ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

The time is right for you to seriously consider going after the real estate and legal verticals.  According to Heavy Reading, these industries are the most primed right now for business VoIP services. 

Wouldn't it be great if you had something really distinguishing among your offerings to make you stand out from the competition?  That something extra is a call recording system - a logical extension to your other business VoIP services.

Call recording can be a simple add-on service to your existing portfolio that you could very easily turn on or off for existing or new clients.  Think about the possibilities.  You would be able to:

• Upsell existing customers
• Strengthen your value proposition
• Extend your reach into real estate, legal and other markets
• Differentiate your business from other business VoIP providers
• Grow your business-VoIP practice
• Expand your footprint among SOHO/SMB businesses

Call Recording for Real Estate SOHOs/SMBs

Real estate professionals conduct a lot of business over the telephone, and new call recording capabilities will enable them to show proof of compliance (if necessary), verify what was said during a conversation, help resolve "he-said-she-said" disputes and more. Both commercial and residential brokers will have an easy-to-access record of every call they make so they can easily pull a conversation and play it back to also verify something they may have forgotten.  Often times a deal can be lost by a broker who simply forgot to do something important.  Recorded calls help agents avoid these mistakes and keep their clients happy and on board.

With the right call recording solution in your business VoIP arsenal, you will also empower your customers with the ability to search through their recorded calls for all conversations associated with a specific agent or customer or time of day. Think about how powerful and useful that will be to their business.

Call Recording for Legal SOHOs/SMBs

Lawyers and legal associates spend over 75 percent of their time on the phone with clients and their representatives.  With the ability to record client calls, law offices can maintain compliance, resolve disputes, document litigation discussions, verify fee agreements with clients, maintain case continuity between phone-based and non-phone-based conversations, and so much more.

Law firms can monitor how compliant their legal clerks and administrative teams are on the phone and easily identify and fix any problems or skill gaps.

Recorded calls are also a great way for legal firms to keep track of billable time on the phone with a client or when speaking with someone on their behalf.  It is often times very easy to underestimate (or overestimate) how much time was spent on the phone, without an accurate record to refer back to.

Again, like with real estate, the right call recording solution enables your customers

 to search and locate specific conversations associated with a particular case, for example.  This can be extremely powerful for legal entities.

Finding the Right Call Recording System

You want a call recording system that fits easily and seamlessly into your existing communications environment, is easy to use, and quick to turn on/off for customers.  You also want a solution you don't have to maintain or troubleshoot, and for the real estate and legal industries in particular, you need a Total Recording (100 percent audio/screen capture) software product that records both the voices of the two parties, and the screen of your employee.

Recording customer calls can be a nice to have and it can also be a necessity to help protect you from relevant legislation. For example, did you know that with the Truth in Lending Act, there are a number of pieces of information that must be disclosed during a customer call?

• "amount financed"
• "total of payments"
• Annual percentage rate
• Finance charge
• Schedule of payments

This is just one example of a law that sets mandates on what must be said over the phone.  Infractions can be quite costly to the organization in violation.

A number of businesses choose to capture all customer calls (compliance recording) and mine them to ensure agents are saying the proper things (or not saying certain things) during such conversations with customers. These recorded calls can also be used to settle a claim against a company who has been cited by a customer for violating behavior associated with one of these laws. 

Here's another example. 

Did you know that with the Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR), telemarketers are required by law to:

• Include on voicemails a toll-free number that the consumer can call to place an opt-out request? 
• Tell the absolute truth - not even little white lies about product capabilities and features are allowed

Just imagine if you had hundreds of agents a day violating such stipulations?  The resulting penalties could be huge.

A good practice for your organization is to capture agents' calls with customers to quality check whether your employees are following the correct protocols to ensure proper compliance.

There are a number of laws in the U.S. that have similar stipulations that your organization should be aware of. These include, but are not limited to:

• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) - credit card numbers need to be kept hidden from unauthorized staff
• Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) - an "opt-out" must be included on voicemails
• Truth in Lending Act (TILA) - several disclosures must be stated during the call so that borrowers are made clearly aware of all costs and terms associated with the credit (e.g. is there a prepayment penalty?)
• Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA) - debt collectors must identify themselves as collectors in every communication, and collectors must notify the consumer of their right to dispute the debt
• Health Insurance Portability and Protection Act (HIPPA) - personally identifiable information must be kept hidden from unauthorized employees
• Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) - requires organizations to design and maintain standards to protect customer information

The best thing to do for your organization if you feel there are some of these laws (or potentially others) that may impact your contact center operation is to consult with a lawyer who can research the most pertinent legislation.

The information presented in this post should not be considered legal advice.  It is intended to simply raise awareness of the potential for violating certain laws if your agents aren't abiding by relevant stipulations. 

