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Call Recording: It’s Not Just For Compliance Anymore

By Brendan B. Read

Gone are the days where call recording was a necessary and expensive evil, performed minimally if possible for compliance reasons and just to keep the contact center agents on their toes. Now more organizations see recording as heaven-sent means improve customer satisfaction and revenues and boost productivity. These are also seeking these tools to slice expenses like average handle times and new customer acquisition costs, which are five to 10 times the pricetags of retaining existing buyers.

“In this recession there is an increased awareness by companies to make sure that customers keep on getting a good experience, compared to the last recession where cutting costs was all that mattered,” explains Jim Davies, research director of Gartner. “If customers don’t get a good experience then they are much more likely to leave when the market picks up. Investment in recording, quality monitoring and coaching solutions to make sure that they get that enhanced experience and in doing so reduce churn are getting the green light.”

In short, call recording – like contact centers – are migrating from being cost-sources to profit tools. And, like contact centers, are become effective thanks to new features and functionality. The shift from TDM to IP in contact centers have enabled and prompted firms to deploy new IP-based products that permit easier centralized recording and system administration, and management especially when there are multiple centers and home agents.

“We’re headed for a near-100 percent recording environment from partial recording capacity due to decreased storage costs, increasing use of the cloud for recording and the ability to do more with the recordings than just listen to them randomly for quality monitoring purposes,” reports Keith Dawson, a senior analyst with Frost and Sullivan.

For such reasons there appears to be an increase in call recording sales as the economic downturn bottoms out; demand for these products had also nosedived in the financial morass of the past year. Datamonitor reports that its global market forecast model shows call recording growing at a steady compound annual growth rate of 6.5 percent between 2009 and 2013.

“Enterprise risk management strategies that were previously focused on securing systems and rapid data recovery have advanced to include an increasing focus on the management of customer data,” explains Aphrodite Brinsmead, an associate analyst of Datamonitor. “Not only is basic recording and monitoring of calls a necessity in many industries, but enterprises also need to be able to sort information and analyze trends.”

Not that compliance has gone away as a rationale. If anything, there will a greater need for recordings for that purpose.

“In fact, the current legislative response to the present economic turmoil typically includes stricter regulations,” says Brinsmead. “This trend should actually drive slow but steady growth in the recording market.”

Product Upgrades

Recording is becoming easier and more cost-effective thanks to continued enhancements being made by call recording suppliers to their solutions. For example CyberTech’s CyberTech Release 5.3, offer improved security, compliance, resilience, connectivity, archiving and screen recording. It now provides Active IP Recording for Cisco systems with an advanced connection with the Cisco Call Manager that simplifies monitoring and recording.

Also, Newfound Communications’s Newfound IP Call Recorder Version 1.5 has a “record and save” feature that gives contact centers the option to store only the most essential recordings. It initiates recordings at the beginning of calls and keeps the recordings only if escalations occur. It also enables pausing and resuming recordings to omit capturing sensitive information such as account numbers. The feature reduces file size by not recording while calls are in queue or hold music is being played.

Telrex now includes full-motion video capture, including voice and data and live monitor employee desktops or take screen snapshots at pre-determined intervals in CallRex Computer Recording 3.9 software. It captures desktop images and videos to completely assess agent-customer interactions. Full-motion videos, synced with call audio, provide a holistic view, allowing contact center managers to identify positive experiences or areas for training.

Zoom International’s CallREC 4.4 permits 100 percent voice capture via SPANless recording; it also eliminates the time-consuming need for network administrators to configure and maintain SPAN ports on network switches. The version has other key features including support for configurable thresholds for disk space; calls are stored and moved between internal disks/NAS/SAN based on lifecycle management settings. Also, calls can now be backed up and archived based on customer profiles, skill groups or other business related data.

Speech Analytics/Call Recording Impacts

The arrival of speech analytics software to derive actionable intelligence from interactions based on understanding what was said, by agents or automated IVR or speech rec systems and customers is a great spouse for call recording. There is synergy in that call recording makes these analytics possible while the added demand for recordings bolster those solutions.

One of the companies at the ceremonies is OreCx. Its Oreka Total Recorder software allows customers to make Oreka TR speech analytics ready for most commercially available speech analytics engines.

Another firm at the altar is CallCopy whose new cc: Discover 4.0 recording solution had been released ahead of the firm’s new speech analytics and performance management solutions with support already built in for these features. It also has an agent coaching portal aimed at improving agent performance by delivering agent access for reviewing call recordings and viewing performance reports and delivering personalized coaching. There is browser-based interface to permit listening and acting on recording without additional software. Reporting is simplified via additional ready-to-use reporters and integration with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.

The arrival of speech analytics solutions as a means to boost customer satisfaction/retention, productivity, and quality may require firms to change out or upgrade their call recording tools to fully appreciate the potential benefits. That is because older recording platforms did not support stereo recording, making it difficult to separate the various participant's audio and thus determine who said what, Gartner’s Davies points out. For example, was it the customer getting annoyed or the agent?

“However, even with older recordings you can still identify interesting insights such as the mention of a competing company or product or the referral to a recent marketing campaign,” says Davies.

Contact centers may also need to add recording storage and processing capabilities. That is because more calls will get recorded, and those recordings will need to be accessed quickly.

Ed Templeman is director of marketing, TelStrat, which earlier this year released Engage Analyze, its speech analytics solutions that is integrated with the Engage Contact Center Suite. The Engage Suite blends voice and screen recording; agent performance evaluation, tracking and coaching; agent scripting and call automation; and workforce forecasting and scheduling.

