ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

BPOs have among the highest agent turnover rate in the contact center industry. This issue can cause significant cost pressures to the customer service organization as it can cost upwards of $7,000 to on-board and train a new agent. And when they leave, all of that learning and knowledge is lost.

Fortunately, call recording and high-fidelity audio streaming can help improve agent satisfaction to help you keep your staff happy, while at the same time improving customer satisfaction. 

Solutions

When considering recording/audio capture solutions for your BPO business, it is important to maintain control and access to your quality data as you aim to identify agent strengths and weaknesses in order to improve training and enhance service levels. This means you want software that offers full, open interoperability with other systems such as speech analytics, conversational AI and voice biometrics to help you leverage your data.

Additional considerations include:

• Call/screen recording - choose record-on-demand or total recording software to capture a sampling of interactions (or all interactions) for quality assurance, compliance and dispute resolution purposes; ensure your selection features an open API to pull data from your CRM system into the recording/quality monitoring platform. It's also critical to pick a solution that offers multi-tenancy and centralized management of your recording data so you can manage multiple clients independently, yet simultaneously.
• Audio capture - select a modern, open and modular audio capture platform to gain added value from your speech analytics voice data; consider free, open, fine-grained privileged access to media and associated meta-data with standards-based tools. Ensure you choose high-fidelity, dual-channel audio streaming with support for upper-end audio sample rate formats such as G.711 and OPUS.

Agent Satisfaction

With the right solutions in place, your team leaders, supervisors and QA analysts can significantly impact agent satisfaction. The result is happier employees that want to stay with your organization.

Here's how to utilize your recording and audio capture platform for the biggest gains in satisfaction:

1.  Automatically tag interactions in which the customer expresses satisfaction or delight (for example, by mentioning the words "happy", "satisfied", "thank you so much"). You can then capture and share these portions of interactions publicly with your team or privately with individual agents to highlight exceptional service.
2. Well trained agents equal less frustrated employees. Record select interactions per agent to identify skills gaps, which you can then quickly address with additional coaching/training.
3. Review agent screen activity during long or repeat customer interactions to identify workflow disruptions or bottlenecks. You can then correct these issues to streamline agent workflow and reduce average handle time (AHT).

These are just a few of the ways you can leverage the right audio recording/capture solutions to improve agent satisfaction and minimize employee churn.

If your contact center or enterprise is like most others, you have call recording software in place to capture your customer interactions for compliance, customer service and dispute resolution purposes.

Like most, you also likely have some common issues from time to time which require troubleshooting, such as:

• Past call recordings were not saved
• Can't listen to recordings offline
• Only hear one party upon playback
• Can't export a call
• Meta data isn't displaying properly
• Lack of access to media/meta data
• Poor audio quality

All of these problems can require hours and hours of your IT support team getting on the phone with the call recording vendor's support team trying to troubleshoot the issues. This takes your technical staff away from other important projects. It also disrupts certain workflows that require access to high quality call recordings.

Let 2020 be the year you put an end to all of these call recording challenges.

Try OrecX free for 30 days. Our call recording software installs in just 30 minutes and requires no maintenance. Our clients don't have the issues listed above. Our software just works.

Many businesses today record some or all their customer interactions for compliance (PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, etc.), quality assurance, or dispute resolution. Others use their recorded conversations for business intelligence. There is truly a myriad of reasons for recording calls.

One you may not be thinking of is the notion of competitive differentiation. That's right, leveraging your recordings for the purpose of increasing your competitive advantage. It's kind of a different way of looking at things. In doing so, you can better demonstrate your recorder's value to your management and potentially free up some budget for advanced features like speech analytics or even mobile recording.

Let me explain a little.

Attracting Customers

One of the most prevalent uses of recorded customer interactions is to assess agent performance for the purpose of uncovering skills deficiencies and workflow issues. Call and screen recording are really the only tools you can use to assess these areas without having to sit right alongside each agent for every call.

When you identify problems using call recording, you can not only correct them but also dramatically improve upon them. If your current workflow, for example, is causing longer average handle times (AHTs) than you'd like, don't just tweak your existing workflow - overhaul it and make it far more efficient. There is no excuse for not doing this, and when you do, your AHT will go down, your net promoter score (NPS) will go up, and your customers will be happier. The result is competitive differentiation in the form of customer satisfaction and a more positive public reputation.

Sales Traction

Your inside sales team is the tip of the spear when it comes to prospect outreach and lead generation. Their effectiveness has a direct line to your bottom line. A finely tuned inside sales team can be the difference between hitting your annual sales quota and falling short.

