ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

Picking the right call recording vendor can greatly impact your customer service levels, agent performance scores and even your compliance penalties. Not all recording solutions are created equal, so you need key questions to ask prospective vendors when you are looking for a new system or considering upgrading your existing one to ensure you are procuring the best solutions for your needs.

Here are the top 10 questions to ask each potential recording vendor:

1. Do you offer call recording, screen recording, quality monitoring and mobile recording software? You want a modular-based solution that offers all four to support your organization's needs today and tomorrow. Some solutions come all-in-one and charge you for those features you don't need. Modularity is important to ensure you only pay for what you will use.

2. Does your recorder capture calls in single channel (mono) or dual channel (stereo)? Mono records both the agent and the customer on the same channel and overtalk can disrupt you from clearly hearing what each individual says. You want stereo recording which captures both parties on separate distinct channels which can be isolated upon playback.

3. Can the recording system scale up to hundreds or thousands of users? You don't know how many channels of recording you will need in six months, one year or even five years. You need a recorder that can scale with you as you grow. Look for a solution that can support as few or as many as you may need someday, ideally from five to hundreds of thousands.

4. Does the system offer speech analytics and transcription, and/or does it provide an easy pathway to procuring those added solutions? Not all recording solutions offer the capabilities and interfaces to enable a smooth migration to analytics and customer experience management solutions. You may need these added features as your organization evolves. The ideal recording system will provide a smooth pathway for you to enable this functionality when and if you need it.

5.  What is the process and cost for accessing/exporting my recording metadata to third party systems like CRM, conversational analytics, and customer experience management? Some vendors actually charge you to export your own data to these systems. The right vendor for you provides a REST API for easy export to these solutions without any charge. After all, it's your data. You shouldn't have to pay extra to access it.

6. Do you support cloud, premise and hybrid storage of my recordings? Your organization may have different locations (featuring different telephony environments) today or in the future. You need a recording solution that provides the flexibility to capture calls in each location and store those recordings how and where you need them stored.

7. Are there any restrictions on interoperability with my existing communications environment (PBX, ACD, etc.)? Many recording solutions are proprietary black box systems that do not play well with others. Your recording system must easily integrate with your current and future environment without significant customization or help from a costly professional services organization. 

8. Can you please provide a demonstration of the solutions administrative capabilities? Some systems require weeks or months of training to learn how to manage. Your recorder should be easy to learn and operate so you may begin capturing and replaying calls, evaluating your agents, and creating performance reports right away.

If you are unsure if your current or potential recording solution meets the bill, contact OrecX. Our open-source based recording solution is the most open, easy to administer and scalable recorder on the market, and we are now owned by CallMiner, the number one conversational analytics provider on the planet. Our solutions provide a direct pathway to transcription and analytics-as-a-service.

Running a call center takes more than just connecting a set of agents to your office Asterisk PBX. At the very moment you start working, you realize that you need a set of tools to make sense of what is going on. This is true not only for large call centers, but even when you start having one person answering the phone, it does make sense to ask questions like: are we doing what is expected from us? Are we living up to our standards of quality? And most importantly: are people happy about the interactions they have with us? 

Because if they don’t, we are sooner or later in for an unpleasant surprise.

The big problem here is that you get no intuitive sense of what is going on in a room with agents talking on the phone; and so you need tools to augment your intuitive perception. And as things grow, or you start having agents working remotely, the problem gets even more serious.

At Loway, we believe that a tool to keep track of what is going on should have four main areas of concern:

• A real-time view
• A historical reporting mode
• An agent’s page
• A Quality Assessment module

The real-time view lets you see what is currently going on. It should be able to scale up and down at different levels of detail, in order to power wallboards and to communicate the current status of teams and of the call queues they serve to team leaders, so that they take corrective actions quickly. A defining feature here is the ability to use the real-time view as a communication platform to send feedback to agents, and to be able to “barge-in” to live calls in order to actively inspect problem situations as they unfold.

The historical reports are the bread and butter of call center analytics. What is important here is not so much the number of computed analyses, but the ease of making sense of what is going on, and the capabilities to drill down with searches in order to pinpoint specific issues. It is very important to be able to integrate with call recorders, so that the details of any specific call are just a click away; and to be able to retrieve different kinds of documents related to each call – e.g. video recordings, or chat transcripts, up to the CRM form.

The agent’s page (or agent toolbar) is a very important function that your call-center monitoring tools should provide. Even if this is not strictly speaking a monitoring function, using an agent’s page greatly facilitates feeding the monitoring backend; plus, an agent’s page allows a degree of interaction that would not be feasible using a phone’s limited numeric keyboard. For example, it is far easier for an agent to select a call outcome or a pause code out of a drop-down list than entering it as a numeric code, and this means you can have codes that are more specific. Also, when working on multiple queues, it is not easy joining / leaving them using a numeric keyboard. An important feature here is that the page should be web-based and will ideally include a soft-phone: it will act as a launching point for your CRM applications, and will reduce your TCO because agent workstations do not need additional software and can be blank, interchangeable workstations.

The Quality Assessment (QA) module is your secret weapon to effectively manage your call center. By reviewing call recordings, you can create a quality profile for each call; and by aggregating these call profiles you can understand the strengths and weaknesses of each individual agent, and of the service you offer. It is important to have a tool that is flexible enough to create scoring forms and rules that effectively match your business goals and targets; and it is also important that the calls to be reviewed are selected automatically based on both attributes of the call (e.g. the queue, the call outcome) and of the agent who processed it. An automated selection process is important to avoid any bias human reviewers may have towards “interesting” situations (calls that are long, or short, or are known issues) as they may not tell the whole store about what the agent is actually doing. The QA process is often used to analyze QA data gathered directly and automatically from callers, e.g. by using a post-call IVR, in order to directly measure perceived client satisfaction.

At Loway, we strongly believe that quality is the result of a continuous learning process powered by objective measurement. During the last 10 years, we have seen organizations learn and improve, turning this process into an asset to outperform the competition by simultaneously reducing costs and improving the service offered. Whatever the size of your Call Center, there is no excuse not to do it.

Article by Lorenzo Emilitri, founder of Loway.

https://www.loway.ch/

https://www.queuemetrics.com/