If you've got a tight budget for technology purchases in your call center, you'll know that some of the most common contact center solutions can be arrayed on a sliding scale of cost-benefits: some solutions are “nice to haves” that add non-monetary value to your operations and customer service. Others are at the other end of the scale and qualify as “technologies you can't afford NOT to have.”

Call recording is one of these (workforce management is another, but that's a different story).

Even in the days when call recording solutions were large and cumbersome and sat on large servers in your IT room, requiring at least one full-time IT person to maintain, you couldn't afford not to have it. With today's small footprint, easy-to-use and scalable call recording solutions, the value and the importance become even greater. Many of today's modern call recording and quality management solutions allow you to automate your entire contact center quality assurance program while keeping to the low total cost of ownership and high return on investment the current economy demands.

Many of these newer solutions, such as Virtual Observer from CSI (News - Alert) (www.csiworld.com), offer a number of extra features that wouldn't have been possible even with the giant solutions even a few years ago. These include:

High scalability. With today's flexible solutions, contact centers can scale up and down as needed with their quality monitoring and recording, easy adding new agents, departments, locations and phone systems, handling volume spikes and fluctuating demand with ease.

High-level security. Solutions such as CSI's Virtual Observer offer robust security and compliance features. Virtual Observer includes a suite called “Data Defender,” which enables contact centers to meet PCI (News - Alert) and HIPAA compliance through media encryption, agent auditing, system-wide permission controls and a “lights out” function that removes confidential customer data such as credit card numbers or social security numbers.

Real-time monitoring. Once upon a time, monitoring was something that happened long after the fact. Supervisors pulled calls from last week, last month or even last quarter. In the case of weak or poorly trained agents, or mistakes on high-value customer calls, the damage was already done: all that was left was the “post-mortem.” With today's newer call recording and monitoring solutions, supervisors and managers can monitor agents in real-time, both on the phone and on the desktop.

Selective call recording. Depending on your business, you probably have different call recording needs. If you monitor only for quality and agent evaluation, you will want to monitor x amount of calls per day or week. If your contact center handles customer inquiries in the medical or financial services industry, you may need to record – and store – 100 percent of calls for the purpose of legal compliance. You may also want to provide agents with record on demand functionality. With solutions like Virtual Observer, you can record as little or as much as you require, and make changes easily as your needs change.

Bottom line is: if you have an old-fashioned, cumbersome call recording and quality monitoring solution in place, you're not doing yourself – or your agents or customers – any favors. Call recording should be about more than recording calls and filling in evaluation sheets every month. They are a rich source of intellience that you should be able to use easily to your own benefit, helping you understand how to improve operations (by reducing hold times and talk-times, for example), increase first-call resolution, adjust and enhance your training programs, even the playing field among agents by fostering fairness and continuity in their evaluations, and delighting your customers.

A tall order? Once upon a time, but no longer.

For more information, visit www.csiworld.com/vo.pdf.