Join VPI and Straumann for an exciting webinar showcasing the powerful reporting solutions for Cisco UCC Contact Centers. You'll learn how Cisco and VPI helped Straumann develop and award-winning real-time contact center performance reporting solution.

Date: Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Time: 1:00 PM ET, 10:00 AM PT
Register here.

Now you can get even more value from your Cisco UCC Express (UCCX) or UCC Enterprise (UCCE) investment. VPI, a Cisco Solution Developer, VIP and SIP Partner, has integrated its award-winning VPI Performance contact center reporting and performance management software application with Cisco. This functionality complements and enhances the UCCX and UCCE platforms greatly by consolidating data and presenting actionable, real-time information in the form of Web dashboards, interactive reports, scorecards and desktop tickers to empower contact center managers, supervisors and agents to make better, quicker decisions.

Learn how Cisco and VPI customer Straumann, a global leader in dental implant solutions and restorative dentistry, enhanced the capabilities of its Cisco Unified Contact Center system and operations with VPI’s award-winning real-time Cisco reporting software solution.

Register to attend the complimentary Webinar, hosted by subject matter experts from Straumann and VPI, to learn how you can:

• Create and report on metrics based on Cisco UCCX, UCCE and other contact center data (CRM, ERP, QA, WFM) to meet business objectives.
• Report across multiple teams and queues, locations and Cisco UCCX/UCCE systems to get a holistic view of contact center operations.
• Perform true historical reporting with unlimited data collection – get insights into trending over time and a historically accurate representation of your agents’ group assignments.
• Create flexible grouping structures to report on groups and teams in any manner that makes most sense to your business.
• Drill through layers of data for root cause analysis and trigger targeted alerts, notifications and Coaching assignments based on performance thresholds to promptly correct performance gaps.

Scheduling Conflict? Register for the Webinar and we'll send you the recorded version.

Presenters:

Carlo Wise - IT Specialist, Straumann

Carlo Wise serves as a senior IT Specialist at Straumann, a global leader in dental implant solutions and restorative dentistry, leveraging his strong background in all facets of telephony and network systems integration. He is an experienced IT and Contact Center professional with over 16 years of experience in supporting and implementing Contact Center technologies in small to large Contact Center environments. Mr. Wise holds a variety of industry certifications, including Cisco, CompTIA and Redhat.

Delee Shields - Channel Sales Director, VPI
 
Delee has been instrumental in working closely with Cisco in developing VPI's Cisco Developer Network (CDN) Solution Developer, Value Incentive (VIP) and Solutions Incentive (SIP) partnership programs. She is responsible for working hand-in-hand with Cisco customers and channel partners through the entire sales process. She has extensive knowledge of Cisco Unified Communications product platforms and is highly experienced in Cisco reporting software, Cisco call recording software, workforce optimization, VoIP, LAN, WAN, MAN and wireless solution design. Prior to joining VPI as a sales engineer in 2007, she worked in sales and sales engineering capacities promoting Cisco solutions as well as earning her Cisco CCNA and CCNP certifications.

Ahead of this year's holiday season, consumers charged more to their credit cards for second straight month. Robust holiday spending is driving the speculation that U.S. consumers are shifting their use of credit and debit toward credit. Early spending patterns do suggest that total credit card spending is increasing, as it has all year. Worldwide, consumers carry more than 1 billion Visa cards alone. More than 450 million of those cards are in the United States. The number of U.S. identity fraud victims rose 12 percent to 11.1 million adults last year. Credit and debit card fraud is the No. 1 fear of Americans in the midst of the global financial crisis. Concern about fraud supersedes that of terrorism, computer and health viruses and personal safety – one in ten Americans have already been victims of credit card fraud. Software.net found that as many as 40% of its transactions were fraudulent. Expedia.com lost $6 million due to fraudulent credit card purchases.

During the holidays and throughout the year, contact centers that engage in catalog sales, up-selling and/or cross-selling, service providers, and collection companies that take payments in the form of credit or debit cards can become unsuspecting targets of cyber criminals. The card information is typically entered by agents into a CRM or other sales automation software and may be recorded by voice and screen recorders. And there it resides - thousands and even millions of card records inviting remote criminals or even greedy employees to extract consumer card data for personal gain or sell into a sophisticated secondary market.

