Call Quality Monitoring Is More Important Than Ever With Holidays Approaching

Believe it or not, the holiday shopping season is less than one month away (Black Friday), or in some retail outlets, it is already here!.

Reports say that consumer spending in 2010 might be down this season. Other online reports show increased spending for Christmas.


This has some interesting effects in our space: online catalog companies, and e-tailers, are likely to see an increase in call center activity, as shoppers call in with questions, for support, to place orders, etc.; call center operations managers will be challenged to produce -- more upsells, more saves, increased customer satisfaction.


As always, it will also be important to reduce the costs of running the center - less churn of employees, faster training cycles, faster customer handling times, etc.


Virtual Observer has been able to help many e-tailers address these issues and make serious performance gains, including Harry & David, Crutchfield Electronics, Fox Head Inc., Casual Male XL, Cigars International, J&P Cycles and many more.


Do your CSRs enter credit card information on-screen or take credit card information over the phone? It is also mission critical for e-tailers to maintain PCI compliance.


Virtual Observer helps firms remain compliant through the use of 256-bit media encryption and through granular security which allows administrators to control privileges down to the functional level and through our "LightsOut!" functionality, which automatically eliminate sensitive data after it has been entered on the screen.

Related articles

• Bold Software Releases Holiday Readiness 2010 Research Report (prweb.com)
• Retailers ramp up hiring for holiday season (calgaryherald.com)

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.