ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

You can use recorded customer calls to help you build your sales and marketing buyer personas. 

One of the hardest things for sales and marketing professionals is to identify and clearly articulate who the target buyer(s) is/are. This is about more than just their job title. Buyer personas should include a full understanding of the following characteristics of each individual buyer (at the least):

1. Job title
2. Roles and responsibilities
3. Challenges
4. Hot buttons
5. Risk aversions

Think about the customer conversations your sales team and your call center representatives have with your potential bu

yers every day. They are speaking directly with these individuals already, and by sharing select recorded conversations, they can provide a wealth of knowledge to the sales and marketing teams to help them understand the characteristics like those listed above.

Challenges

"I don't have any free time." "I'm strapped for budget already as it is."

These are just a couple examples of the types of challenges your target buyers face, and many of these will likely surface during your customer calls - whether it's during an initial sales call to introduce your company and its products/services or it is a call in which the customer called for technical or product support. Either way, your buyers' challenges will come up, and when they do, you can share those insights (or the entire conversation) with the relevant sales and marketing folks in your company to help them get into the mind of your potential customers. 

Hot Buttons

"My team doesn't have time to learn about a new product." "My team needs to be producing, not learning about some new solution."

When your sales and customer service professionals are speaking with your target buyers (or existing customers), these hot buttons will surface. The customer will react to something your company representative says with a comment indicating one of their hot buttons. For example, your salesperson mentions that the new widget you are offering can save the company thousands of dollars a month, but it takes time to learn how to use. If the would-be customer reacts negatively to having to teach his team how to use the new widget, then you can share that insight with your sales and marketing managers to help them craft future campaigns around that (and other) hot buttons. By recording every call your sales and customer service teams make will ensure you have these calls captured and shareable with the relevant staff when these types of insights arise. 

Risk Aversions

"I hate being the first to try something." "I only like products that have been proven to be effective."

Customers and prospects will occasionally share their risk aversions on the phone, like the examples above. Suppose your customer service rep is speaking with an existing customer and tries to upsell your new product, and the customer replies by saying he/she is not comfortable trying new things until they are proven. This is solid-gold customer insight that you can share with your sales and marketing teams to help them craft messaging that will resonate with future customers. 

These are just a few examples of the rich insight your recorded calls can yield in terms of better understanding your target buyers and what makes them tick. Start sharing this intelligence with your sales and marketing teams today.

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.

If you have ever called into a contact center, chances are you have heard the phrase before: “This call may be recorded for training quality assurance purposes.” We may not think much of it, and completely forget we’re being recorded once an agent answers the phone. While the customers calling in never get to hear that recording, or ever even know if the information truly does help training, the opposite is true within the Contact Center. 

Call Recording allows your business an entirely new path to improve and optimize, with entire new sets of data and information to analyze. But, we’ve always seen Call Recording as nothing particularly special, just another great feature users can gain thanks to the power of Business VoIP, and the Cloud.

However, as it turns out, there’s so much more to call recording than we ever really thought. In fact...

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.

There are two very different types of call recording solutions available today, and when searching for the right software to record your calls, there are a few things to note about the difference between business call recording and personal call recording. 

Business call recording refers to business class call recording software which captures a business's customer calls and stores them for later reply on workstations or servers to mitigate risk, settle disputes, monitor for quality assurance, maintain PCI and HIPAA compliance, etc. These business call recording solutions include various advanced features to offer more value to businesses, such as selective or total call recording, pause and resume, speech analytics, multidimensional searching, auto tagging and more.

Personal call recording is when you want to record a personal call you have with someone while using your cell phone. There are many applications available in the Google Play Store and the iTunes App Store that can help you capture and replay such calls.

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.