The payment card industry (PCI) established a Council to define technical standards aimed at minimizing the risk of cyber crime to the misuse of credit cards. The Council subsequently issued a Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) which details security requirements for members, merchants and service providers that store, process or transmit cardholder data. Contact centers and other organizations that accept credit card payments are generally prohibited from archiving sensitive information such as account numbers and security codes after payment authorization has been received. Compliance to PCI-DSS is now mandatory for all non-credit card 'issuing' organizations dealing with credit, debit and ATM cards, as defined by the PCI Security Standards Council - size of an organization and its annual sales are no longer a factor for exceptions. While being compliant to PCI DSS - an already daunting task - is the first part, it it also required that you prove your organization's compliance to PCI-DSS. This PCI Audit is performed either with a set of questionnaires or by a Qualified Security Assessor, external to the organization.

On October 28, 2010, the Payment Card Industry Standards Council made a major update to the PCI Data Security Standard to clarify it. PCI DSS version 2.0 went effective on January 1, 2011. In PCI DSS version 2.0, the PCI DSS standards were clarified to require that no sensitive credit card information be stored within recorded calls, even if those calls are encrypted. The standards committee made the change because of the availability of sophisticated malware that could penetrate encryption algorithms. Organizations that do not take action by December 31, 2011 to ensure compliance with these new PCI call recording requirements could face costly fines. 

Achieving PCI DSS Compliance

To help organizations ensure compliance and avoid costly fines, VPI has developed an effective, affordable solution. The VPI CAPTURE PCI call recording system has the ability to detect when an agent enters an application screen with sensitive information, when sensitive information is inputted, and when they leave a screen containing sensitive information.  The VPI telephone voice recording system then has the ability to promptly mute sections of recorded audio and mask screen video during this sensitive portion of the call.


To further secure sensitive information, the VPI CAPTURE PCI DSS call recording system help you:

• Secure File and Data Transport and Storage Encryption – VPI uses built-in end-to-end data encryption and key management to secure the SQL database that holds attributes of all recordings. The media manager provides for AES 128, 192, 256 or variable bit encryption/decryption when files are stored and accessed from the media manager.
•  Ensure Authenticity with File Watermarking - Every call within the VPI system is wartermarked in real time to ensure authenticity. VPI offers a powerful application to validate the authenticity of any WAV file.
• Monitor User Activity with Detailed Audit Log Reporting – VPI records all user activity within the system so that organizations can conduct full trace audits to determine who accessed any recording in the system and when - for playback, export, or any other critical events.

Leading industry analyst firm, Gartner, predicts that employees will account for up to 80 percent of contact center budgets in the increasingly demanding world of customer interaction. Such a substantial investment cannot be left to chance, yet, it is often an area that is overlooked and rarely reviewed by managers.

Like many other industries in which employee performance is crucial to the customer experience, the utility industry provides an essential commodity to the public. As they are often under intense scrutiny, utility companies must also take steps to minimize their exposure to liability issues. For utilities that provide direct service to retail power customers, the large volume of customer service calls they manage demands both courtesy and accuracy on the part of call center agents. And, consequently, their contact centers need reliable and effective quality monitoring and training solutions. Similarly, "upstream" energy providers specializing in transmitting power to other utilities need interaction recording systems to accurately record 100% of their service and event calls to and from their technicians (and other utilities) for liability protection and to recreate major incidents.

By now, most successful utility contact centers have already adopted baseline call recording and quality monitoring solutions –  the fundamental building blocks for any type of workforce optimization solution. However, although useful, these solutions can be of limited value if they are outdated, early generation quality monitoring applications,  and may be due for review and reevaluation..

The good news is that quality assurance technologies have evolved significantly. They have now reached  the point where they can enable contact centers to focus the entire process on what really matters and what can make the biggest impact on business performance – all without losing objectivity in the assessment of agent performance.

Anticipate and Plan for Agent Satisfaction to Maximize Operations and the Customer Experience

Customer service and help desk environments have traditionally been known as high-turnover environments, where employees tend to consider their positions to be transient or temporary. There are many things that contact centers can do to overcome this challenge.

To anticipate and reduce  turnover, it is best to give agents some time away from the phone for cross-training and multi-skilling. Allowing agents to respond to email or perform other administrative duties while they are mastering the skills of becoming expert contact center professionals makes their jobs feel more fulfilling and enables them to provide a better customer experience.

It is also crucial to provide ongoing training. This will keep agents engaged, alert and empowered to quickly and accurately resolve customer issues. In fact, with today’s tightly integrated quality monitoring and coaching software tools, skill development can be highly personalized according to the needs and objectives of each agent.