Implementing a Compliance Recording (100 percent audio capture) solution can help protect your business from such infractions by enabling your supervisors to assess agents for proper behavior. This recording software can enable you to easily search, find and categorize recordings based on time or date of call, incoming phone number, outgoing phone number, agent ID, customer name, etc. 

Phone recording software (aka call recording software) is a very effective tool in not only assessing and evaluating call center agents but also in helping to train them to enhance their skill sets and performance.  Phone recording software with quality monitoring capabilities empowers supervisors, team leaders and agents them

selves to review good and bad past calls to identify best-practices and areas for improvement.

Here are 10 ways you can use phone recording software to improve customer service skills within your contact center.

1. Create an online repository of weak phone calls between agents and customers.  Include all types, such as: cancelled account, customer complaint, dissatisfied customer, very long call, etc.  Use these calls to train new and existing agents on what "not" to do.  Keep these calls fresh and update regularly so the repository does not become stale.

2. Create an online repository of best-practice strong phone calls between agents and customers.  Include all types, such as: new customer, renewed subscription, successful upsell, successful cross sell, highly satisfied customer, etc. Also use these calls to train both new and existing agents on what to do and how to handle specific situations.  Make it a contest and have agents submit their best calls.  Pick the best calls and reward agents accordingly.

3. Combine recorded-call evaluations with live monitoring for a 360-degree assessment of the agent's performance.  Live monitoring enables supervisors/evaluators to give immediate feedback when necessary following the call, while recorded-call evaluations gives the evaluator more time to review the call on a number of factors.

4. Hold "rapid fire" group call-review sessions to go over good and bad recorded calls together and discuss as a team.  This gives all agents, customer service managers, evaluatory and supervisors the benefit of hearing other team member's perspectives.

5. Evaluate the evaluator - allow call center agents to evaluate a call or two of their team leader through an evaluation form.  This empowers the agents and makes them feel like their input on call performance is important.  Inadvertently, it also helps them with their own training.

6. Self-evaluate - Have supervisors or team leaders pick specific calls for agents to review in order to grade themselves on their own performance.  This also empowers the agent and gives him/her a non-threatening opportunity to see what went right and what went wrong during their call.

These are simply some of the many tips you can use to improve agent performance using call recording and quality monitoring software.

Call monitoring software can help your business easily and effectively identify operational issues within your call center that need attention.  It can also help you increase call center agent productivity and improve your customer service capabilities.  There is a lot of call monitoring software to choose from.  How do you know which one to buy?

Here is a list of criteria to consider when purchasing the right call monitoring software for your business.  Be sure the quality monitoring software you purchase aligns with your choices below:

What am I going to use this software for primarily?

• Assess the performance of my contact center agents?
• Identify process breakdowns in the customer interaction lifecycle?
• Understand the level of service my customers are receiving?
• Identify areas to improve operational performance and customer interaction workflow?

How interoperable is this software with my existing environment? 

• Will the software integrate seamlessly with my telephony/VoIP switch - e.g. Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, BroadSoft, MetaSwitch, etc.?
• Can this software run on my commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware, or do I need a special voice logger?
• Will I be able to pull external data from my CRM system through an API?

How difficult is it to customize the call monitoring software to my specific business needs?

• Can I customize the agent evaluation questionnaires with questions that make sense for my contact center?
• Can I change the look and feel of the solution to fit my specific brand?
• Is the software proprietary or open (ideally open source)?

How flexible are the reporting capabilities?

• Am I able to filter reports by date, groups, agents and managers?
• Can I generate customizable performance reports to enhance my decision making?
• Can I easily export and send the reports to agents and supervisors?
• Can I perform form-level summaries?
• Are there calibration tables? 

How easy is the software to learn and use? 

• Do my employees need hours of training to use the software?
• Can we learn to use the software effectively in just a few minutes?
• How quickly can I get new supervisors up and running on the software?

What does the installation process look like? 

• How long does it take to install the software?
• How long after the software is installed can we be using it effectively?
• Do we need on-site support for the installation?
• Can we handle the install ourselves?
• Do we have to wait a period of time (days or weeks) before we can gain the support we need for the installation?

These are merely some of the criteria you should consider when selecting the right quality monitoring software for your business. When choosing your product, think about these questions and ask the vendor for specifics on any other considerations you might have.  They should be forthright and open about any issues you bring to the table.

