ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

FBI estimates of the cost of insurance fraud in the U.S. are staggering: Non-health insurance fraud is estimated to be more than $40 billion per year, which impacts consumers due to higher premiums. It also harms insurers’ profits and the country’s economic stability. The insurance industry itself is massive – consisting of more than 7,000 companies that collect over $1 trillion in premiums each year – and its size contributes significantly to the cost of insurance fraud by providing numerous opportunities and greater incentives for committing illegal activities.

Here are some of the more common insurance fraud schemes:

• Premium Diversion, or the embezzlement of insurance premiums. This is most common type of insurance fraud, and occurs when an insurance agent fails to send premiums to the underwriter and instead keeps the money for personal use. Another common premium diversion scheme involves selling insurance without a license, collecting premiums, and then not paying claims.

• Fee Churching, which is when a series of intermediaries takes commissions through reinsurance agreements. In this scenario, the initial premium is reduced by repeated commissions until there is no longer money to pay claims. The company left to pay the claims is often a business the conspirators have set up to fail. When viewed alone, each transaction appears to be legitimate—only after the cumulative effect is considered, does fraud emerge.

• Asset Diversion, or the theft of insurance company assets. This occurs almost exclusively in the context of an acquisition or merger of an existing insurance company and involves acquiring control of an insurance company with borrowed funds. After making the purchase, the subject uses the assets of the acquired company to pay off the debt. The remaining assets can then be diverted to the subject.

• Workers’ Compensation Fraud. Some entities purport to provide workers’ compensation insurance at a reduced cost and then misappropriate premium funds without ever providing insurance.

• Disaster-Related Fraud, which involves false or exaggerated claims by policyholders. Claims could include misclassification of flood damage as wind, fire, or theft; claims filed by individuals residing hundreds of miles outside the disaster zone; bid-rigging by contractors and falsely inflating the cost of repairs; contractors requiring upfront payment for services and then failing to perform the agreed-upon repairs; and charity fraud scams designed to misappropriate funds donated for disaster relief.

Faced with such an enormous job, fraud officers need as many tools as possible to help identify and thwart these schemes. The trouble is, finding evidence for fraud can be tricky – but sometimes, it’s just a phone call way. That’s where call recording software can help. Call recording systems can enable a call center to flag and easily query all calls associated with a specific claim. Fraud investigators can then scrutinize each call where fraud is suspected to identify any inconsistencies or discrepancies that might indicate fraudulent activity.

Call recording can be a powerful weapon in a fraud officer’s arsenal.

 

 

Compliance officers perform a critical function: ensuring that an organization is operating within well-defined regulatory and statutory parameters. Whether it’s making sure to abide by HIPAA, PCI-DSS, the Telemarketing Sales Rule, or a number of other mandates, your organization and your employees need to be careful, today more than ever. Why? Because the penalties associated with non-compliance can be crippling, particularly for smaller organizations. Just look at the average fines associated with these regulations:

• PCI-DSS: $50,000 per infraction
• Telemarketing Sales Rule: $16,000 per infraction
• Do Not Call Implementation Act: $11,000 per infraction
• Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform & Consumer Protection Act: $7,500 per infraction
• HIPAA: $1,000 per infraction

To help your organization contend with these compliance requirements, many organizations are deploying call recording software to protect the interests of both themselves and their customers. These systems enable an organization to capture every telephone call (and accompanying screen activity, if needed) and store this information for a set period of time. By classifying calls containing sensitive cardholder information, patient data, or other compliance-related activity, call recording systems can provide assistance later on when an organization needs to provide evidence of compliance or mitigate a dispute.

In addition, compliance call recording systems can help you as a compliance professional, both in motivating staff as well as training new employees. For example, you can create a meta-tag for all calls containing sensitive information (credit card or healthcare data, for example). You can then review select interactions at team meetings to demonstrate how or how not to handle the collection of such data from customers. You can also record best practice calls that involve sensitive information and make a library of these best-in-class interactions to share with new or under-performing staff members.

If you’re a compliance officer seeking out a call recorder, here are some of the features you need to look for when evaluating a system:

• Ability to mute a customer’s voice when credit card or other personal information is being given
• Ability to mask the credit card or personal information portion of a screen
• Ability to permanently delete recordings containing sensitive information
• Ability to encrypt recordings, if desired
• Ability to restrict playback to only those individuals (e.g., supervisors, trainers, legal personnel) who need access to such interactions
• Access to both voice and screen recording, to capture the full interaction

In our litigious and closely monitored business environment, the question isn’t ‘should you use a call recording solution to aid your compliance efforts’. The question should be: ‘How can you afford not to?’

