Outlook inbox and find a shining example of the customer service efforts provided by my team:

"I just wanted to send an email out to thank all of you at CSI for the great tools and support you offer. I can’t really say enough about the level of customer service provided to me on every interaction I have with your teams. We use one of your products (Virtual Observer) and anytime I’ve had a question or any issues, I give you guys a call and it feels like you drop what your doing to make sure we are up and running. I was assisted in the past by the training team,who always takes care of business. I have also been working with the project teams who always takes the time to answer every questions I may have. I also love that  they take the time to check out our systems and ensure we are running to full capacity.

At Rewards Network we pride ourselves in our World Class Customer Service experience and it’s great to know there are other companies out there that feel the same way. Thanks again for all the help!!!!"

This email was sent today from the desk of Gil Alvarez, Member/Merchant Services Trainer/QA Supervisor for the Rewards Network.

The Rewards Network runs Virtual Observer on an Avaya S8710 phone system, handling recording and quality assurance tasks for their customer service center.

This is proof of the endless cycle of sales feeding the technical staff, who in turn feed the sales and marketing folks.

Internally, at CSI, we treat each individual in our company as a customer, with tremendous respect and consideration for their individual goals as well as the company's goals. We're also not shy about crossing over to help out if another team member needs help.

It's all about keeping the cycle turning.

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Leading pharmacy claims management company selects Virtual Observer for Cisco call recording

We are pleased to announce that eRx Network, LLC, located in Asheville, NC has selected CSI’s Virtual Observer for call recording and quality monitoring.

eRx Network, LLC has a Cisco VoIP phone system and will be using the Virtual Observer Professional Logging Edition to capture all calls and to automate their contact center's quality initiatives.

"We received positive feedback from existing CSI customers, but ultimately, our decision was based on value. We felt that the features and functionality that VO had to offer as well as the relatively low cost of ownership were more in line with our company’s needs. In addition, we felt that the associated ongoing costs would allow us to scale the product as our company and customer service organization grew."
- Joseph Balcken, Director, Customer Service, eRx Network

eRx Network is a leading provider of third-party claims management and analysis services, Medicare and Medicaid DME billing services, and electronic prescribing services to the retail pharmacy industry. eRx solutions provide their customers the tools necessary for improving their profitability, efficiency, and accuracy.

eRx Network's success lies in the exceptional service, innovative technology, and industry expertise offered to customers, ensuring e-commerce products, billing services, data center solutions, and network infrastructure are designed to meet the evolving needs of a complex industry.

Virtual Observer call recording system becomes even more flexible

What's all that ruckus up in the CSI and Virtual Observer labs?

Must be the engineering team banging out more new features for Virtual Observer.

Among the highlights:

* The Virtual Observer screen capture module now captures and makes note of all screen activity from log in to log out. These screen frames can be used for any combination of capture rates, from a simple percentage to 100% screens. Of course this can be tuned by audio calls, chats, emails, campaigns, DNIS, Queue, Skill, you name it. Consider setting a filter for “Filler”, i.e., screen only events, to see what your agents are doing when they are not on calls, emails, web, or chats.

* DMCC (Device Media Call Control) is a method of recording via the Avaya API. This is a pure software-based call recording solution using softphones, service observe and single step conferences to capture audio without the need for packet sniffing or expensive telephony recording boards.

* Dual Screen VO Live - Virtual Observer now has the ability to view dual screens from within the VO Live suite of features (in VO Live, supervisors can view all agent screen activity, chat with them, or take control of their desktops if they need assistance.)

* Microsoft Vista Compliance – The Virtual Observer Agent Client and Supervisor Clients are now both fully compatible with Microsoft Vista Operating systems (Both32-bit and 64-bit).

* Email, Chat, & Web Interactions – The Virtual Observer AES data connector now supports email, web and chat call types and coupled with our screen capture component, ensuring these events are captured and accounted for.

If you'd like any additional information on any of these new features, or to find out what else you can accomplish with Virtual Observer, please contact your account representative today.

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Use Screen Capture to Improve Agent Performance

Virtual Observer's Screen Capture functionality is more than a "big brother" feature. It is an extremely powerful training tool which can help to identify where your call center agents are making crucial mistakes in navigating your CRM applications. Watching recorded screen activity (which should be synchronized with the audio recording) during the evaluation process allows you to properly evaluate the entire interaction from start to finish, across all media.

Virtual Observers's Screen Capture feature creates a true full-motion video. The video is a smooth, real time capture of your MS-Windows desktop environment, including dual-monitor environments.