When you record all your inside sales calls - whether inbound or outbound - you are capturing the full conversation, not just handwritten or typed notes. Think about that. You have the complete interaction documented as it happened and can share the recording with your outside reps who will work the deal. Instead of relying on the inside sales rep's account of what happened on the exploratory call, the rep can listen to the interaction and hear for him/herself. This ability to hear the call first-hand, helps bolster sales success.

Competitive Offers

We all know that sometimes customer conversion all comes down to price, and in some cases, your competitors may offer discounts which they don't publicly disclose. Having this information would help your sales and marketing team adjust your promotional pricing to better compete. Not having this puts your teams in the dark, and the result could be lost business without knowing why.

When you record your calls and employ speech analytics, you can automatically identify any interactions in which the customer/prospect mentions one of your competitor's names. Sometimes, along with the competitor's name, the individual may disclose the competitor's pricing or special offer. "Well, XYZ company is offering a 30% discount this week." You can share these recordings with your sales and marketing teams. The result is more competitive pricing and more new customers.

These are just a few of the ways that call recording software can help your business - regardless of industry or size - better compete for mind share and market share. 

Speech analytics software is being used all over the contact center landscape, and not just by enterprises anymore. Auto-transcription and keyword spotting are enabling customer service teams to identify defecting customers, identify up-sell opportunities, collect meaningful competitive intelligence and more.

None of this is really news, however, to professionals in the contact center space. But what is new is the fact that you need stereo call recording to optimize the results of the audio transcription for speech analytics. Quality in, quality out. With traditional call recording, both the agent and the customer's voices are captured on the same channel. When there is over-talk, say during an argument, the transcription tool is unable to discern who is speaking and what is being said. This can be an issue for many businesses. 

Suppose during the over-talk in a heated discussion about a dispute, the customer says the words "It's my fault". Those keywords could help the organization avoid a lawsuit, but without dual-channel, stereo call recording, those words would never be captured or heard. Here's another example. Imagine if a customer utters the words "I'm done", "I'm leaving" or "I'm cancelling" during an argument, and the agent was speaking at the same time. Those vital phrases would never make their way to the customer retention team, and that customer could be lost forever, to a competitor. 

Stereo recording actually improves speech to text, keyword and phrase spotting, speech analytics, and voice biometrics. It high fidelity audio capture capabilities support upper-end audio sample rate formats such as G.711 and OPUS, so you're recordings will feature the highest quality, clearest audio for both transcription and quality monitoring. 

So many contact center today unknowingly rely on mono call recording solutions to power their speech analytics. It's true. This is a fundamental flaw in one's customer service strategy that ought to be reviewed and reconsidered.

Another consideration is the value stereo recording can bring to the quality monitoring/agent evaluation process. Supervisors, team leaders and contact center managers rely heavily on recorded customer interactions to identify agent weaknesses and to train agents on what went right and what went wrong during specific customer calls. With stereo or dual channel recording, evaluators can focus on just the agent's or customer's voice and home in on specifically what was said. Mono call recording does not allow for this separation of voice.

Call recording laws by state in the United States can vary greatly from one state to another. Thirty six states have one-party consent rules while the remaining states have an all-party consent policy. As many of your U.S. based conference calls can consist of parties from multiple states, it is important to understand the laws from each state.

Here are some resources to help you understand the call recording laws by state:

• MWL Law - Laws on Recording Conversations in all 50 States 
• Digital Media Law Project - State Law: Recording
• JUSTIA - Recording Phone Calls and Conversations
• ExecVision - Primer on Call Recording Laws
• Top Class Actions - What California Laws Address Recording Phone Calls?
• Practical Law Intellectual Property & Technology - State Telephone Recording Laws Chart: Overview
• Smith Marco, PC (Attorney at Law) - Call Recording Laws by State

OrecX is simply providing public resources to help you understand call recording laws by state. We are, by no means, providing any type of legal advice.

We wanted to know which call center regulations most businesses were focused on this year. So, we asked a bunch of call center managers spanning a number of industries (financial, collections, insurance, healthcare, consumer, high-tech and more). 

Privacy Regulations

More than a quarter of respondents cited various privacy regulations as their top priority - including GDPR, PCI and then HIPAA. This makes sense as data privacy issues become more and more prevalent. The ability to protect payment card information (PCI), personal health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII) is imperative today. Noncompliance can lead to costly fines, a damaged reputation and even suspension of one's credit card processing privileges.