 

Whether your job title is CEO, CFO, CMO, CCO (Chief Compliance Officer) or CTO, you’re constantly challenged to find better ways to run your organization. What’s more, employees look to you for leadership, strategic direction, motivation and vision.

To help gather the insight you need to succeed in a C-level role, consider the power that can be harnessed from recorded customer calls. These calls give you direct access into the minds of your customers, information that is invaluable as you seek to shape new strategic directions, develop new products and services, or even appoint new staff. By monitoring these calls and carefully assessing what’s being said, you can help your organization build a successful business while establishing and cultivating a viable customer base.  Think of how much more informed you could be about your business if you made it a practice of listening to just three carefully selected customer calls each week.

You can use your call recording software to hand-pick select recordings which can provide real strategic intelligence. Here are some of the many ways in which select recorded calls can help senior executives within your company:

1. Tap into the true voice of the customer to better understand who your target buyer is when making important strategic decisions about the company's future direction - i.e. new products to develop, new markets to enter, new investments to make, etc.

2. Take a pulse of customer sentiment toward your brand by listening to select calls to better understand how your company stacks up to the competition.

3. Motivate staff and/or investors by replaying motivating calls at the start of staff or even investor calls/meetings to demonstrate your company's positive impact on customers, in their own words.

4. Set the tone for executive team meetings by playing select calls at the start of the meetings to demonstrate specific areas of focus for the company moving forward.

5. Woo new senior talent to the organization by having candidates listen to the best calls to demonstrate how beloved your company is by customers.

These are just some of the many ways in which call recording software can help your senior executives lead your organization.

 

In a recent survey by CMO.com, Chief Marketing Officers revealed some of their most pressing challenges. Not surprisingly, things like “asking the right questions” and “understanding our customers” ranked near the top of the list, demonstrating the critical importance of maintaining a firm grasp on what your customers want and finding new and improved ways to deliver it.

For many organizations, recorded calls can provide your marketing team with just that appropriate level of insight into the minds of your customers – a true channel into how your customers actually think or feel about your products and/or services.

Call recording (aka call recorder) software can give you details related to:

• Geography: Find out which regions of your customer base have the most callers regarding a new marketing promotion. You can then use this information to better target specific customer segments by geography. This helps you align future marketing campaigns to best resonate with buyers in specific areas.
• Business intelligence: More often than not, you can glean valuable information about what your competitors are doing during customer calls. Armed with this information, your marketing organization can re-align or tweak their campaigns in order to achieve maximum success. [Customer: “That’s not what XYZ does. They let you…”]
• New product ideas: You might be surprised to learn how many great ideas come from customers, either as suggestions to improve your current offerings or as inspirations for an entirely new product or line. You also gain insight into competitive solutions.

You might also want to consider another innovative use for a call recorder: Using actual recorded calls for marketing purposes. That’s right – consider taking best-practice segments of customer interactions and using them in your marketing or advertising campaigns. This can be done by sharing audio segments through online banner ads or other promotional vehicles. (Of course, you’ll want to remember to omit the customer’s name or other personally identifiable information from the recorded sections you use.)

Understanding the benefits of call recording to your marketing team is the first step. What’s the next one? Knowing the questions you need to ask your call recording provider to determine if a particular solution is right for you. Questions might include:

1. Is the solution designed primarily for a company of my size? If you’re a smaller organization with a limited budget, you don’t want to pay for features that are designed for a different-sized organization. Similarly, if you’re a larger organization with significant financial resources, look for a system with all the “bells and whistles” you require.
2. Does the solution support multi-site and multi-tenant capabilities? You want to be prepared if and when this is needed.
3. Can the solution scale to support my organization’s growth? Again, it’s important to plan for the future. You don’t want to get stuck with a system that cannot accommodate expansion.
4. What reporting functionality is available so I can pull out the necessary marketing metrics and insights to support our marketing campaigns?

Recorded calls can prove to be a valuable tool in your marketing arsenal.

You spend a lot of time as a sales team trying to meet two primary objectives: keeping current customers happy and attracting new ones. No matter what your industry segment, geographic location or company size, those objectives remain the focal point of most sales campaigns. To successfully achieve them, you require information – information about what your current (and potential) customers want and information about why (or why not) they’re buying your product or services. Gathering this information may seem like an insurmountable task, but it doesn’t need to be.

