Call center quality monitoring can yield dramatic improvements

The core quality assurance features which come bundled with Virtual Observer helped to make SRA Associates' recent call recording implementation a resounding success:

Read this excerpt from an article on TMCnet:

The Virtual Observer team implemented a system to record calls of SRA’s Samsung (News - Alert) phone system. Using an SMDR feed, the calls are able to be tied back into the agent database. Screens are captured and synchronized to give SRA a complete perspective on the customer's interactions. SRA leverages the integrated evaluation, screen capture and performance reporting to automate the quality process and reduce agent turnover as well as improve customer satisfaction.

"Virtual Observer presented a strong value proposition, and I would recommend it for any financial services organization," offered Chiara, as he turned on his pc screen, which showed thumbnails of his entire staff's desktops. Using VO Live technology, John can double-click on an agent desktop, go full screen, take control, or chat for assistance. "VO Live is one of the features that sold me. The power was apparent," John added.

Continue on reading the entire article SRA Associates Sees Dramatic Improvement in Call Center Performance...

CSI and Windstream partner to deliver Siemens call center quality monitoring to Assurity Life Insurance Company

We are pleased to announce that Assurity Life Insurance Company, located in Lincoln, Nebraska, has selected CSI’s Virtual Observer Professional for call recording and quality monitoring. Virtual Observer was implemented to record calls off of Assuritys’ Siemens phone system.

CSI worked hand-in-hand with partner Windstream Communications to configure a robust quality monitoring solution for Assurity which not only met all project requirements but was also able to bring in the total project cost under budget.


About Assurity:
Assurity Life Insurance Company offers a wide variety of insurance and annuity products and services designed to solve complex financial problems for individuals, families and businesses. Assurity is committed to tailoring clients’ plans with a variety of creative solutions to fit wide-ranging needs for protection and wealth accumulation. For additional information about Assurity, please visit www.assurity.com

About Windstream:
Windstream Corporation is an S&P 500 company that provides digital phone, high-speed Internet and high-definition video and entertainment services to residential and business customers in 16 states. The company has approximately 3.1 million access lines and about $3.2 billion in annual revenues. For more information, visit http://www.windstream.com

Call Recording should be a one-time purchase

Why should call recording be a one-time purchase?

The initial selection of a call recording vendor typically entails quite a bit of work:

1) research and identification of requirements

2) market comparison of industry vendors

3) due diligence

If the relationship is maintained properly, the customer should never have to go through those steps again. The selected call recording vendor should be able to provide exemplary service, seamless transitions through evolving phone system technologies, consistent introduction of value-added enhancements, and an extremely high value to price.

Let's dispel some myths relative to the purchase of a call recording solution:

- Upgrade paths do not need to be a complete call recording rebuy
Updates and full upgrades/point releases should be included as part of your maintenance program. New features should be added continually as part of a valuable product evolution, rather than to save for the next big release with a hefty upgrade price tag.

Upgrading to VoIP shouldn’t require a entirely new call recording system
- At most, the recording methodologies may change, but you shouldn’t need to purchase an entire new solution. - VoIP recording systems use either Packet Sniffers or API connections with the phone system itself.

Implementing a new phone system should not necessitate a new call recording solution
- Many call recording methodologies interact with different phone systems in the same manner using the same equipment. - Direct API recording would require a different connector dependent on which phone system you have.
- You may be changing phone systems, but you’ll still be using the same core software solution.

The bottom line is you shouldn't have to rebuy your entire call recording solution every time your environment changes.

More than just a logger, but as a logger, it's very, very good

In the marketing department here at Coordinated Systems, Inc., we get a ton of leads and inquiries for call recording. Half of the leads that come in fall into our sweet spot, which is call recording for quality assurance. The best leads are from contact centers looking to record agent interactions in order to train them and improve their performance.

Occasionally we'll receive leads from companies who are simply looking to record all their calls, typically for legal/liability or dispute resolution reasons. More and more companies also need to log calls for standards compliance. Virtual Observer can certainly work as a standalone logger. Of course, the real value does exist in the quality assurance functionality, but as a logger, it's still a great tool.

