ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

The results from the annual Future Of Open Source survey are in, and they confirm everything we already knew: Open source is now the default.

The survey reports that 78 percent of its respondents are now running their businesses with open source software, and two-thirds are building software for their customers that’s based on open source software. More significant, the percentage of respondents actually participating in open source projects has increased from 50 percent to 64 percent, and 88 percent say they expect to contribute to projects within the next three years.

Click here to read more of this article ("The Rise and Rise of Open Source") from InfoWorld.

Companies spanning every industry, every size and every geography are realizing the true power of call recording software as a resource to ensure service quality, resolve disputes, train and coach call center agents, verify orders, ensure compliance and much more.

In fact, a survey of 80+ call center, sales and marketing professionals cited 14 areas of value that call recording capabilities provide.  See the graphic below.

Let's take a deeper dive into the top five areas on this chart:

Ensure service quality/assess agents

Call recording software can help ensure agents are delivering the best possible service. Recorded calls offer insight into how agents are doing their jobs – all the way from making sure they’re polite and respectful to ensuring they’re equipped to tackle tough questions. Quality of service is a business imperative when you consider a report by the U.S. Small Business Administration and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which cites 68% of businesses cite the number-one reason why customers leave as the negative treatment they receive from agents.

Resolving Disputes and Verifying Orders

With call recording, you have an easily referenced resource to resolve he-said/she-said customer disputes. Call recording provides protection to battle these disagreements, and it offers a valuable resource should the problem escalate to litigation. With the actual interaction stored on your server, you can pull it up whenever needed to verify precisely what was said, and not said.

Training/Coaching/ Developing Staff

Through call recording you can gain insight into which regions of your customer base have the most individuals who agree to a subscription upgrade or a cross-sell, for example. This information can help your sales staff spend their time on the most promising targets.

In addition, listening to customer calls is useful in training agents to close more deals and to ensure they correctly understand a customer’s intent to purchase or not. 

Ensuring Regulatory Compliance

Did you know that a single PCI Compliance violation can cost your organization upwards of 10,000-$50,000?  Multiply this figure many many times if you have a call center with thousands of agents, because whether you have the necessary contingencies in place, breaches and violations will happen. With call and screen recording software you have a definitive record of how a call was handled to help you prove proper compliance was followed.  This could go a long way toward avoiding unnecessary and costly fines.

Gleaning Sales and Business Intelligence Data

Call recording software can give you an inside glimpse into the activities of your competitors. How? Sometimes when a customer or prospect calls into a call center, they’re unsure about whether or not they want to make a purchase and may reveal information about your competition, as in “I get a free 30-day trial when I sign up with XYZ Corporation.” This competitive intelligence can provide your sales and marketing organization with insight to help re-align their campaigns or promotions.   

These are just some of the many ways in which call recording software can significantly impact your business and its bottom line.

Enterprise SBCs make it easier to embrace launching a new next-generation contact center

The contact center landscape has grown increasingly sophisticated during the past several years, largely due to the rapid proliferation of mobile and IP communications.

Now that customer service departments are using VoIP solutions and mobile-enabled technologies, agents are able to manage more workloads and interactions without introducing performance complications or risking the inability to collaborate with prospective or existing clients using their desired platforms.

While these benefits are appealing, the diversity of communications in the contact center has introduced some significant challenges. This drives the need for enterprise session border controllers (SBCs) within these contact centers, as the technology can alleviate numerous concerns and potential costs.

Enterprise SBCs sit at the network edge and provide security as well as an effective way to translate different SIP formats so that many types of devices function on the corporate network with ease.

Sophisticated enterprise SBCs are designed with the scalability in mind to support in-house and remote agents, making them a perfect fit for contact centers that are looking to engage in teleworking strategies.

Mitigate security issues
Now that end-users in and outside of the contact center are using a multitude of devices and communication solutions, businesses must be able to monitor and protect those connections if they are to completely mitigate risk. Enterprise SBCs have the unique ability to view each interaction and application as a single session, which can make it easier for security and IT professionals to keep operations flowing smoothly and safely.

The adoption of unified communications systems, where VoIP, instant messaging and other collaborative tools converge, makes a strong case for using enterprise SBCs. This is because SBCs can give managers the unique ability to observe and track touch points without interfering.

Consolidate remote workers
Mobility has empowered the workforce and driven employee operations out of the office and into homes. This remote working phenomenon has made the contact center life both easier and more difficult. While companies have fewer in-house agents, decision-makers need to ensure that teleworkers stay efficient and are able to connect to the network.

As contact centers evolve and become more diverse in nature, decision-makers need to consider if their current telecommunications infrastructures will be able to make the cut. Enterprise SBCs can be highly advantageous for organizations that want to embrace bringing your own device (BYOD) and support remote working without worrying that doing so will introduce unmanageable security or connectivity issues. Ultimately, this makes the SBC an ideal partner for a next-generation contact center.

Check out this white paper on Session Border Controllers, the Critical Component for more information.

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.

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.