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Go Upstream, Identify Problems Before they Hit Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter

By Rich Tehrani,
CEO, Technology Marketing Corp

Social media is all the rage these days and unless you spend a good portion of your day tweeting or posting status messages on Facebook, you may think you aren’t doing your all to engage your current and potential customers. I have seen firsthand how marketing departments are frantically trying to understand what their customers are saying so they can improve sales in an economic slowdown that has caused sales to suffer and jobs to be lost.

Enter the contact center, that repository of information that can do almost everything social media can and more. Let’s be clear that while I am not encouraging the abandonment of social media I am convinced there is so much more work we can do to understand customers if we just spend some time to better analyze contact center data.

In a recent conversation with call recording leader OAISYS (News - Alert), I had a chance to learn more about the company’s Tracer Version 6.0, which is loaded with new features designed to allow companies to better integrate customer feedback into their business processes. CEBP, or communications enabled business processes, is a hot area as these solutions allow companies to integrate communications to improve workflow, productivity and most importantly the bottom line. I consider the 6.0 version of Tracer to be an important product to watch in this area.

I had a long conversation with Brian Spencer, OAISYS president, in which he explained that this version of the product is based on customer feedback going back to the product launch in 2002.

He was enthused as ever while explaining how the latest incarnation of his company’s solution can choose to record calls or even have calls be sent for live monitoring based on business rules which include the duration of the call, which team was responding to the call, how the call was routed, CRM data, etc.

Perhaps one of the most beneficial features of Tracer 6.0 is the owner’s report function, which is an auto-generated report that lets a manager see exactly how and if the these new features are being used. As companies take on more and more priorities with less people, it is not uncommon for a solution to be purchased and not implemented for some time. The report can be sent automatically via e-mail so the C-suite can keep tabs while on the golf course or aboard corporate one. Spencer says this feature gives transparency and transparency is great for people who get the job done. Who can argue with that?

Another important addition is an API which allows call recordings to be integrated seamlessly into a variety of applications meaning you can now listen to calls which are attached to an Outlook contact or a Microsoft (News - Alert) Dynamics CRM record.

For me, this was the “A-ha” moment when I started to realize how social media is just now beginning to recreate information which is already housed on corporate contact center servers. It was at this point Spencer said, “Tracer 6.0 with the API bubbles up the necessary information at the point where it is most valuable.”

Obviously the next question was when speech-to-text integration will enter the mix. The answer? Sometime next year. Spencer thinks this functionality will be important for healthcare, financial services, applications such as e-discovery and, of course, “Enterprising contact centers looking to improve customer service levels as high as possible through the advanced use of technology.”

Our conversation ended with Spencer saying he believes companies need technology to monitor each communications channel such as Facebook, Twitter, contact center conversations and email – or they may miss vital information from their customers. He feels (and I agree) that often people “blast off” when they have a positive or negative experience with a company. His closing thoughts were that companies can go upstream and control what is being said on Facebook and Twitter. It seems much more cost-effective to seek out and correct systemic and potentially embarrassing problems before they find their way onto the Internet… who can disagree with that?

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