From a call recording perspective, it is important to have some sort of compliance-enabling capabilities in place, The following features, e.g., can help your contact center conform with these (and other) privacy regulations:

• Pause/resume recordings while sensitive information is being shared
• Mask/mute recordings while sensitive information is being shared
• Encrypt recordings
• Protect recordings with permission/password-based access 
  
  

Consent-Based Laws

Among the top six responses to the survey were a few consent-based laws. At number two was call monitoring consent - those state by state regulations which specify how many parties must consent to a call recording. Number four was the Do Not Call Registry, and number six was Telecommunications Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). These laws are perennial concerns for all contact centers, and this is why you always hear a recorded voice say "This call may be recorded for...". Without such a notification of the intention to record, organizations face financial penalties.

Predictive dialing solutions and campaign management software can help keep your contact center on track with these regulations.

 

For more information on contact center regulations in the U.S. and across the world, download our ebook below.

 

 

 

Open source call recording brings many benefits over traditional proprietary call recording systems - namely, flexibility, cost savings, data control, openness and more. 

SIPREC is a SIP protocol for call recording, based on IETF standards, and it is used for establishing an active recording session and reporting the metadata of the session. Open source SIPREC is particularly attractive to VoIP service providers as the auto-provisioning capabilities of open source SIPREC are much easier to administer. This means service providers can get their clients up and running faster and with less hassle/resources. 

The flexibility of open source SIPREC enables service providers to add call recording as a service to their portfolio of offerings without costly and time-consuming integration, API development, and so on. It's as simple as turning on the service to new or existing clients. With open source SIPREC, service providers also enjoy easier call recording system deployment and concurrent call capture.

Here are some of the many advantages of open source SIPREC:

• Scalability to thousands of concurrent calls
• Interoperability (OrecX open source SIPREC supports Avaya, Cisco BIB, Broadsoft, Metaswitch, Ribbon, Oracle/Acme and more)
• Open database schema, file formats and API
• Highly efficient (configure only the traffic you need to record)
• Low cost of ownership

There are two key components of SIPREC interactions:

1. Session Recording Client (SRC) – the SBC or PBX

• Avaya, Cisco, Broadsoft, Metaswitch, Ribbon, Oracle, Sonus are some of the telephony platforms that support SIPREC.

2. Session Recording Server (SRS) – a call recording platform

• OrecX is the most widely used open source SIPREC call recorder.

Click here to learn more about OrecX open source SIPREC.

Also check out our blog post titled "Growing Prominence of the SIPREC Call Recording Standard"

Organizations require flexibility in their IT systems in order to successfully integrate new tools into their technical environments. Call recording software is no different. However, most recording software is locked in terms of self-customization. Some recording vendors charge an arm and a leg to perform this customization for you. This is a deal breaker for many. 

What is needed today is flexible, open call recording systems which you can tailor to your very unique requirements. Every organization is different and falls under a particular set of regulations, mandates its own internal compliance measures, has different customer interaction workflows, and son on.  You want the ability to decide what your recorder looks like and how it behaves. For example, you want to be able to set your own playback restrictions to keep unauthorized users from accessing recordings containing personally identifiable information. Your quality supervisors review interactions for specific hard and soft-skills criteria, and therefore, you require flexibility in how you search for specific recordings. Many records take away much of this flexibility and require you to engage their professional services arm to make any adjustments.

An alternative to standard proprietary recording systems is to deploy open source recording and build it out to meet your specific needs. Open source recording is different, and its openness and flexibility make it far easier to ensure high levels of customer service, minimize risk, maintain regulatory/industry compliance, verify orders, resolve disputes, and more.  

OrecX offers open source recording software.  Oreka GPL is an open source recording system for capture and retrieval of voice. Its primary application is for recording calls from VoIP telephony systems via port mirroring. It runs on both Linux and Windows. Recording can be distributed on several recorders, all reporting to the same database and Web User Interface. 

Oreka is a modular and cross-platform system for recording and retrieval of audio streams. The project currently supports VoIP and sound device-based capture. Metadata from recordings can be stored in any mainstream database. Retrieval of captured sessions is web based.

Some of the primary benefits open source recording offers include:

• Operating system, database and hardware agnostic
• Open data model, open API, open file formats, open web interface
• Full customization capabilities
• You control your own data
• Low total cost of ownership (most open source software is free)
• Enhanced security
• Multiple protocol support

If your business does not yet have a voice recording system – or if you have one but it is not meeting your needs, then an open source recording solution is something you should seriously consider.

The business process outsourcing (BPO) market is very unique in that everything an outsourcer does is for the benefit of its clients. Outsourcers take on the responsibility of handling another business’s sales, or customer service, and often times even the client’s compliance responsibilities and liabilities.