The Right Technology Can Help

In addition to process improvements, implementation of the latest technologies can be crucial to the continued success of utility contact centers. When liability and accuracy are the challenges, it is vital to adopt an interactions recording solution that can record 100 percent of calls and data interactions. Using an advanced telephone call recording solution, utility companies can determine what to retain, for how long, and on which storage device by implementing flexible, intelligent business rules. Recordings can be unified across audio and data sources and multiple locations while users can freely search, locate, playback and share using instant searches and filters.

The beauty of a completely integrated suite of workforce optimization applications is the interoperability. Each technology application – recording, QA, performance management, analytics, coaching, E-earning – has valuable capabilities, but multiple solutions can work symbiotically to provide even greater results. Beyond the immediate improvements in contact center performance and lowering operating costs, workforce optimization solutions allow for quick decision making, which helps resolve customer issues.

By adopting advanced technologies for monitoring quality and optimizing customer service — including analytics-driven call center quality assurance systems that help identify and automate routine contact center tasks — utility companies can dramatically improve performance and profitability. The decision to choose one solution instead of another depends on the specific utility’s needs, goals and circumstances. However, with modular workforce optimization software suites, there is a sensible, financially sound path for every budget and objective.

2011 is certainly shaping up to be VPI's year - VPI Quality Pro recently received the 2010 Product of the Year Award from Customer Interaction Solutions (CIS) magazine! Even better, this is the second consecutive year we've won the award. And while our most valued praise always comes from our customers, it never hurts to receive recognition from the industry. We know that selecting a call center Quality Assurance solution is a big decision, and most people rely on industry resources such as TMC and CIS magazine to help guide their decisions.

So, you may be wondering what this award is all about. Each year, CIS presents its Product of Year awards to products and companies in the contact center and CRM industries that help users deliver an enhanced customer experience. Why did CIS choose VPI Quality Pro? First, it's built on our secure and powerful VPI Empower platform. This gives users confidence and reliability. Plus, VPI Quality Pro allows users to automatically categorize and prioritize recordings by customer names, products offered, transaction values and more -- across multimedia communication channels -- so that contact centers can focus on their most critical business issues instead. Now managers have these crucial recordings at their fingertips and can act quickly to resolve issues, improve performance and increase productivity. We're proud to deliver this innovation to our customers and the industry.

Does your contact center use VPI Quality Pro? We'd love to hear what you think! Or click here to learn more about VPI Quality Pro.

Credit unions and community banks are increasingly coping with federal and local legislation, interest rate hikes and volatility in capital markets, all of which entails placing greater emphasis on local and regional customer retention, quality assurance, internal controls, as well as more careful compliance and risk management. Although these smaller banks share many common challenges with large contact centers, they have unique needs that can be addressed using today’s modular, highly customizable call quality monitoring and workforce optimization solutions.

Small- to mid-sized financial services contact centers face a number of operational challenges relatively unknown to the larger contact center. With limited resources and shrinking budgets, a Branch or Regional Manager for smaller contact center needs to carefully keep an eye out for inefficient practices to find opportunities for cost reduction. He or she needs to carefully plan capital expenditures, and training investments, while keeping up with significant hardware and software investments within their broader organization.

Traditionally, customer service and help desk environments are known as high-turnover environments. This is rather typical for smaller financial services contact centers as well, where employees tend to consider helpdesk positions to be transient or temporary. To anticipate and reduce the impact of this phenomenon, it is best in the early days of their careers to give agents some time off the phone for cross-training and multi-skilling to respond to email or perform other administrative duties while they are mastering the skills to becoming expert contact center professionals.

Another necessity is ongoing training to keep them engaged, alert and empowered to resolve customer issues quickly, while they answer phone calls during their careers. In fact, with today’s tightly integrated quality monitoring and coaching software tools, skill development can be highly personalized according to the needs and objectives of each agent and simultaneously targeted directly at business goals of the contact center as well as the broader home organization. Gartner predicts that staffing will account for up to 80% of contact center budgets in the new world of customer interaction. The need for such a substantial investment just cannot be left to a chance. Yet, it is often an area that is overlooked and not really routinely reviewed by managers.

Regardless of size, every contact center must provide excellent customer service, reduce costs and maintain a healthy profit margin to thrive in the new economic model. By adopting advanced technologies for monitoring quality and optimizing customer-service and contact centers — including analytics-driven call center quality assurance systems that help identify and automate routine contact-center and customer-service tasks — mortgage companies and credit unions can dramatically affect their performance and profitability.

