ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

Cloud call recording applications are rising in popularity, along with cloud contact centers in general. The advantages are significant, primarily around the elimination of procuring and maintaining costly hardware, the ability to access call records from just about any web-connected device and subscription-based models. With these many cloud benefits, however, comes a heightened risk to internet-based attacks which aim to compromise your recorded calls and your private network. The emergence of mobile phone recording also adds to this ongoing security challenge.

There are a number of risk-mitigation measures you can put in place, such as OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) Level 2 security, but first you need to understand the types of threats that exist to your cloud call recording system.

“Most vulnerabilities found in the proprietary code of Web applications are unknown to security defense systems; these are called zero-day vulnerabilities. This is because these vulnerabilities are specific to each application and have never been known before. A skilled attacker can easily find these vulnerabilities and exploit the issue without being detected. The best defense against these attacks is to develop secure applications. Developers must be aware of how application attacks work and build software defenses right into their applications.

Educating and informing developers about application vulnerabilities is the goal of OWASP. The organization has put together a list of the most common application attacks. This list is renewed every three years, with the latest refresh in 2013.”

Download our white paper for descriptions of four of the most common web-based application attacks that you should be aware of in your contact center.

The ability to record the calls that go through your platform is gradually shifting from being a feature to being a necessity. Whether you run a call center and you need it to monitor your agents’ activity,  to comply with your countries laws, or simply to improve your services, you need a recording solution that is simple to deploy and does not affect the quality of the calls. This article shows how you can achieve that using the new SIPREC module available starting with OpenSIPS 2.4.

 Read more.

OrecX is a go-to for screen recording, cloud recording, open source recording, and quality monitoring reliability and innovation. Bruce Kaskey, an OrecX co-founder, has over 28 years of experience in technology product management, sales and marketing. Prior to OrecX, Bruce worked at Stevens Communications and Eastman Kodak. OrecX is a sponsor for and Bruce is a speaker for Cluecon.com scheduled for August 7 - 10, 2017 in Chicago, a conference filled with hands-on workshops, coding and hackathon games, night-time parties, presentations and panel discussions.

You'll know exactly who Bruce Kaskey is and a little about him and OrecX after our short interview.

Questions/Answers:

1. What does your company do for its clientele in regards to Internet protocol communications and technologies?
OrecX records and stores customer phone calls (incoming and outgoing) for customer service and liability purposes.

Your customers, just like many of your staff, can benefit from you recording calls with a call recorder. Here's a scenario to explain how.

Scenario: Customer named Jeremy 

Motivation: Wants to have a pleasant phone experience and likes the idea of having the call recorded so he can ask the company to pull up his past call to verify what was said – if necessary.

Scenario: Jeremy calls his cable company about the high cost of his monthly bill. It is about $22 higher than usual. The agent quickly realizes the heightened cost is due to Jeremy’s recent approval of adding Showtime to his account. The agent claims the records show that on a date 32 days earlier, Jeremy agreed to add the premium channel while on the phone with a representative of the cable company who called to sell him on it. He asked for that call to be accessed and listened to. It was, and it was determined he in fact declined the service. His account was credited in full.

Call recording is not only a means of protecting your organization, but it can also be promoted to your client base as a means of protecting them from any unfortunate mishap or misunderstanding.

Most organizations merely state at the beginning of customer calls that "this call may be recorded", and they do so for compliance purposes. But why not promote your call recorder practices on your website to show your customers how much you are about them?

By now you have hopefully heard of the significant new trend that is emerging around the notion of “Intelligent Contact Centers”, or contact centers that fully integrate the power of analytics into the contact center function. See “Launching an Intelligent Contact Center” by Omer Minkara of Aberdeen Group.

In his article, Minkara defines intelligent contact centers as those “…mastering the art and science of data-driven customer interactions.” At the crux of any interaction is the voice of the agent and the customer, and the only way to capture that unstructured data is with business call recording. These systems record the interaction’s audio and agent screen video and offer integrated playback. Leading call recording solutions also offer speech analytics to auto-tag key phrases or words such as “upset”, “cancel my order” or “speak to a manager”.