In many cases, these service organizations are taking over a role their clients cannot manage on their own or don’t want to handle any longer.  Therefore, BPOs are under enormous pressure to over-perform each and every day just to retain clients.

With the help of the right call recording, screen recording and quality monitoring software in a BPO's arsenal, they stand a far greater chance of satisfying (if not wowing) clients.  But first, the right solution(s) must be chosen to fit one's specific business requirements, which can be dramatically different from other types of businesses. 

In short, consider solutions that offer:

• Broad functionality to meet the varying needs of a diverse client base
• Ability to lower operating costs while still meeting service level agreements (SLAs)
• Affordability, as budgets are tight in order to maintain profitability
• On-the-fly implementation, as down time is not something that can be afforded
• World class support services when they are needed
• Low ongoing total cost of ownership (TCO) with minimal-to-no maintenance required
• Full, open interoperability with other systems - CRM, speech analytics, etc.
• Flexible, subscription-based pricing
• Graphical user interface (GUI) customization
• Open file format so you can share recordings with your client(s)
• Multi-tenancy

When considering adding or upgrading your call/screen recording system, there are a number of criteria to look for in a solution.  A solution with these features and functions will provide you with the necessary tools and capabilities to manage risk, settle disputes, improve agent compliance, verify orders and streamline operations. 

• Centralized management of all recording data (voice and screen)
• Multi-tenancy so you can manage multiple clients independently, yet simultaneously
• Precise search querying to find the exact call recording you need to prove compliance, share with your client, settle a dispute and so on
• Scalability to thousands of seats (whether through one logger/server or by linking multiple devices)
• Compliance-ready – Ensure the system has masking or muting capabilities to protect personally identifiable information for PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, etc.
• Subscription-based, affordable pricing so you can activate and terminate licenses when necessary to support your dynamic project workload
• Same-day installation so you can be up and running immediately in support of your new accounts
• Open platform (i.e. open API) so you can easily integrate the recorder with your existing applications (CRM, ERP, SFA)
• Compliance-ready – Ensure the system has masking or muting capabilities to protect personally identifiable information for PCI-DSS and HIPAA.
• Subscription-based, affordable pricing so you can activate and terminate licenses when necessary to support your dynamic project workload
• Same-day installation so you can be up and running immediately in support of your new accounts
• Integrated voice and screen recording with simultaneous playback
• Open web interface with support for any browser, including mobile; and also internationalization
• Modular components to remove complexity and cost associated with bundled applications
• Open data model with ancillary features and processes, along with enhanced meta data for pre and post call processing
• Live monitoring so supervisors or even clients can listen in to live customer interactions
• Interoperability with virtually any communication system/PBX

Outbound sales and marketing campaigns today leverage just about every communication channel when it comes to connecting with customers and prospects - email, voice, SMS, chat, social media, etc. Employing an omni-channel communication strategy helps organizations reach target buyers more effectively, by covering all bases - so to speak. One thing remains clear, however, and that is that voice is still king. There is no doubt about it. In a world of marketing and sales automation, automated dialers are the heavy lifters as they enable businesses to efficiently connect with an exponentially larger pool of individuals. 

Call recording and speech analytics capabilities enable campaign designers (call center managers, inside sales directors, marketing managers, etc.) to leverage past interactions to devise future campaigns that will resonate with target buyers. Without recorded calls and speech analytics data, managers cannot fully understand how called parties are feeling during an interaction, nor extract all of the valuable intelligence recordings offer. Recorded voice provides an element of emotion detection and keyword spotting that other communication channels simply cannot. 

Voice pitch, spoken phrases, long pauses, etc. help assess what a potential buyer is really thinking, so supervisors and managers can gain a real understanding of a campaign's success or failure and the potential root causes for each. Future campaigns can then be adjusted accordingly to increase the likelihood of success, by not repeating past mistakes.  

When selecting a call recording and speech analytics system, look for these capabilities to help you optimize your outbound campaigns:

1. Open API for easy and smooth integration of the recording engine and the speech analytics tool

2. Customizable data visualization and reporting tools

3. Multi-dimensional searching 

4. High fidelity, dual channel stereo recording (most call recorders only have mono) 

5. Voice analytics auto-tagging

5. Free and unrestricted access to recordings

6. SIPREC recording

As you move forward with your omni-channel customer engagement strategy, be sure to leverage the full power of recorded voice to increase your sales and marketing success, while also boosting customer satisfaction.