Businesses today - spanning almost every industry vertical - can benefit greatly from call recording in a variety of ways, including:

• Quality Management and Live Agent Monitoring – monitor and measure agent performance in order to identify and address areas in need of improvement, with a goal of increasing service levels
• Audit Trail and Multi-Criteria Call Searching – quickly and easily locate and access any past recording to settle he-said/she-said disputes
• Mobile Phone Recording – capture and monitor staff calls taking place outside of the office and/or after hours
• PCI, HIPAA Compliance - adhere to industry and governmental regulations for protecting personally identifiable information

Call recording is a natural extension to your other VoIP services and would be a nice addition to your portfolio of offerings. By offering call recording (and potentially quality monitoring) software, your services business will also enjoy a number of benefits.  You will be able to:

• Offer companies a broader set of services
• Provide your existing clients with more value
• Reach into new markets
• Grow your ARPU
• Differentiate yourself from other business VoIP providers
• Keep customers from going to other providers

While there are a variety of call recording/quality monitoring solutions to choose from, open source call center software installs in minutes and can be customized and branded to your business.  It is also more affordable than proprietary solutions and requires little to no maintenance.

Just think about how unique you would be as a business VoIP provider by offering call recording as a services along with your other offerings.  Check out your competition.  Almost none of them are yet offering call recording.  When you start doing so, you will be a pioneer and one of the very first.  Customers will see you as innovative and more of a full-service provider than your competitors.

You will be able to offer your customers more services, all under one roof, so they don't have to go elsewhere for what they need. 

Chances are you have already had customers ask you for call recording and you didn't know how to offer it to them, quickly, easily and profitably.  With OrecX call recording software you can!

The time is right to consider adding call recording and/or quality monitoring to your services portfolio.

Get started today! 

According to Forbes (May 2012) 81% of employees use at least one mobile device for business use.  What’s more, home-based workers are increasingly using their cell phone as their primary business line.  This includes telemarketers, inside-sales professionals, survey proctors, order takers, support technicians and so on.  Are you recording these calls like you do landline-based business conversations?

If your business does not capture business calls made over mobile phones, you can’t:

1. Settle a customer dispute by replaying the call

2. Verify customer orders

3. Monitor your staff for quality assurance

4. Ensure HIPAA, Truth in Lending, and PCI compliance

Recording for Compliance

In November of 2011, the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority (FSA) imposed a federal law requiring all financial firms to record mobile business calls for compliance purposes.  FSA mobile phone recording already has many on Wall Street and beyond talking about such legislation coming to the U.S.  Many of these same U.S. firms are already jumping into mobile recording in anticipation of such impending U.S. law and also to ensure corporate compliance (such as ensuring traders follow corporate protocol when taking customer orders), like they do already with landline calls. 

Mobile-Phone Recording Technology

When contemplating which mobile recording software to implement, it is important to consider a recording system that can capture calls centrally and not just on the device itself.  If phones become damaged in the field, recordings would therefore be protected.  It is also important to employ a system that can seamlessly record calls on any type of mobile platform – from iPhone’s IOS to Blackberry and Android.  There is ubiquitous usage today of all three platforms by mobile workers.

Industry-Specific Recording Application

Different industries have different business needs when it comes to mobile call recording software.  Many firms already capture a sampling of staff/customer calls or every call.  Following is a breakdown of some of the different industry applications for mobile call recording software: 

Financial Services – Verify trades and other customer transactions; settle potentially costly customer disputes

Insurance – Verify what the insurance company pre-authorized in terms of coverage; settle potentially costly customer disputes

Hospitals – Ensure medical staff comply with regulations regarding patient privacy and medical records

Telecom and Consumer – Monitor staff to ensure quality/compliant customer interaction

These are only a sampling of industry applications.  Every vertical today can in fact make a case for recording mobile calls.  Regardless of your industry, mobile recording is certainly something you should begin considering for your business. 

In closing, here are a few questions to ask yourself:

“Do I record landline staff calls today?  If so, why don’t I also capture mobile-based business calls for the exact same reason?”  The rationale for recording both types of calls in your environment should be the same if you think about it.

If you capture a sampling of landline agent calls today to ensure quality customer interaction, for instance, why wouldn’t you do the same with your home-based agents that use their cell phone as their primary business line?  Likewise, if you record all office-based calls today made by your insurance agents (to ensure compliance and to settle he-said/she-said disputes, what about all of the other calls your agents make to the very same customers using their cell phones while outside of the office? 

With the overwhelming ubiquity of mobile phone use in business today, the time is right to look into mobile call recording software for your organization.

Call recording systems are becoming more and more of a business necessity today than a nice-to-have. Organizations need such tools to ensure highly levels of customer service, to minimize risk and to maintain regulatory/industry compliance. The problem, however, is that call recording software tends to be expensive, complex, maintenance-intensive and proprietary. These hurdles keep many companies from installing call recording systems.

An alternative to standard proprietary systems is to download open source call recording code and build it out to meet your specific needs.  OrecX offers such software and it can be found here.  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. It supports several database systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and MS-SQL.

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. Recordings metadata can be stored in any mainstream database. Retrieval of captured sessions is web based.

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 audio recorder is something you should seriously consider.