ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

These days, many unified communications platforms offer similar capabilities, such as messaging, presence, and voice and video communications. Understandably, these unified communications platforms are now looking to differentiate themselves.

As unified communications platforms and other UC products look to advance enterprise collaboration, their contributions to the industry are often deemed evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Although incremental developments may not seem innovative, they are important to advance an industry in realistic, problem-solving ways.

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Do you own (or have you ever given away) an old cell phone? If the answer was “yes,” you probably know why: Because as technology has changed and new enhancements to mobile phone communications have become available, we all want to upgrade to the latest and greatest models. Better technology means better performance, better ease of use, better battery life, better portability, and countless other improvements.

You don’t have to look at your old cell phone from the early 2000s to understand that it – and many other forms of technology – have evolved over time, including the technology of call recording and call monitoring software. What once offered rudimentary and fairly limited capabilities now provides the ability to record, analyze, and interpret vast amounts of data to improve customer service and operational performance.

When considering a call recording software or call monitoring software provider, look for one that comes equipped with the latest and greatest features, particularly those that can give you greater flexibility in terms of provisioning, administration, and utilization. Here are six technological innovations that you want to make sure your call monitoring software provider offers:

1. LDAP support. Look for systems that support LDAP for user identification and auto-provisioning. This capability means that system administrators are relieved of the potentially error-prone task of manually provisioning users in multiple systems.
2. A web interface that supports HTML5.  Look for systems that permit access to the system from any device (laptop, tablet, smartphone) and enables audio recording playback without any browser plug-in. Playback is native to the web browser being used.
3. Single-check emailing of media files – Look for systems that provide a single-click emailing of media files from the web interface to the logged-in user. The benefit? All that is needed is the configuration of an SMTP server for sending emails and ensuring that users have an email address configured in their profile.
4. Auto-Provisioning – Look for systems where auto-provisioning is supported primarily for use with BroadWorks and LDAP. This ensures that users and groups (or service providers) can be automatically provisioned based on incoming recordings or upon a login attempt to the web interface, depending on the platform and configuration.
5. Quality Monitoring (QM) Scorecard – Look for systems that feature Quality Monitoring (QM) scorecards, which provide a highly customizable set of evaluation criteria for reviewing, coaching and assessing agents based on the content and context of their customer interactions. These scorecards may contain any number of criteria, which can be configured with custom weighting scores or even the authority to auto-fail the evaluation of the call as a whole based on a single criteria.
6. Media Manager – Look for Media Manager, an extremely flexible tool that allows administrators to set up programs for managing recordings. Media Manager programs provide criteria-based execution of multiple functions such as copying, moving, deleting, or emailing recordings. Some examples of Media Manager typical uses are backing up or archiving recordings, setting up different retention periods for different groups of recordings, centralizing recording files in a distributed architecture, and automatically emailing recordings to their owners.  The execution trigger of these programs may be pre-scheduled (recurring or one-time) or event-driven, such as when a recording ends.

Call recording systems with advanced features such as these can enable users to significantly reduce the time their IT support staff spends on user provisioning and system management. What’s more, these advances can help ensure that supervisors will be able to easily pinpoint specific customer service issues and drive immediate improvements.

Call recording software helps businesses of all sizes capture customer/prospect calls so the organization can go back and listen to calls in order to settle he-said/she-said disputes, support litigation, prove compliance and more.  While a highly effective tool in its own right, when combined with quality monitoring software, you have a powerful one-two-punch that will greatly enhance the performance and capabilities of your contact center.  And who doesn't want that?

While most Fortune 5000 organizations employ both tools, it is fair to say that many small to mid-size organizations either just have call recording or nothing at all.  The value of the combination of call recording and quality monitoring software is so high, that these organizations need to really start considering employing both.

Value of Call Recording + Quality Monitoring Together

In fact, there are a number of statistics that illustrate just how important quality monitoring software is (along with call recording software), including:

86% of buyers will pay for a better customer experience

89% of customers will go to a competitor due to poor service

Average first call resolution rate in the U.S. is just over 80%

Did you know all the different types of insightful business data you can glean from your call recording software?  You can garner important information to help you make performance improvements and more informed business decisions.  This data goes far beyond the standard agent performance, quality monitoring type of data. There are likely some new types of data listed below that you might not have thought of before, and these can help you realize maximum value from your call recording system as well as drive improvements across specific areas of your organization.

Some of the key pieces of data you can glean from your call recording software include:

Geographic Purchasing Data - Which parts of the country or the world are most receptive to a new product or marketing campaign?  From this data you can ascertain some important insights regarding your products and specific markets.  The same holds true for particular vertical industries.  In other words, why are you receiving calls from a recent campaign from insurance company prospects (or from individuals in Greece) only?

Solution Problem Identification - You can determine which products/services are receiving the most support calls and can pass this information along to your product development and product marketing teams along with specifics on what the most prevalent problems were.

Competitive Intelligence - What are callers saying about what they like or don't like about the other products they've tried or are considering? Customers love to tell us how great our competitors and their offerings are.  What can we learn from this competitive data that can help us improve our products/services and sales and marketing campaigns moving forward?

Dispute Patterns - Are there certain geographies, industries or sizes of companies that are yielding more disputes than others?  What might this tell you?

Promotion Ideas - Customers often tell agents about a great promotion or deal a competitor is offering in hopes the company will match it, for example.  You can pass this important data on to your sales and marketing teams to help them with their efforts.

False Promises Data - What if your call center receives a bunch of cancellation calls for a specific product?  Might this tell you that the sales/marketing messaging around the product might be misleading and making false promises or claims?

