Big business benefits from CTI and Avaya Interaction Center

One of our newest customers, a large wireless provider scores big business benefits by integrating Virtual Observer and Avaya Interaction Center.

An award-winning wireless carrier that has operated in the Southeastern United States since 1999 and in parts of the Caribbean since 2004, they have more than 1,900 people and five business offices. The wireless company lives and breathes “customers come first”, with a committent to provide the highest quality network, simple and straight-forward service plans that deliver real value, and the best products available on the market. Customer care associates are available 24 hours a day, everyday to quickly and politely assist customers with their questions and concerns.

The wireless carrier’s contact center handles an average of 35,000 calls per day. They wanted to implement a call recording system to maximize the performance of their agents within the center. After reviewing several options, they chose Coordinated Systems, Inc.’s (CSI) Virtual Observer solution, based on the value, price and quality the solution offered. With 114 supervisors managing the agents, it would be extremely important for the supervisors to quickly get on board with the system. Clearly, the software seems to have earned some fans, as one supervisor was quoted to say “Virtual Observer is extremely easy to use, easy to learn and the ability to coach associates based on the screen shots. It also has a much higher accuracy rate for recordings compared with our previous recording software. An integrated evaluation form reduces the need to have a 3rd party monitor form solution.” He added “CSI’s customer service has been superb. They are always available for assistance and return calls/emails very quickly.”

The wireless provider runs an Avaya phone system with Avaya Interaction Center (AIC). It was vital for the winning call recording vendor to offer a tight integration with AIC. An IT engineer at the wireless company stated “Virtual Observer works extremely well within our IC environment. It allows VO to capture recordings based off of CTI Triggers to reduce the length of unnecessary recordings and speed up the quality monitoring process. It also allows us to see the account that the associate has on their screen.” Additional business benefits include reduced recording size and reduced storage space needed, improved performance by QA associates. “Custom CTI Triggers by CSI allowed us to record based on call type,” he added.

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.

5 most popular Virtual Observer Add-Ons

5 - VO Surveys: This allows you to gain insight on customer interactions from your customers themselves and allows for calibration of your evaluation metrics by balancing survey results against supervisor evaluations.

4 - Auto-Archiving: This module allows companies to automatically archive their logged recordings to a network drive or DVD. When you are recording all of your incoming and outgoing calls, it is possible to archive your call history based on specific parameters.

3 - SMDR Integration: For T1 loggers, it's a necessity - it's the only way you'll be able to match up calls with agents and phone extensions. SMDR feeds can provide you with ANI/DNIS call detail. For extensive data capture, we can also provide CTI integration.

2 - Media Encryption: Using our Media Encryption module, companies that process credit card transactions over the phone or record confidential customer information are be able to encrypt their recordings, and it's a requirement for anyone trying to meet Visa's Payment Card Industry standard compliance.

1 - E-Learning: This functionality typically blows people away when they see it for the first time. It provides a user-friendly method of automatically delivering targeted training materials to agents after an evaluation is complete. Supervisors can also easily create cds or webpages with a "Best Of" call list for training purposes.

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.

Glossary defines CTI and SMDR, among other things...

We've added a new glossary of technical call center terms to the site. This includes many of the frequently used acronyms you've grown to hear and love, such as:

TDM
ANI/DNIS
SMDR
CTI
VoIP

Please click here to browse the call center glossary