With all of this intelligence, combined with CRM, IVR, ACD, speech and desktop analytics data, contact centers have the rich information necessary to intelligently route calls to the best agents, intelligently classify callers by their defection potential, understand which customers likely can be upsold effectively, and so on.

The benefits of such capabilities can be enormous. According to Minkara, intelligent contact centers enjoy a 5.9% higher customer retention rate, an 8.9% reduction in customer complaints, and a 10% jump in the ability to create a unified view of customer data. Improvements like these can easily translate into significant cost reductions, increased upsell and cross-sell conversion and higher revenue.

The move to an intelligent contact center does not have to take place all at once, and your company does not have to be a Fortune 500 business. Any contact center today can take small, iterative steps and begin realizing the associated benefits along the way. For any business, here are some effective first steps to consider:

1. Add speech analytics and auto-tagging to your call recording system
2. Install an intelligent IVR that can route calls based on agent skill sets
3. Integrate and centralize your customer-related data sources (call recording, speech analytics, ACD, IVR, PBX, etc.) – systems with open APIs make this easier.

Intelligent contact centers are not just on the horizon. They are already here, and you need to start thinking about how to migrate your customer service operation to the new level of sophistication that your competitors are already trying to achieve.

Collections agents have one of the toughest jobs out there, contacting people who are late on payments. The called party's reaction is typically unpleasant and it can certainly have an effect on the psyche of your agents and their future performance. According to IBISWorld's Dec. 2016 industry report titled "Debt Collections Agencies in the U.S.: Market Research Report", the collections industry has been on a steady -2.7% decline since 2011. The same report also states that nearly 43.5% of industry revenue comes from your staff.

What this all means is that there is an opportunity in your agency to boost performance and revenue. And this is where call recording software can help. 

By capturing best-practice calls by high performing agents, you give underperforming or newer agents a glimpse into how your top agents operate. Perhaps you have an agent who is great at keeping the conversation light and somewhat upbeat, or maybe one of your agents consistently has the highest collections rate. What is it about these agents that gets would-be payers to react favorably to their rhetoric? By recording their calls, you can not only find out but also share these interactions with other agents so they can see how it's done and emulate their behavior. 

It is one thing to role play with a new or underperforming agent. It is quite another to give them a direct window into the best of the best interactions and how they transpire verbatim. This is what call recording software can do for you, your collections agency and your staff.

According to Joseph Coll, Operations/Collections Manager of Bruch Law Offices (collections agency), "We (use call recording to) hold training meetings, and I have our collectors give me one good call and one bad one each week, so we can critique them as a group and come up with refined collections strategies.  Having these recordings has proven very helpful in this manner.”

What's more, compliance is also a constant concern in the collections business, especially with the many regulations on the books, such as Fair Debt Collections Practices Act, Telephone Consumer Protection Act, Do Not Call List, and so on. When an agent violates one of these regulations, a penalty must be paid, and you want to avoid these payouts at all costs. Call recording can help you uncover potential violations and work with those agents to correct future behavior.

How many times have you heard: "Can I put you on hold for a minute"? If you are like me, and you probably are, the answer is WAY too many times. We all dread that wasted time being put on hold by a call center agent when we are trying to reconcile our bill, get rid of an erroneous charge, or request support of some kind. 

Have you ever thought about what is actually driving that agent to put you on hold? Sure, at times, the interaction calls for a supervisor to empower the agent to grant you a refund, for example, but those instances are the exception. Much too often, the reason we are put on hold is likely two-fold:

1. The agent is ill-equipped to support your needs

2. The technology is ill-equipped to support your needs

Overcoming Agent-Driven Workflow Disruption

An under-trained or under-skilled agent can cause havoc in the customer service world. When interacting with prospects and/or customers, ill-prepared agents who take calls are akin to middle-school football players being sent in to NFL games. To say the least, they do not have the wherewithal to get the job done. Therefore, most often when you are put on hold by one of these under-skilled agents, it is because the individual does not know where to look for the information they need to support you. During the silence, the agent is literally fumbling through screen after screen attempting to locate your account record or the product information you're looking for.

This doesn't have to happen. An integrated call recording and screen recording system can capture the live interaction and provide a complete picture (upon playback) of the entire interaction and where the agent went wrong. Supervisors can then empower the agent with the right workflow knowledge to better handle customer needs moving forward. 