These are just some of the many unique things you can learn from your call recording software.

Before you purchase a call recording solution you need to be sure you receive adequate answers to a number of very important questions.  The right answers to these questions will ensure the system will fit your specific needs, will scale with you as you grow and will  interoperate with your existing environment. 

These are the questions:

1. Do I pay upfront as a capital expenditure or is there a subscription fee?

2. Do I have to sign a long term contract or simply pay as I go?

3. What does the implementation process entail? How long? How much involvement is required on my end? Do I need to have specific technical expertise?

4. Do I have to pay for all features and capabilities or can I select what I want? In other words, is it a single integrated solution or modular and I can pick and choose call recording, quality monitoring, screen recording, live monitoring, mobile recording, etc.?

5. Is there an open API so I can integrate with my other existing applications?

6. What PBXs does the system support?

7. What are the ongoing maintenance requirements?

8. What is involved in customizing the software to my specific look and feel, requirements, etc.?  Does it require your professional services support?

9. How many current users/customers do you have?  What countries are they in?

10. How do I know you will be around in three to five years?

11. Can I review some customer success stories?

12. Do you offer a free trial so I can test the software out in my environment before I purchase?

13. What type of training do you offer and how long does it take to become proficient with the software? Is it easy to learn?

14. How many channels/seats can your software support?

15. Can I use my own server(s)?

16. Does your software support multi-site? How about multi-tenant?

17. Can I speak with some satisfied customers?

18. Is your software PCI Compliant? HIPAA Compliant?

19. Are recorded calls portable in an open-file format?

20. Do you support TDM and VoIP?

21. What if I need to add more users? Do I need more hardware? What is involved?

22. Do you offer mobile phone recording?

While call recording software can add significant value to your customer service, compliance and risk mitigation efforts, there are certain rules an organization must live by with regard to its use.

Call Recording Do's:

1. Set-up pre-defined search queries for the specific types of calls you are looking for (e.g. all calls that result in a cancelled order).  The availability of this intelligence will help you make important decisions.
2. Notify all customer-facing staff and customers that their calls are being recorded.
3. Record your sales calls too.  It helps to have recorded sales calls on hand to share with others that are brought in on the deal and also they are invaluable for training new salespersons.
4. Keep a repository of best and worst calls to help train new agents or to improve the skills of existing ones. Store calls that span all different types of interactions, including calls that resulted in a closed sale, up-sell, cancelled order, dispute, unhappy customer, etc. 
5. Be sure the call recording system you choose can integrate with most leading PBXs.  You may choose to replace your PBX one day or you might merge with/acquire another company that has a different PBX and you'll want to be able to integrate with that switch as well.

Call Recording Don'ts:

1. Don't purchase a call recording solution that doesn't also offer quality monitoring/selective recording because you may need/want it later on and you'd hate to have to migrate all of your recorded data to a new platform that can offer it.
2. Don't purchase a call recording solution without first trying it out.  Like anything else, you want to be sure it works in your environment, provides you with the functionality you require and is easy to navigate and utilize. 
3. Don't purchase call recording software that doesn't offer an open API so you are assured it will interoperate with your existing and future applications.
4. Don't under-utilize the system.  Ensure all staff that can benefit directly from the system are successfully trained on its use and have access to recordings.  This includes staff from Sales, Marketing, your Executive team and so on.  They can all realize significant value from hearing the actual voice of the customer.
5. Don't dump recordings before a year if possible.  You will see as times goes by how valuable these past calls can be for training, dispute resolution, agent incentivization and so on and you'll want to have them accessible for these reasons up to 12 months down the road.

Business VoIP providers need ways to stand out from the competition and also new approaches to increasing ARPU.  This typically comes in the form of additional/complementary solutions, features and the like to augment one's core VoIP service, such as offering:

• VoIP phone systems
• Hosted call center solutions
• Expandable PBX trunks
• Online faxing
• Call routing
• Caller ID
• Auto-attendant
• Softphone
• Virtual PBX
• ...and so on

But are these things on their own really enough to take your company and revenue to the next level?

What about cross-selling your VoIP customers on call recording and quality monitoring cloud solutions?

Three of the top 5 business VoIP providers are already doing it.  Perhaps it's time you consider adding these offerings to your portfolio as well.

To help you understand how you can sell these solutions to your customers, I've compiled a list of probing questions you can use to bridge the conversation from VoIP to quality assurance and call recording.  Here you go:

1. How are you capturing customer calls today for quality assurance, compliance (HIPAA, PCI-DSS, etc.) and order verification/dispute resolution?

2. How much is your on-premise call recording system costing you today in maintenance alone? (Obviously only ask this if you know ahead of time they already have call recording in place.)

3. How do you ensure you are delivering quality customer service in your organization today?

4. What are you doing today to monitor your agents/staff to ensure they are following your compliance requirements?

5. When you have a customer dispute over whether they gave consent for a purchase, e.g., how are you proving to the customer what they actually said during their conversation?

6. What approach do you use to tap into the voice of your customer to know what is really important to them?

7. How do you demonstrate to your call-handlers how a proper customer call is handled?

8. What approach do you use to train your call handlers? 

9. What do you use today to evaluate your agents/call handlers on quality assurance, compliance, etc.? 

10. What is your strategy for improving the customer service capabilities of your organization to better satisfy customers and their needs? 

With these (and other) types of questions, you have the ability to probe your customers a little bit to uncover some of their pain points around customer service, compliance and dispute resolutions.  Many of your customers have these issues and by offering hosted call recording and quality monitoring software, you can help allay these needs and challenges. 

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.