“Implementing speech analytics doesn’t really change call recording methods but what it does do is become a driver to prompt more frequent and widespread recording,” says Templeman. “This means contact centers must make sure their recording systems are scalable from an agent count/server capacity standpoint, as well as a server management standpoint.”

Keep in mind, though, in the push to record the maximum number of calls is whether the chosen voice analytics solution will be able to effectively process them, he points out. Due to processing time and server horsepower constraints, traditional large vocabulary conversational speech recognition or speech-to-text analytics solutions rely on a 3-to-5-percent statistical sample of calls. So, even if you’re recording 100 percent, you’re actually analyzing nowhere near that amount.

“On the other hand, newer speech analytics technologies, such as phoneme-based approaches, have much greater speed and capacity,” says Templeman. “Their ability to process call content in order of magnitude faster than LVCSR systems makes analyzing 100 percent of large call volumes a practical proposition.”

He also recommends that recording servers should also be equipped to simultaneously handle multiple voice technologies such as VoIP, TDM, analog and even radio.

“This will allow speech analytics to provide a truer glimpse into all types of an organization’s customer interaction,” Templeman points out.

Suites Versus Standalones and Hosting

Call recording is now being bundled into workforce optimization suites or being offered as modules in integrated multivendor WFO solutions that make buying, installation, management and support simpler and less costly. Hosting is becoming a popular delivery option for recording for those reasons, along with greater flexibility to meet needs.

There is still a debate over which way to buy call recording solutions: best-in-class or pre-integrated suites with WFO solutions. Best-in-class can be more cost effective in that not all companies use all the modules available in today’s suites and/or that they have don’t have the needs for the rest of their features. Firms can therefore buy only what they require to perform the tasks at hand.

Yet suites allow for a single administration environment, along with smooth and efficient data collection, analysis and presentation across multiple modules with minimum hiccups. Maintenance of all modules in the suite requires dealing with one vendor, which provides advantages in financial and time efficiency over point solutions.

The trend is clearly towards suites. A recent Frost and Sullivan survey reports that 34 percent of centers source their agent performance optimization – or APO, a catchall term for analytics, performance management, quality monitoring and workforce management systems – from single vendors via integrated suites. Another 17 percent source their systems from multiple vendors that have since merged. That puts a clear majority of APO implementations in the hands of consolidating suite vendors.

This movement is backed up by what is happening in the marketplace. Many WFO suppliers now offer call recording in their suites.

To compete, standalone recording suppliers are partnering with WFO/WFM suppliers to offer products that integrate both solutions in single packages. For example Zoom International is partnering WFM firm GMT. Branded as WorkFORCE the agreement brings together Zoom’s CallREC and ScoreCARD products with GMT’s Planet solution.

At the same time more CRM, CIM and routing suppliers are incorporating recording into their suites. To illustrate, Syntellect has integrated its new Syntellect Call Recorder with the Syntellect Customer Interaction Management suite.

“Vendor consolidation has pushed recording in the direction of suites,” says Dawson. “Then, in response, most of the standalone vendors have established ad hoc suites or ‘ecosystems’ to add value to their niche products. So whether customers want suites or not, they will increasingly benefit from a higher degree of inter-company integration.”

Hosted delivery is a viable choice as it enables companies to obtain, ramp up, down and, if need be, exit recording solutions. VirtualLogger has tapped into these features to draw attention to its hosted recording solution. It has been expanding existing programs and offering new risk-minimizing programs as well. For example, its business protection plan allows clients to reduce costs immediately in response to changing business demands. It has been marketing for limited periods, free recording and quality monitoring services in exchange for signing multiyear agreements.

“Enabling clients to pay-as-they-go for hardware and software is an ideal solution for contact centers that want current technology without the risk of being overextended,” says the firm’s president, Jim Veilleux.

Call Recording Tips

Verint offers these suggestions to get the most out of call recording and quality monitoring solutions:

• Plan, communicate, and formalize the rollout process. All three are vital to initial and ongoing use, and in gaining agent buy-in and acceptance. Agents and supervisors need to feel that they’re part of the process: understanding how and why it’s valuable to the business, the ways it will benefit them, and how it can help them become more proficient and advance in their roles
• Think multi-channel and big picture: recording not only voice conversations, but also the data entry, screen navigation and desktop activities that agents use. This full picture delivers a complete view into how customer experiences unfold: and how the organization’s agents, technology, and processes performed in doing so. Recording can be used to capture e-mail, chat and Web transactions, along with back-office department workflow such as claims processing, order entry and billing that have definite impacts on the resulting customer experience.
• Develop customized forms to evaluate contact center interactions/recordings and agent performance. Evaluation forms can be tailored and weighted to the specific and unique needs of the particular contact center, company and industry it serves. In creating forms, another best practice is to structure them so as to ensure the right and desired behaviors are being tracked and measured. Forms should be correlated to and measured against a balanced scorecard of key performance indicators and goals to ensure that the improvements in the desired behaviors produce the desired big-picture results and are consistent with overall center goals
• The protection of customer data is a growing concern. Call recording solutions should feature encryption, secure storage environments, and options not to record certain credit card authentication data

The following companies participated in this article:

CallCopy
www.callcopy.com

CyberTech International
www.cybertech-int.com

GMT
www.gmt.com

Newfound Communications (News - Alert)
www.newfoundcomm.net

OrecX
www.orecx.com

Syntellect (News - Alert)
www.syntellect.com

Telrex
www.telrex.com

TelStrat
www.telstrat.com

Verint (News - Alert)
www.verint.com

VirtualLogger
www.virtuallogger.com

Zoom International
www.zoomint.com

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