Most pure loggers simply record the calls and store them in a network drive and allow you to play them back if need be. Virtual Observer gives you a visual playback mechanism which shows the entire call's audio wave, along with a synchronized view of the agent's screen activity. With the agent tagging module, agents can categorize the call and identify the customer. Of course, with CTI integration, such data will automatically be associated with the call. If you need to locate a call, you can either browse and sort by any or all available data fields, or you can search via our easy-to-use query wizard, again with the ability to search on any available data fields. Data such as time of day call started, length of call, agent, ANI, DNIS, customer name, customer industry, etc., should be available, depending on what level of integration you've configured.

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.

What's the biggest benefit of CTI integration with call recording?

We asked this question to our panel of experts and again we were able to gather a few very strong answers. Please comment if you have a definitive view on which of these benefits is more valuable to your call center.

* Integrating CTI with call recording provides the ability to perform "cradle to grave" recording - meaning if a call is passed internally from extension to extension, the recorded event will include every conversation.

* CTI Integration provides the ability to capture Private Data, Attached Data, or User Data linked from an IVR, ACD etc. This is good for enterprise data capture such as Claim-#, Account-#, Order-#.

* The call recording system gets all of the CTI events stored with a call and gets call start. With all of the CTI events stored with a call, you can see when a call goes on hold and know how many times a call was placed on hold, etc.

Afraid of recent call recording industry consolidations?

Are you a customer of the call recording industry giants?

Have you recently seen your system become consolidated into a larger conglomerate of companies?

Companies who face uncertainty in the wake of the recent acquisitions worry about being supported or being forced to upgrade to the new, "better" brand. Of course, maintenance rates and add-on pricing may also increase. It's a valid concern.

Please post comments relative to your concerns and we'll discuss in more detail.

What's the most frequent use for call recording: quality assurance or liability / verification?

We asked this question to a diverse group of call center professionals. Among the responses:

"My company does not use call recording software; however, we often find the need to partner with entities that do supply such capabilities for our customer base. We sell solutions that provide E911 support for Enterprise customers. Being that a 911 call more then likely is some sort of emergency, most customers have strict requirements for call recording. In these cases, I would assume the need will be much more for liability protection, though I could also see need to review 911 calls from a training perspective." - e911 solution provider

"Most catalog companies I’ve spoken to are heavily into sales and customer service, so training seems to be the most important issue." - Call Recording Sales Executive

"Some are recording sales confirmations for high ticket items but for the most part they capture unique identifiers as a means of certifying the purchase." - Call Center Consultant

"I’ve found that most catalog centers I’ve reached out to have expressed a need for employee development vs. legal/liability recording," - Regional Sales Manager, Call Center Recording Solutions

"Depends on the industry, of course. For catalog companies, it's definitely QA" - Call Center Software Programmer

"It would seem to me that certain e-commerce industries, such as catalog companies, would definitely start out call recording to help meet their quality initiatives, but I could see more and more of them starting to record all calls for liability reasons and dispute resolution. They definitely need to encrypt calls if they are accepting credit card orders over the phone." - Marketing Executive

Quality Monitoring Case Studies: Start Small and Think Big

We've got two distinct case studies that show the value and diveristy in what we can deliver to different customers. It's all relative to our "Start Small Think Big" philosophy of providing the right solution at the right time. Some of our competitors seem to force feature-overload on new customers to justify the high price tags. We'd prefer to sell our solution at a fair price, and keep the customer for life. This is also reflected in our pro-customer upgrade pricing: regular updates AND full version upgrades are provided at no charge for supported customers. Again, some of our competition will force their vulnerable customer base into what is basically a complete re-buy of the system at a price close to the original purchase price. Sound familiar?

The first case study. "Start Small" tells the tale of a convenience store chain who leverages the value of VoIP with call recording and quality assurance at an affordable price.