By now, most successful contact centers have already adopted at least baseline grade digital call recording and quality monitoring solutions. They are the fundamental building blocks for any type of workforce optimization solution, but they are just a start that may be due for review and re-evaluation, especially if they come from early generations of quality monitoring that couldn’t see beyond the horizon of individual agent compliance with (possibly outdated) internal rules and policies. These older technologies did not really have a good way of connecting standards for customer/agent interactions with evolving business objectives of the bank, let alone being able to incorporate voice of the customer into any part of the quality management process. The good news is that the call center quality assurance technologies evolved to the point where contact centers can focus the entire process onto what really matters and what can make the biggest impact on business performance, without losing any objectivity in assessing agent performance. In fact, evaluating agents based on their quantifiable contributions to the contact center’s business success supports their drive to do well, succeed in their jobs and avoid defection.

The proverbial “needle in a haystack” is now rather easy to find – with the implementation of advanced desktop screen analytics, supervisors can easily identify and evaluate the calls that resulted in a customer cancelling their account and taking their business elsewhere. Or the calls where agents attempted an upsale successfully or unsuccessfully, or where they saved a customer by resolving their issue during the first call – even without unnecessary concessions. Instead of wasting time and adding costs with reviewing completely random selection of low-value calls, why not concentrate on evaluating those calls that provide insights into the bank’s business practices every time, so that something could be done about it before opportunities are missed or lost forever?

Real-time performance management and automated E-Learning tools are the latest additions to the workforce optimization family of solutions that can be closely tied into quality management processes, to provide options for action mechanism whenever a manager needs to be notified or agent supported by just-in-time help.

The decision to choose one solution instead of another depends on a company’s needs, goals and circumstances, but with modular workforce optimization software suites, there is a sensible, financially sound path for every budget and objective.

The beauty of a completely integrated suite of workforce optimization applications is interoperability. Each individual solution has valuable capabilities, but multiple solutions can work symbiotically to provide even greater results. Beyond the immediate improvement of contact center performance involving operating costs, workforce optimization solutions allow for quick decision making which in turn helps resolve issues for customers. Easy access to call recordings can help contact centers give better customer service. Call records can be used to settle disputes quickly and with minimum inconvenience.

Recorded calls provide excellent material for training purposes – real-life examples of good and bad agent-customer interactions. This helps the manager effectively intervene when agents are underperforming. The latest-generation solutions have the capability to automatically select and assign coaching and training through courses, tips, quizzes, training flashes, pre-shift announcements and bulletins according to individual agent needs, identified through quality evaluations or simply by monitoring their performance metrics. This tool allows you to set rules that send targeted coaching and training to individual agents or groups when they reach predetermined thresholds based on their performance scores, customer survey results and more. By targeting the right training to the right person at the right time, your agents will be empowered with personalized guidance that will make it easier for them to offer improved service, thus heightening customer satisfaction and ultimately increasing both, agent productivity and satisfaction with the job. Managers can track sales and address marketing and service challenges quickly.

Integrated workforce optimization systems can accomplish this in a cost-effective manner while decreasing expenses, increasing revenues and enhancing customer loyalty and satisfaction – all of which can lead to strengthened market position, customer loyalty and long-term bottom-line growth.

Are you interested in keeping up-to-date on the latest developments in contact center call recording, quality monitoring, analytics, performance management or eLearning technologies?

As organizations look to optimize the performance of their contact centers and the vital role agents play in providing customers with the right experiences as they handle interactions, the demand for thorough research into vendors and products that support agent performance management is becoming critical. Ventana Research has just released this ground-breaking independent research report on Contact Center Agent Performance Management solutions.

You can download your complimentary 2010 Value Index for Agent Performance Management Research Report by Ventana Research at http://www.VPI-corp.com/2010-Value-Index to learn:

• What tools can help you more effectively manage of all the business activities associated with handling customer interactions to ensure an optimal customer experience and alignment to a common set of customer and revenue goals and objectives.
• A framework for buyers to thoroughly review technology vendors as they seek to purchase new systems to support their efforts.
• How 13 agent performance management software vendors and their products were ranked in several categories.
• Why VPI achieved the highest 'Hot Vendor' rating and was rated #1 in Customer Assurance.

It is that time of the year where contact centers are gearing up for the holiday season over the next couple months. Traditionally, this means hiring and training more agents than usual, based on forecasted volumes.  Due to the seasonality of contact center work, expectations and stress placed on contact center resources rise  - this affects especially team supervisors and their agents who are more prone to turnover during higher-stress periods. In fact, multiple  factors contribute to turnover - the most significant variable is the nature of the work the agent does and how they perceive their role within the center. 