Additional Benefits:
- Reduce Call Wrap-Up by improving CRM process flow
- Produce "New Hire" Training Materials which include recorded screen activity
- Include Screen Recordings in Content Deliverables and e-Learning

One of our more recent feature releases, "VO Live", also offers real-time viewing of agent screen activity in a thumbnail view. Supervisors can watch everyone's screens at the same time, enlarge and take control of an agents' screens, and chat with an agent to assist them.

Growing catalog and internet company uses Virtual Observer for quality training

This came in this week from Stephen McDevitt, Call Center Manager for Cigars International:

"As the Call Center Manager for a growing catalog and internet company, sales call quality and customer service call quality are paramount.

In our industry what separates one company from another is the level of service.

We recognized that in order to raise the bar (to become the company of choice) we need to do something more, continually improve on call quality.

After a lengthy due diligence we chose Coordinated Systems Inc’s Virtual Observer as the application to assist us in our quest to be number one.

Virtual Observer has provided us with exactly what we need to guide our representatives to success.

I have used several applications in my career and this system is as straightforward as you can get.

The support team made training and implementation a breeze; making the bottom line cost of the entire application very affordable."

What preceded this testimonial?

The best kind of lead, a referral from an extremely satisfied customer.

Virtual Observer Tips: Dynamic User Layouts

Do you ever want to change the layout of your screen area during playback of calls?

With Virtual Observer's (VO) dynamic views, you can eliminate data windows, resize certain components, and save your current layout as a different or preferred layout.

The next time you go to use VO, the screen will appear as you saved it the last time.

If you need to bring back a screen element you had previously removed, don't worry, it is always available from the drop down menus.

Every VO user can thus have their own unique preferred user interface.

Harry & David scale up their call quality monitoring for the holidays

In 1910 Samuel Rosenberg traded the luxurious Hotel Sorrento for 240 prime acres of pears in Southern Oregon's Rogue River Valley and named them Bear Creek Orchards after the nearby waterway. His sons Harry and David began one of the nation's premier direct marketing and e-commerce companies (Harry & David).

In order to support the thriving mail order business, Harry & David set up a customer service contact center. The contact center has changed significantly over the years, especially in terms of technology.

“We’ve implemented technology that was able to better utilize our workforce and increase the effectiveness of the interaction with the customer,” said Jason Phillipson, Director of Planning for Customer Operations.

“The biggest advantage new technology has is that it allowed us to hold our labor needs static. Advances in our online stores, sales & service applications, knowledgebase, telemarketing, call monitoring, and training systems have kept pace and often exceeded the demand for additional labor force. In fact, over the last 10 years the call centers’ labor needs have changed relatively little, while the business grew significantly,” he added.

Currently, Harry & David has several systems in use in their contact centers. The various applications include an order taking/customer service system, web/knowledgebase, email management, call recording and monitoring, electronic time card, electronic product information index, scheduling, multiple phone switches for multiple sites, electronic badge production, electronic employee statistics and evaluations, online work queues and more.

The call recording application is the Virtual Observer solution, interfacing with their Avaya phone system, and enabling call recording for quality assurance purposes. Employing about 300 customer service agents year round, the number swells to about 4000 across multiple contact centers during the busy holiday season.

“The scale of our holiday call activity pushes all our infrastructure and systems to their peak capacity. This is coupled with the condensed time frame we have to do it in….we hire and train the majority of the 4,000 in about 2 months time. There is also a lot of role transition. Many of our year-round staff are our leaders, trainers, and support staff during the holiday season.

During our holiday season we handle about 100,000 calls per day but during the off season we can go as low as 5,000. A typical day would be around 6,500 calls. Needless to say, it’s a busy time for us. The Virtual Observer system scales seamlessly during the holidays, whether it’s 300 users or 4000,” Jason stated.

When asked about the other contributing factors in Harry & David’s decision to implement CSI’s Virtual Observer solution, Jason replied with that “the major factors were price and usability. There are systems being sold out there with many more bells and whistles than Virtual Observer but the question, for us, was, would we really use all those extras? In the end we felt that CSI offered a solution that was one we could understand and use. We just couldn’t cost justify all those extra features. Because of the seasonality in our business, it is always a challenge to size a system for our peak and see that our costs and licensing fees reflect our lower usage the rest of the year. CSI accomplished that for us.”

Many e-commerce companies are faced with trying to achieve Visa payment card industry (PCI) compliance. Harry & David has implemented Virtual Observer’s Media Encryption technology to encrypt all interactions. Besides PCI compliance, this also helps to protect valuable customer information. “This did help us achieve PCI compliance, which is very important to us as we accept customers’ credit cards orders over the phone,” Jason added.

