Call Recording Featured Article

With the economic uncertainty of recent years on the mind of many CFOs, everyone is looking to get the best ROI they can out of their staffers. To that end, Workforce Optimization (WFO) continues to play an increasingly important role in the enterprise.

One company helping to lead the charge is Coordinated Systems, which has consistently evolved its solutions over time. CSI’s (News - Alert) business has thrived on building high quality, long-term relationships with customers and partners via its flagship product, Virtual Observer (VO), a call recording and quality assurance solution for call centers. 

CSI’s Marketing Director, Rich Marcia, was able to offer some insights into the year that’s rapidly ending as well as provide his views on what 2016 will bring:

TMC (News - Alert): What are you excited about for CSI in 2016?

Rich Marcia: CSI is excited to be close to announcing a new integration with a strong hosted ACD platform in a quickly emerging marketplace. We're looking at a January launch. I think we can also all agree that the analytics and workforce management markets are stronger than ever. The year 2016 may be a record one for the WFO space, and the larger enterprises are starting to realize they can flatten their cost of ownership by considering agile solutions like Virtual Observer.

TMC: That’s great news. On the flip side, what kind of challenges do you foresee in the year ahead?

RM: We'll keep adding innovative enhancements to our Workforce Optimization suite. We got some great feedback from customers during our annual customer interviews, and it helps to fuel the roadmap.

TMC: If you had to make predictions for 2016, what would they be?

RM: In terms of interest, Google (News - Alert) Trends shows "Omni-channel" searches to be overtaking "Multi-channel" in terms of buzz-worthiness. This translates to the WFO marketplace making adjustments to give equal time to chats, email, SMS and social, just as they have always done for calls. I also think video interactions will emerge as a fun trend in the contact center, through Web RTC. Lastly, many enterprises will be looking to make a move toward SIPREC recording to simplify, scale and also flatten costs.

TMC: As 2015 winds down, what were some highlights from the year for your company?

RM: 2015 saw CSI cement its position as a disruptor in the Avaya (News - Alert) space, using an innovative strategy to help unseat larger industry competitors in many enterprise installs. CSI also emerged as a solid WFO partner for multiple hosted cloud telephony vendors, delivering a robust WFO suite at an affordable and scalable SaaS (News - Alert) model for customers who've embraced the cloud.

TMC: Were there any obstacles or challenges your company or the market as a whole faced in 2015?

RM: We were able to overcome a growing number of competitors in the WFO space in the last few years. We've been able to differentiate ourselves with innovative features such as webcam recording and monitoring, plus an incredibly robust amount of included features in our suite which helps translate to a lower cost of ownership. It's also been important to maintain high levels of customer support, especially as today's B2B customers expect better, faster, smarter service levels. We've built an incredible customer experience.

TMC: Anything missing from the picture?

RM: I'm still waiting for the launch of a WFO “watch.” Evaluating calls and screens on your timepiece would be great. Seeing a webcam view of an agent looking at his watch, and seeing him see himself staring at his watch – now that would be awesome, right?