While recently visiting an outsourced contact center, I was able to observe how training was delivered to a new hire training class. It turns out that my high school sports coach was right   - coaching and teamwork matter, especially today when selecting the right  agents from a pool of candidates, training them and getting them certified to be on the phones must be done in less than a month. I witnessed extraordinary collaborative effort expended to get the job done. However, the impressive enthusiasm of the contact center team clashed with their process design and technical challenges.
 
Dave, the Director of Operations advised me that it costs approximately USD $12,500 before an agent is competent enough to satisfactorily handle calls. He was perplexed with why in spite of this significant investment, he was experiencing a large turnover of his new agents within the first 30 days on the floor. When  we visited the contact center floor,  I noticed that the agent to supervisor ratio was rather high - around 1:25. I have immediately noticed that call center management was insufficient, as was mechanism for providing agents with timely, intraday feedback on their performance or guidance for improvement.  It looked like the agents were “abandoned” after their initial training. There was call recording equipment and workforce management software in the IT room. However, the center had no visible individuals who actually owned the metrics or were responsible for the generation of scorecards that would provide information to Dave on how the center was doing in the course of a day or, for that matter, a week.  This tough situation was further complicated by the fact that Dave only had four Supervisors to manage a team of hundred agents AND each Supervisor had  less than one-year tenure! . And as if that weren’t hard enough, one Supervisor was on vacation and  another called in sick. Sadly, it is an experience all too familiar to contact center managers today. Successfully managing a multi-channel contact center is one of the most difficult roles in business today due to the dynamic nature of the environment and all the intricacies woven into the equation. 

The contact center is often the only place that customers turn to when they require assistance or to purchase products and services. As shown in our example, working as an agent in a contact center can be a rather stressful job. As a result, turnover can be as high as 50% annually. That is a significant number that directly affects the operating costs of a center. But my question is - what is the real cost of this common phenomenon within a contact center?  Clearly, it will be  reflected in hard-to-measure ways each Monday morning to start with. Agents are likely to develop apathy and grow ever less engaged in their work due to the unsupportive environment that has been created for them. They will be less receptive to new ideas and more importantly, less willing to follow the coach or go the extra mile for the customer or the team. All of this triggers a cascade of  consequences for the business - reduced customer satisfaction, high agent turnover, and negative impact on  profitability.  And that’s exactly the opposite of what the holiday season promises to deliver for the business. Contact center managers must do their homework in order to understand the causes of their challenges as well as available options for addressing them.

Research at VPI has shown that agent and supervisor satisfaction and productivity can be dramatically improved through  an effective strategy of keeping everyone in the loop at all times.  You can achieve this by using call center performance management software that presents real or near-real time scorecards and other forms of status updates - personalized for each employee role according to their responsibilities, goals and needs.  Better yet, tie real-time call center performance management with intelligently triggered e-learning and coaching to help front-line agents learn and grow, supporting their individual skills and talents, giving them the tools and knowledge to please customers.  You will be soon rewarded with higher job satisfaction of the contact center staff and related cost savings. Customers will respond with increased trust and loyalty – so that you can be on the forefront of their choices during the holiday season and beyond.

Real-time Call Center Performance Management - Sample Agent Desktop Ticker


Real-time Call Center Performance Management - Sample Agent Web Scorecard

For the past 15 years, APCO has been carefully crafting a list of operational standards in order to ensure the best possible quality in public safety emergency communications. Now, in collaboration with NENA and associated industry bodies, this lengthy endeavor has culminated in the development of Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1) standards, along with soon-to-be introduced Quality Assurance (QA) standards. These new requirements are raising the bar for the quality of service required from the nation’s public safety agencies.

Quality of service is impacted by both the performance of employees and the processes in use.  Periodic, systematic quality evaluation of emergency contact center communications can provide invaluable transparency to everyone involved and expose inadequacies in both employee and process areas. This is especially critical in the current transitional period when old, inadequate communication systems are being replaced with Next Generation technologies and 9-1-1 centers are expected to handle various different types of communications - not just voice and TTY communications any more. Plus, the increasingly complex nature of public safety communications entails new regulations that PSAP centers will have to demonstrably comply with. The traditional approach to quality management is being replaced with evaluation of multiple communication streams and types involved in incidents, along with a variety of supporting evidence, such as images, videos, text documents and data. Prioritization of such evaluations is driven by significance of various incident types, so selection of recordings for evaluation has to be subordinated to that. When correctly planned and executed, the latest-generation software-driven quality evaluation can deliver valuable insights into the best course of corrective actions to support the new demands.