The second case study, "Think Big" examines how a large enterprise with 1000 agents are getting amazing value out of call monitoring with Virtual Observer.

Results Companies Inc. selects Virtual Observer to rapidly create better trained customer service agents

Results Companies, Inc. is a global firm providing outsourced call center services. They started out 18 years ago as a privately held company with a predictive dialer product. As they ended up working more and more with telemarketing agents on an outbound basis, they eventually grew to offer both inbound and outbound call center services. Results Companies now has a “best of breed” product used by front line managers of call centers, helping them produce better trained agents.

In the call center solutions market, finding the right vendor can be a daunting process when your investment will eventually integrate with your existing solutions. This is exactly the scenario which faced Results Companies, Inc. last fall when they set out to select a call recording and quality assurance vendor. They needed a solid solution with robust features which would not only scale with their aggressive growth plans, but also would compliment their outsourced call center offerings.

Results Companies, Inc. also planned to use the features of the call recording and quality monitoring system as a marketing differentiator. Using the quality assurance tools of the new system would enable them to not only handle customers’ inbound and outbound phone traffic, but it would allow them to evaluate the performance of each interaction and provide targeted training back to the agents.

Results Companies looked at a few different call recording systems and eventually chose Virtual Observer (VO) by Coordinated Systems, Inc (CSI).

“We were looking for a call recording and quality monitoring solution that our team would be comfortable with,” said Alec Brecker, Chief Operations Office at Results Companies. “Virtual Observer offered everything we wanted to do at an attractive economic value. We wanted something that would be easy to use, so as we scaled up, it would be something that wouldn’t hinder our growth.” Click here to read more...

5 critical reasons for implementing a call logger in a small business

These are in no particular order...

* Verification purposes - capturing every call means you'll be able to go back and play calls where customers placed orders or made billing adjustments.

* Dispute resolution - call logging maintains peace of mind as "he said, she said" conflicts are easily investigated and resolved.

* Training purposes - even if you only have 3 agents, and it's not a "real" call center, capturing every call and being able to go back and evaluate process mistakes can improve the bottom line over time, as your agents begin to increase upsells and prevent cancellations.

* History - you can build a nice repository of customer communications from which you can go back in time and investigate why a customer left - or, for training purposes (positive mindset!), you can see why the customer upgraded.

* Storage Space is cheap! - storing all your calls is less of a space issue than it was even a few years ago.

Daylight Savings Time notice for Virtual Observer users

As most users are aware, the United States Energy Policy Act of 2005 changed the rules setting when DST starts and ends. Starting in March 2007, this law extends Daylight Saving Time (DST) by four weeks (DST will begin on the second Sunday in March and end on the first Sunday in November).

How will the change in DST affect Virtual Observer?

Because CSI-developed software works off of the Windows Operating system clock and assuming that all applicable updates are made to your Microsoft operating systems, the change in DST observance will have no effect on the processing of any CSI software. This includes all supported releases of Virtual Observer

How smaller call centers can attain world class status

This case study was recently published on Contact Center World and tells the tale of a convenience store chain that was able to leverage emerging call center technologies and become a world class call center.

An interesting side note is that on the first day of using their new call recording system, Maverik, Inc. was able to use the recordings to help the police nab suspects who had perpetrated credit card fraud.

Click here to read this case study (requires registration on ContactCenterWorld)

Call recording and quality monitoring can benefit your marketing efforts

The benefits of implementing a call recording and quality monitoring solution are well known. Improved customer service performance, more upsells, less cancellations, and less turnover are just a few of the many results of a quality assurance initiative.

One aspect that many organizations have not taken advantage of is to tout their internal quality monitoring process as proof of commitment to their potential customers - "not only are we promising you better customer service than our competitor, we have the system in place and the performance analytics to prove it!"

The next time your marketing department is seeking more content for their website or a differentiator for their presentations, tell them about your quality objectives and help them to craft a compelling case study that just may help them win their next big opportunity.