Overcoming Technology-Driven Workflow Disruption

Here is another question for you. How many times have you heard the phrase: "Our systems are slow today"? We all know what that is really code for - our systems suck. That is, the applications designed to support the agent, and the flow with which these applications pop up, has some sort of issue. For example, while you are on hold, the agent is trying to figure out why the refund screen isn't showing when he/she tries to issue a refund. While this is obviously a very simple example of workflow disruption, we can all image how complex agent workflow can be for a financial services or insurance agent, for instance. In these environments, the tools, applications and screens designed to support these representatives can be inordinate. 

The problem the agent is encountering is a disruption of some sort in their workflow. A call recording and screen recording system can capture and store the interaction for subsequent replay. Supervisors can then detect any gaps or problems within the workflow and can remedy them to ensure future calls don't suffer the same disruptions.

In a world where 67% of customers leave for a competitor due to poor customer service, you cannot afford to have workflow gaps or interruptions in your contact centers or within the BPOs supporting you. Your agents ought to be empowered with the knowledge, skill and technology to stay on the line with your customers and prospects and satisfy their needs in a rapid manner, without interruption.

Just imagine if you never had to hear that "Can I put you on hold?" phrase again. 

Time is money. For the banking industry, it’s their business. Brokers need the flexibility to take orders while on the fly. Mobility is critical for banks and financial services organizations.

But it’s not as simple as taking an order. Regulations require verification for transactions like a stock trade. And sometimes an order comes in when brokers are not at their desk. That’s why financial companies need a way to record these transactions (with mobile call recording software).

Read more.

By Jim Lyoob

Quality assurance involves maintaining a desired level of quality and it is crucial for your call center to be aware of the ways to do this. In order to optimize call center quality assurance, take advantage of these six strategies. 

1. Focus on quality as a behavior  

One strategy to utilize is to evaluate the quality of your agents during training. Keeping them informed about the call selection process and telling them how well they are doing will keep them more engaged with the calls and more willing to improve. QA evaluations also allow you to measure the performance of your agents. 

2. Use analytics 

Another strategy is to use analytics to your advantage to find higher value calls. A few examples of higher value calls include calls that were tagged by an agent, called that were placed multiple times, calls which involved transfers, calls that were extremely long or short and calls that were directed to specific numbers within a small time frame. When you are able to pinpoint high value calls, you can detect issues you’re having and correct them accordingly.  Read the full article.

It’s called the “hospitality” industry for a reason. Because when customers deal with a large hotel chain or other leisure-focused enterprise, they expect the very best in service – to be treated courteously, with great respect for their personal time and comfort, and with a can-do attitude towards problem solving.

For many customers, their first encounter with a hospitality enterprise is over the phone, through a call center. These call centers handle everything from family vacation reservations and inquiries to group sales and conference scheduling for multinational companies. For these call centers, two metrics are especially important:

• High first call resolution (FCR): meaning that a customer’s issue, problem, or request is addressed on the initial call, rather than requiring the customer to call back at another time or be referred to another party; and
• Low average handle time (AHT): meaning the duration of time a customer must remain on the phone line to get their question answered or problem solved.

Call center managers can monitor these two key metrics by using call recording software. Call recording software can provide detailed, up-to-the-minute information through automatic reports delivered directly to a call center manager’s desktop. These reports, which can be monitored weekly, monthly, or even hourly, can reveal:

• Real-time information about the call center’s FCR and AHT rates to ensure that targets are being met and to provide alerts when they are not.
• Insight into agent performance by seeing a report of how agents are doing with respect to high FCR and low AHT; the manager can learn immediately how agents are measuring up to pre-set performance thresholds.
• Details about high volume times: in particular, which days and/or times of the day might require more (or fewer) agents.

Also, when analyzed on a long-term basis, these reports can reveal geographic data about where the highest volume of callers come from and offer insights into the effectiveness of advertising and marketing campaigns.

In addition to these real-time reports, recorded customer calls – which can be listened to at a later time – can provide valuable information for future training, both of individual agents and for entire groups of agents.

In the dictionary, “hospitality” is defined as the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers. Make sure your call center measures up to those words.