In response to the introduction of the new NG9-1-1 and QA standards and the difficulties faced by cash-strapped organizations in attempting to comply with them, VPI is launching its ‘Upgrade to Quality’ program for public safety and security organizations.  The program, valid from now through June 30th, 2011, stretches the tight budgets of public safety and security organizations by enabling them to affordably upgrade their legacy recording systems with VPI’s state-of-the-art VPI CAPTURE™ voice logging system and provides double the value by including free VPI QUALITY™ call taker quality assurance software. VPI CAPTURE is an affordable, NG9-1-1 ready recording system that installs quickly to reliably and securely capture, manage and share critical incident information and to provide insights to optimize workforce efficiency.

For more information, conditions and restrictions on VPI’s ‘Upgrade to Quality’ program, visit http://www.VPI-corp.com/Quality or contact us at 1-800-200-5430. 

Are you monitoring and measuring the metrics that really matter to you and your organization?

Now more than ever, contact center managers and executives need to be proactive in helping their organizations accomplish contact center optimization and tactical goals, but with so much data available gathered from ACDs, IVRs, telephone recorder software and call monitoring quality assurance tools, there's a tendency to rely upon the tried and true metrics that everyone tracks - perhaps more out of habit than as a result of the their actual value. Successful contact center managers know and understand the metrics that matter and utilize proactive communications recording technologies that enable them to actively identify and optimize rather than wait and react.
 

Download your complimentary white paper authored by one of the industry's premier research firms The Pelorus Group to learn how to develop and track "Metrics that Matter."

Current economic challenges are forcing organizations to rethink their approach to customer service and how they balance efficiency and effectiveness objectives. With regard to call center optimization, complexities have vastly increased with the growing number of communication channels and higher expectations from customers. The implementation of workforce optimization software technologies has become crucial in today's environment, ultimately resulting in increased profitability and improved strategic position in the marketplace.

Download your complimentary white paper authored by prestigious industry analyst and research firm Datamonitor, to learn:

• Key challenges faced by contact centers today

• How contact centers are responding and adapting to current economic challenges

• How using workforce optimization software technologies can help you maintain the proper balance between efficiency and effectiveness

• The capabilities and advantages of workforce optimization software technologies, including voice call recording, quality assurance call monitoring, workforce management, call center performance management, desktop contact center analytics and call center coaching solutions

Want to Learn More about the Call Center Recording Software, Quality Assurance Call Monitoring and Call Center Workforce Optimization Software Market, Key Trends and Products?

VPI is pleased to be able to offer you this exclusive opportunity to get your copy of the executive summary of DMG Consulting's comprehensive annual Call Center Quality Assurance/Telephone Call Recording Product and Market Report. Offering 35 pages packed with valuable information, this guide is essential to navigating in the complex market of contact center workforce optimization software technologies.

Use the promo code LINKEDIN to download your complimentary report summary authored by renowned industry analyst and research firm DMG Consulting, to learn:

• Which call center optimization technologies help call center managers achieve contact center optimization 

• Key technology trends that are altering the direction of contact centers

• How to take your call logging software program to the next level and increase productivity while enhancing the customer experience and agent satisfaction

• The direction workforce optimization software technologies are heading and how to best leverage them, including Telephone Voice Recording, Call Center Quality Assurance, Call Center Performance Management, eLearning, Call Center Coaching, Surveying, Contact Center Analytics and Workforce Management (WFM)

• Comparison of workforce optimization software suites vs. stand-alone solutions

• How industry regulations are impacting voice call recording 

• The new strategic role of contact center managers

• Return on investment (ROI) analysis and workforce optimization software 

• What to expect in the future and more!

Traditional contact center quality monitoring involves random capture of call recordings – either based on predetermined selection criteria or schedules.   We agree that it is impossible for human beings to inspect every single call; but there are two dynamics we have to consider – separating the capture method from the call selection method.  

Latest-generation call recording software allows for recording all calls first, and then a powerful rules engine is used to decide which calls to keep or inspect.   It may sound like a small nuance, but actually this type of call center recording software design approach opens the solution to become far more effective to inspect call center effectiveness.   Rather than make selections of calls for call center quality assurance based on when somebody is scheduled to be in their seat, or assuming that we are taking an X% sample of total call volume when we are not yet aware of how many calls the agent takes, or hoping that we get a sample of calls that are prime examples of effectiveness in handling high value transactions – we suggest a different approach – an approach we term precision quality monitoring.    It involves a call recoridng software designed for the capture of all calls, then determination of what to inspect based on a variety of outcomes. Outcome-based information is used to determine which calls need to be stored, which calls need to be secured in a more robust manner (i.e. for PCI and HIPAA compliance, etc.), which calls answer interesting questions about the performance of a new process, and which calls can simply be discarded.

