CallCopy Blog

DestinationCRM.com, and online publication from the editors of CRM Magazine, recently featured CallCopy’s cc: Survey in an article titled “Changing the Paradigm of the Contact Center” by Christopher Musico.

The article focuses on the many benefits of IVR surveys as well as web-based surveys in collecting customer feedback.  The paradigm shift relates to the ability to focus the data toward multiple goals, providing valuable data to marketing and HR as well as the contact center.  Surveys are evolving from simple data collection to advanced analysis of employee and customer opinions for true enterprise feedback management.

cc: Survey is offered as a hosted application, taking advantage of Software as a Service (SaaS) to make it cost effective as well as easy to use and manage.

The article is available at:

http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/Changing-the-Paradigm-of-the-Contact-Center-50219.aspx 

CallCopy was a premier sponsor for the ShoreTel Champion’s Summit last week in Las Vegas.  We hit the show floor with a ShoreTel mobile demo unit complete with cc: Voice call recording installed, and recorded dozens of live calls as we demonstrated our integration.  We also unveiled our new live monitoring feature, which was well received as well.  Thanks to our friends at Americom Technologies out of Salt Lake City for loaning us their mobile demo box!

It is not hard to see why ShoreTel has enjoyed such steady growth.  The team that put the event together were excellent hosts, and the channel partners were very enthusiastic.  I know they say “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” but in this case I’m sure hoping the enthusiasm and success we saw last week goes global!

CallCopy is proud to be a sponsor for the ShoreTel Champion’s Summit in Las Vegas, July 22-24.  The event brings together ShoreTel’s leading channel partners for informative workshops and training sessions.  CallCopy and other technology partners will be showcased in the Exhibit Hall. 

For our current and prospective ShoreTel distributors, we are excited to meet with you and demonstrate our technology.  Our three ShoreTel-certified call recording solutions are suited for small business as well as enterprise call centers.  We will demo cc: Discover’s call and screen recording, as well as our robust suite of quality monitoring tools.  We will also have information available for CallCopy Essential, our new recorder specially packaged for small call centers that need VoIP call recording.

We were recently asked about which is preferred, trunk recording (record T1/E1 line) or station recording (digital or analog phone recording).  Here’s our $0.02:

In most cases, station side recording is preferred.  One key factor is that with trunk recording you are not able to record PBX calls.  For example, if one employee calls another employee, that call does not cross your inbound / outbound trunks and cannot be recorded via trunk tap.  With station-side recording, all internal calls can be recorded as well as other general inbound/outbound traffic.  

With station-side recording it is also easier to segment the calls, especially if you do not have a computer-telephony integration (CTI) module active on your ACD/PBX (TSPAI, JTAPI, TAPI, etc.).  The advantage in splitting the calls out is that a customer may call one department, and get transferred to another department.  Since two agents are handling the call, and recordings are commonly used for quality monitoring on your agents, having two recordings is preferred so the agents can be evaluated independently, and so you can permission access to the recordings differently.  You may not want a billing department supervisor to hear a tech support call and vice versa.

This kind of segmentation can be accommodated through a trunk-tap, but without CTI data this is done using SMDR information, which is not available until after the call has torn down and may not always be available in enough time for accurate use.  This is especially true if SMDR is being used to trigger a recording start or stop and not just to update recordings with details like ANI, DNIS, agent extension, or queue description.  Also, different switches may have limitation on how trunk channels are tracked and reported, making it difficult to match SMDR and even CTI data to recordings when a call has been transferred several times.

Most CTI-driven active integrations, such as Avaya DMCC (CMAPI), Nortel DMS, and Cisco JTAPI will behave like a station-side recorder.  This is also the same with passive VoIP recording (packet sniffing).  One exception is the ShoreTel TAPI/WAV integration, which behaves like a trunk recorder in the sense that is does not deliver audio for PBX calls; however you do have the ability to effectively separate recordings for each agent leg of the call.

Perhaps the biggest downside to station side recording is the wiring.  Station side recording can be a passive tap /cross connect at the 110-or 66-block in your telecom wiring.  Depending on what stations are to be recorded, you may also be able to do a split on a full amphenol cable between the PBX and the punch down blocks, which can be a cleaner wiring job. 

Speech analytics is a hot topic in the contact center market.  Many of our peers in the industry - clients, prospects, and business partners - come to us looking for information on this exciting new technology.  They are interested in call recording, but they want to use speech analytics in their quality monitoring program to quickly determine which calls should be thoroughly evaluated.  A lot of people I talk to only understand half of what speech analytics can do, and the other half of their understanding usually involves a lot of things it can’t do…yet. 

With analytics, the real value is not just finding a keyword or phrase (word spotting), but in understanding the context in which that key word or phrase is used.  For example, key word spotting may tell you when a competitor’s name is mentioned, but what you really need to know is why that competitor’s name is mentioned.  True speech analytics does this, looking at the surrounding language and determining if there are indicators for churn or praise, for instance.  There is a big difference in a customer saying “I am leaving you to go to competitor X” as opposed to “I am staying with you because you are so much better than competitor X.”  The competitor’s name is mentioned in both circumstances, but the data has little meaning until you can determine why it was mentioned.  If you are not able to answer the latter question, you are missing the value afforded through speech analytics and you’ll end up swimming directionless in a sea of data.

One if the biggest misconceptions I’ve come across is the tendency to confuse speech anlytics with a dictation machine.  Training a technology to understand your voice for dictation is very different from a technology that understands millions of voices, each with different accents, colloquialisms, and vocal undertones.  The variation in the voices and the increased vocabulary raises the complexity exponentially, which means more servers, processors, and time to complete the analysis.  Speech analytics is not yet to the point where you can confidently “read” the full content of a recorded call.  And if you could, would you want to?  Remember, spoken language is different from written language.  You do not have the benefit of punctuation, tonal inflections (such as sarcasm), and general grammar.  Sometimes your ear is the best tool for the job!