Asked about what type of impact Virtual Observer has had, Jason replied with “One of the immediate benefits was our ability to monitor that large influx of new associates we have at our season. Being able to give them feedback on their performance quickly and correct areas where they are having trouble has lower our attrition, during that critical period, and saved us money.”
“We highly recommend Virtual Observer for other e-commerce contact centers. The features, cost, and ease of use along with the good customer service provided by CSI makes this system an excellent choice.”

Harry & David provides consumers with gourmet-quality fruit and gift assortments year-round from their mail order catalogs, online store, or retail stores nationwide. Their headquarters is in Medford, Oregon, and they also have a campus in Hebron, Ohio. Harry & David operates a seasonal call center in Eugene, Oregon.

Upgrades to call recording software are free for actively supported customers

We are still one of only a few (if any) call recording vendors who enable supported customers to obtain the latest and greatest version of product at no charge for software. We've upgraded 75% of our customer base and will continue to transition the rest of the VO customers with active maintenance contracts.

3.0 customers are also the beneficiaries of the additional features added to the existing product - for example, the Live Desktop feature set is an incredibly valuable tool for managing agents. This could have been a standalone add-on module, but the benefits are so great from a QA perspective and customer satisfaction standpoint, we had to include it as a standard feature. For more information about the Live Desktop functionality, please contact your CSI sales rep.

The Tao of CSI: three core philosophies drive success

Three core business philosophies drive our success in the call recording and quality monitoring markets.

Many of our blog readers might not be familiar with the history of CSI. If you are not yet a customer or partner, you may not understand what we're all about. I'm hoping this helps to explain what drives us.

Since beginning as energy consultants in 1972, we've experienced all of the highs and lows of a thirty-five plus year business. Quickly becoming a custom computer programming house, we soon moved on to become a developer of a custom job shop manufacturing control system. Several years later, we've emerged as a strong call center solution provider.

We developed Virtual Observer (VO) as a robust, scalable call recording and quality monitoring system. We saw a hole in the marketplace once occupied by several bloated suites of bells and whistles. Many small and mid-sized call centers could not afford the benefit of a feature-rich call recording and quality monitoring implementation. Larger companies were forced to pay high upgrade fees because they were lacking choices. With the launch of Virtual Observer, CSI changed all of that.

How've we done it?

We have three core philosophies that make up our business mantra and combine to enable us to deliver the lowest cost of ownership in the industry.

The first is to “Build Great Customer Experiences”.

Our customer service philosophy drives everything in our organization, from the usability of our systems to our implementation and training teams. Perhaps the most evident result of this long-term customer strategy is in the aggressively low pricing of our upgrades – software is free for customers with active support agreements. This is practically unheard of in our industry. The largest percentage of your investment will come with the initial purchase, as opposed to upgrade offerings from our competition which essentially translates into a re-buy.

The second is our ability to allow customers to “Start Small and Think Big”.

Our sales philosophy starts with pricing structured so that a new customer can “Start Small and Think Big” -- implementing the right amount of functionality at the right time, and adding on new features as needed, as opposed to our competition’s methodology of forcing purchases of extra features that you’ll never really use, simply to justify the high price tag.”

Dan McGrail, Director of Product Development, added the third philosophy: “Don’t forget about “Simple, Effective, Affordable”.

Our operating philosophy dictates that every process, every product and every decision is based on it being simple, effective and affordable. We are able to manage operating costs by avoiding what some in the industry tout as “cutting edge”. Eventually “cutting edge” functionality becomes commodity, and then is made more affordable for our customer base. This is a huge component in allowing Virtual Observer to deliver a rapid return on investment.

CSI partner seeks new sales rep in Illinois

North American Communications Resources (NACR) is seeking to add sales representatives for their Illinois territory. Interested parties can email us here and we'll get you in contact with the powers that be at NACR.

NACR, a Value Added Solutions Provider, launched in 1993 with only five employees. Today, they are Avaya’s largest Business Partner worldwide and a five-time Business Partner of the Year, with employees and locations across the United States. NACR built a quality reputation as a nationwide provider of end-to-end communications solutions for organizations of all types and sizes — offering systems and support for every need, from Voice over IP (VoIP) and converged network integration, to consultative services, ongoing maintenance, and repairs.

NACR actively presents CSI's Virtual Observer (VO) as a preferred call recording solution, an integral component in their complete scope of communications product and services.