I recently had the opportunity to ask Richard Marcia, marketing director of Coordinated Systems, Inc. about the evolution of the Call Center space and the direction his company is taking.

 

Coordinated Systems, Inc. offers a range of products and solutions that are built around the philosophy of being "simple, effective and affordable.”  The company’s core business provides quality assurance technology and workforce optimization for call centers. This solution includes call recording software, an evaluation component, server hardware, and professional installation and trainings services. Above all, our support is world class.

 

 

We have three core philosophies that make up our business mantra and combine to enable us to deliver the lowest cost of ownership in the industry.
 
The first is to “Build Great Customer Experiences”.

Our customer service philosophy drives everything in our organization, from the usability of our systems to our implementation and training teams. Perhaps the most evident result of this long-term customer strategy is in the aggressively low pricing of our upgrades – software is free for customers with active support agreements. This is practically unheard of in our industry. The largest percentage of your investment will come with the initial purchase, as opposed to upgrade offerings from our competition which essentially translates into a re-buy.
 
The second is our ability to allow customers to “Start Small and Think Big”.

Our sales philosophy starts with pricing structured so that a new customer can “Start Small and Think Big” -- implementing the right amount of functionality at the right time, and adding on new features as needed, as opposed to our competition’s methodology of forcing purchases of extra features that you’ll never really use, simply to justify the high price tag (News - Alert).”

 

Our operating philosophy dictates that every process, every product and every decision is based on it being simple, effective and affordable. We are able to manage operating costs by avoiding what some in the industry tout as “cutting edge”. Eventually “cutting edge” functionality becomes commodity, and then is made more affordable for our customer base. This is a huge component in allowing Virtual Observer to deliver a rapid return on investment.

How is the call center space evolving?

 

The call center industry has grown very significantly in multiple directions, with centralized centers handling the work of multiple locations, outsourced centers in multiple countries, and internal staff distributed across remote locations.

 

Virtual Observer evolves in parallel with the demands of our customer base. When the industry demanded a more affordable call recording solution, we introduced selective recording, which turned the industry on it’s ear, enabling the benefits of quality monitoring to the smaller centers who couldn’t afford it before.

 

E-Learning was a big industry buzzword at one time. When our customer base wanted E-Learning, we developed an E-Learning module for VO which followed our simple, effective and affordable philosophy.

 

Speech Analytics and Surveying are not only industry buzzwords, but practical applications in use in today’s call centers. We’ve partnered with some of the best technology companies out there to make the technology available for our customers.

 

Typically when a new technology has been released, initially it is exclusive to the Fortune 100s of the world. American ingenuity tells us that as the technology gains adoption, it will become more affordable and available to mid and smaller sized centers.

 

 

Virtual Observer (VO) is able to reduce agent churn by empowering supervisors to engage agents with powerful training tools, turning recorded calls into valuable assets. An organization's training cycle time can be reduced greatly by leveraging VO's features such as integrated evaluation and E-learning. VO can also help customers improve other call center metrics through scoring and performance reporting, which can identify trends and weaknesses. Customers typically begin realizing the benefits of VO within the first 1-2 weeks of usage.

What Virtual Observer features are most beneficial to a company in your industry?

 

Virtual Observer offers many features which are extremely valuable - one which comes to mind first are the playback and packaging features -- our customers really seem to appreciate the ability to see a visual play back of the recordings. This helps them identify on hold time and long periods of silence. They can also jump around the call, leave markers at spots they want to highlight, or annotate the call with text or audio notes. Customers also love the way which VO enables them to package calls within a media list, such as a "Greatest Calls" compilation for training. The playback and packaging features also include synchronized screen capture, so they really get the entire picture for each interaction. Media Lists can also include the full evaluation. Customers can burn the media list to CD or upload the files to an internal web page. Of course, the engineers up in our labs are always introducing new features which can have an immediate positive impact -- such as VO Live, which gives supervisors the ability to view thumbnails of agent desktops, from which they can then offer guidance by zooming in, chatting with the agent, or taking control of the desktop.

 

 

The call recording landscape looks very promising. Evolving into more than just a call logging requirement, more and more businesses now understand the importance of having a quality monitoring system. Automating the quality initiative can have a dramatic impact on an enterprise’s bottom line.

 

Looking to the near future, of benefit to CSI is the number of companies looking to escape their current call recording vendors’ upgrade policies. So many businesses are forced to re-buy their system every year or so, whenever a new version comes out. What we’re offering is a seamless alternative to them. We like to say we are “easing the transitions” – whether it’s from one phone system to another, legacy to VoIP, meeting new compliances, etc.

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