The outcomes used to make these critical decisions are either attributes of the calls themselves, attributes of the agents fielding the calls, or simply true random samples based on any number of criteria.   When the call recording software is enhanced with desktop screen analytics, not only can the calls be tagged with extended information in a unique way, but they can also be analyzed based on the associated information and provide a roadmap for your management team to identify trends – both positive and negative - that affect performance.    This approach is revolutionary, because it breaks down barriers that have long been separating related functions.   In the old days (a couple of years ago), you would have an approach for running reports and analyzing data that flows through your call center, then you would go to another call center quality assurance system for inspecting agent performance and perhaps hunt for examples of the performance trends.   Unfortunately, using a random method based on limited agent based information meant that it was often difficult to find enough examples of the call types involved in the trend to make a legitimate operational adjustment based on the sample.  

Latest call recording software and integrated performance optimization technologies change that dynamic. The process of identifying and addressing business issues is completely unified. Now you can identify trends in interactions, both positive and negative, and then the recorded interactions become an element of the data you are reviewing.   Importantly, these latest-generation call center optimization technologies are incredibly easy to use and take the selection guesswork out of the equation. They truly automate the end-to-end quality review process, beginning with identifying the appropriate calls to inspect, serving those calls to the right person to perform the inspection in a simple “to do” list, and address the issues uncovered through a variety of action steps. 

To find out more about uncovering performance issues via intelligent recording and quality management, visit: http://www.vpi-corp.com/Call-Center-Quality-Assurance-Management-Software.asp

Ready to upgrade your contact center? Looking to implement new TDM and VoIP Call recording, call center quality assurance, call center performance management, or call center coaching solutions or replace some of your existing applications?

If so, it's now time to zero-in on the most appropriate call center optimization technology and ask management for the money. This must-read resource guide is crucial for any contact center professional looking to take their organization to the next level.

Use the promo code LINKEDIN to download your complimentary resource guide at http://www.VPI-corp.com/ROI-Guide authored by prestigious industry analyst Dick Bucci from The PELORUS Group, to learn about the key components for developing a compelling and convincing business case for your successfully obtaining your contact center investment funds, including:

• The importance of building both business and ROI cases
• How to prepare your funding request
• The many financial benefits of call logging software, call center quality assurance, call center performance management, contact center analytics, call center coaching solutions
• How to prepare your ROI analysis, and much more!

Call center reporting software has, for some time, been evolving from the very basic, disparate technologies of the 90s to the tightly integrated, multi-dimensional software suites of today. Once upon a time, the standard call center performance management system implemented in organizations worldwide consisted of a telephone system, a call logger, an ACD and a CRM solution. Times have changed with the emergence of powerful new performance contact center analytics solutions designed to rapidly boost contact center performance and operational effectiveness – enabling organizations to discover, diagnose and manage issues before they have a chance to adversely impact customer satisfaction.

In order to survive, compete, and truly maximize the productivity and profitability of an organization, managers need much more information than the call center performance management systems of the past could provide. There’s only so much that anyone can do with dozens of disparate reports and spreadsheets of data relating to nothing in particular. Even though customer-agent interactions and the associated telephony data represent a veritable goldmine of business intelligence, the old call center performance management software systems had no way to enable users to access, analyze, and act upon the intelligence. VPI developed VPI PERFORMANCE to empower contact center agents, managers, and executives with actionable, targeted information to drive real-time, multi-level performance improvements through innovative call center reporting and contact center analytics tools. The VPI PERFORMANCE call center performance management software collects and consolidates real-time and historical performance information from multiple telephony and business systems, delivering critical key performance indicators (KPIs) in a timely and relevant manner for each user. With a powerful combination of real-time consolidated call center reporting, root cause performance contact center analytics, and targeted call center coaching and messaging, VPI PERFORMANCE enables contact centers to drive continuous, proactive improvement – crucial for cost containment, contact center optimization profitability.

VPI PERFORMANCE Web-based reports allow managers to conveniently access, analyze and drill through data to quickly identify the root cause of problems or successes - even down to the recorded interaction from the integrated VPI contact center recording system - and immediately change business direction based on actual customer responses and employee performance. As soon as the problem or success is determined, VPI PERFORMANCE call center performance management software ensures the delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time with employee desktop dashboards, tickers and scorecards. Managers and supervisors are equipped to manage the here and now – to take immediate actions to solve immediate problems, rather than trying to handle yesterday’s problems next month, or worse, never managing them at all. Managing based on old information is likely to result in once happy, high-value customers taking their business elsewhere.