With call recording software, your sales team can gain valuable insights into your customers’ behavior and decision-making process – insights that can help you understand why:

• Cross-selling and up-selling offers are or are not working
• Customers are canceling their orders
• Particular products are more popular than others
• Certain geographic regions account for the majority of your successful (or unsuccessful) sales conversions

Recorded customer calls are a powerful tool for sales teams and can be used in a variety of ways. Consider, for example, the age-old challenge of customer defection. Defecting customers present a costly problem for any organization, especially because the cost of acquiring a new customer is six to seven times greater than keeping an existing one. With the right call recording solution, you can set up the system to flag every call in which your sales or support person visits the “Cancel my account” page. That way, you can reroute these calls to your account rescue team to help prevent the customer from leaving, and bring him or her back.

Call recording can help with acquiring customers as well. The fact is, recorded calls enable you to hear the “true voice of the customer.” By listening to these calls, you’ll be able to learn what customers want and what they don’t – even what your customers consider the most valuable benefits or features of your product. You can even gather competitive intelligence from these calls. Say you hear, for example, “XYZ Company is offering a two-for-one deal on a similar product. Why don’t you offer that?” This information can then be shared with interested parties across your organization, which can help them develop new products or refine current offerings in order to meet current and potential customer demands.

You can also use recorded calls to help motivate and train your sales staff. Consider gathering your sales team together on a regular basis to share successes and challenges. That way, your sales team learns from one another and, ultimately, can achieve greater sales-conversion success.

When evaluating a call recording solution, look for a system that can answer the following questions to your satisfaction:

-Is it expensive? Look for a system that can cost you as little as $20 per month per user (depending upon product, scope and size).

-Is it hard to install and maintain? Look for a system that can be installed in 30 minutes or less and requires no maintenance.

-Is it difficult to learn and use? Look for a system that you can learn to use effectively in as little as one hour.

-Does it require special hardware? Look for a system that offers an open-architecture software-only solution that runs on standard industry hardware.

At OrecX, we are constantly finding new ways to garner insight on the call recorder software industry to share with our customers, prospects, partners and the industry at large.

As we've done in the past, we surveyed countless professionals spanning enterprises (call centers, IT organizations, sales teams, operations teams), debt collections firms, BPOs and more to understand who in these organizations is responsible for the company's call recorder system.

Below is a graphical representation of the results of this survey of 50+ individuals spanning all industries:

 

 

More and more organizations today are using business process outsourcers (BPOs) to perform some of their most necessary functions. BPO categories can range from front-office customer services, such as technical support, to back-office business operations like billing. Recent research shows that since the mid-1990s, the number and scope of BPOs have grown exponentially, particularly in India, which ranks as the world’s preferred market for BPO companies, followed (in no particular order) by Australia, China, the Philippines, and Ireland.

Because they’re located offsite from an organization, quality control of BPOs becomes an important consideration, both for the company doing the outsourcing and for those performing the outsourcing services. That’s why call recording can offer valuable assistance, providing a window into what’s taking place and insight into:  

• Regulatory and industry compliance: Helping to ensure that all proper procedures are being followed. This includes guaranteeing, for example, that credit card information and personal data are being appropriately handled or that HIPAA (Health Information Portability & Accountability Act) rules are adhered to.
• Operational performance: Allowing managers to screen employees’ activities to identify areas where workflow was hampered or interrupted. Calls can also provide insight that can assist with staff training and development.
• Service quality: Providing access to customer interactions so that managers can know whether agents are providing the highest level of service. And should a dispute ever arise, these calls can be analyzed to help resolve the problem.
• Critical business data: Gathering key pieces of information about customers, their concerns, and their buying habits. You can glean geographic data, for example, as well as gain competitive intelligence based on what callers say about what they like or don’t like about other products they’ve tried or are considering.

That’s the easy part: knowing you need call recording software. Next comes the hard part: selecting one. Actually, it’s not such a difficult choice, because regardless of where you or your BPO is located, you need to look for the same thing when it comes to call recording software – a solution that’s affordable, scalable and keeps you in complete control so that you can deliver the best possible results for your business.

When evaluating call recording software for a BPO, look for solutions that offer:

• Open recording architecture: You’ll want software that’s free from any proprietary hindrances.
• Ability to work with any operating system, server or database: In “techie” terms, the software should be “system, server and database agnostic.”
• Open data model: Make sure you own the data.
• Customizable solution: Enables you to fully customize the software with open APIs (Web 2.0)
• No maintenance required: Worry-free software means you can spend your time thinking about more important concerns.
• Software which can be learned and used in minutes: No special training or technical expertise is required to install, operate or manage the system.

Employing the services of a BPO can provide tremendous benefits to an organization, including productivity improvement, improved use of resources, cost savings, and the ability to focus on core business areas. Just make sure your organization is making the most out of its BPO relationship by gaining the insights that only call recording can provide.

 

 

CEO Jim Murphy

 

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