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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Future Contact Centers Are in the Hands of our Children

This post doesn't relate to my company or the call recording space at all, but I wanted to share some interesting feedback I'd received relative to depicting the call center of the future, and -- in imaging the future, you must have to include tomorrow's workforce in the equation.

Thus, I wanted to share an article I had recently on FastCompany entitled "How the iPad became child's play" which positioned the Apple tablet as an excellent learning device for children - toddlers even.

I know this to be true. My son, turning 2 this week, has an innate sense of how to use my cell phone, my iPod and besides breaking a few keys off of my keyboard, my laptop computer. He knows which videos he wants to play, and which songs he wants to hear. I think this is indicative of most toddlers now -- they take to electronics like they did to a bottle a year before.

A few months ago, I told my wife "if I could get him an iPad, he could navigate it and use it immediately - without breaking any keys!".

Before too long, I have no doubt my son will be using Skype to video conference his 1 and 1/2 year old cousin in Hawaii.

By the time this generation joins the workforce, technology will be second nature and current forms of customer interaction, such as telephone calls and even web chats, may be outdated and replaced by means of which we may not even comprehend as of yet.

For example, imagine a tiny bar code or interface implanted on a product which, when engaged, opens a video chat projected on a wall, with a customer service expert on the very product you are using.

Click here to read others' predictions on the call center of the future, gathered from the LinkedIn network.

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Unified Communications Dealers: Enhance Revenue Streams with App Sales

"App Stores" and the "App Market" are familiar phrases in today's tech world, gaining popularity with the emergence of the Apple iPod, iPad and Google Android devices.

In a logical, winning business move on the b2b side of things, many Unified Communications dealers are also building a diverse portfolio of applications for their customers.

Many such dealers are complimenting their phone system sales with application sales. Besides being a good foot in the door to large revenue telephony platform sales, application sales can generate a high-margin revenue stream of their own.

For years, telephony dealers have aligned themselves with the large, incumbent call recording vendors in order to bundle call recording and quality monitoring with their phone system solution sales.

The typical "Large-Call-Recording-Company" offering was typically a monstrous suite of features which shut out the small and medium sized enterprise and locked the bigger customers into a lifetime's high cost of ownership as well as a re-buy scenario when it comes to upgrades.

We (Coordinated Systems, Inc.) used this as an entry point to entrench our Virtual Observer call recording and quality monitoring solution as an obvious alternative to the existing call recording offerings made available from the telecom market.

Virtual Observer enables channel partners to not only sell call recording and quality monitoring to the smaller and mid-level enterprises, but also to provide enterprise customers with a more affordable, robust system and lower overall cost of ownership.

We also enable our partners to share in professional services (such as CTI, custom integrations, onsite training, etc.) and annual support agreements. It's a very win-win situation for CSI and our partner ecosystem.

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