Unlike the old call center reporting solutions, VPI PERFORMANCE enables managers to expedite performance improvements through automated, targeted intervention. They can easily automate the feedback and call center coaching process and empower front-line employees and supervisors to be highly effective. The solution helps to maximize time and cost efficiency – electronic call center coaching and learning fits smoothly within existing workflow, is a powerful supplement to face-to-face training, increases retention rates for new information and expedites ramp-up. With timely access to actionable information, managers can rapidly improve sales conversion, collections and quality of service while realizing significant savings in areas such as: agent attrition, quality scores, first call resolution, average talk time, idle time, sickness and absence, average hold time, and much more. With VPI PERFORMANCE, the entire organization will quickly begin to benefit from increased productivity, customer loyalty, and revenue.

Call logging software comes in all shapes and sizes. Selecting the best call recording equipment for your organization’s specific needs can be tricky. Do you need to record for compliance and liability purposes? Or, are you more focused on your quality management goals? What kind of telephone voice recording does your organization currently utilize – traditional voice logging, digital call recording, VoIP call recording, or a combination? Is your organization growing or downsizing? Do you record multiple locations, and if so, is it easy to administer the communications recording system in order to access and analyze any and all recordings, by site, by group, and even down to individual calls? How many technologies do you currently have in place? Would the new call monitoring system have to integrate with any of them? There are indeed many questions to answer and issues to address in the quest for a new quality assurance call monitoring system. VPI has been listening to these questions from its customers for over 15 years, and has designed flexible solutions that can adapt to, and work within, virtually any environment – meeting the needs and expectations of organizations of all types and sizes.

For organizations seeking compliance and liability voice logging, such as public safety agencies, security companies, government bodies, and financial institutions, VPI developed VPI CAPTURE PRO. As the industry’s most secure and feature-rich audio and data phone recording software, VPI CAPTURE PRO enables organizations to seamlessly capture, assess, assemble, and share their recorded communications from a combination of telephone, radio, email and Web chat systems – traditional digital call recording and IP call recording software. In addition to handling compliance and risk management, VPI CAPTURE PRO enables federal, state, local, and private organizations to improve the quality of their mission-critical voice and data interactions and deliver first-rate customer service by acknowledging and utilizing call center quality assurance.

If you’re looking for a call logging software solution that will help you achieve your call center quality assurance goals, VPI CAPTURE PRO is by far your best bet. Whether or not you use a formalized quality evaluation process, VPI CAPTURE PRO allows you to engage in quality assurance call monitoring which will improve the customer service quality delivered by your local or locate and playback high value call recordings directly from a variety of standard reports, and leverage best practice remote employees, focusing on the most pressing business issues. You can monitor live calls across multiple locations, conveniently calls for training – call recordings are highly portable in standard formats and small file sizes.

With the VPI CAPTURE PRO voice call recording solution you can rest assured that whatever your needs may be, and whatever kind of technology and telephone voice recording you may have – both now and in the future – all of your immediate needs will be met, and you will be fully equipped to rise to every challenge that lies ahead. VPI’s open standards call recording equipment and technology welcomes change and meets the associated challenges with many options for fast and cost-effective reconfigurations in order to satisfy changes in legislation, increased capacity, new geographic distribution of your employee teams, or changes between centralized and distributed operation.
 

Voice logging systems were once very basic solutions built to record all or a sample of calls along with some rudimentary telephony data. Generally deployed for compliance and liability purposes, digital call recording systems were viewed as a backroom necessity that occasionally served a purpose whenever a customer dispute occurred. Over the past decade, the role of the call recorder has changed a great deal. The value of recorded interactions and their importance for effective quality assurance call monitoring has become a major focal point in the development of the highly advanced call logger systems available today.

Today’s flexible, elegant communications recording solutions are light years away from the clunky, hardware-based beasts of the past. Gone are the proprietary parts and expensive customizations – today’s advanced digital and VoIP recording software solutions are software based, leveraging open architecture for easy integrations and cost-effective customization. VPI’s robust digital and IP recording software solutions can be customized, scaled and adapted to meet the evolving demands of organizations of all kinds – from small- and medium-sized contact centers to global enterprises employing any combination of in-house and remote employees. VPI CAPTURE PRO is the most progressive, ground-breaking voice call recording and screen data call recording software available today. Highly reliable, easily implemented and remarkably effective in virtually any environment, VPI CAPTURE PRO can record multimedia interactions from a wide range of network configurations, TDM and VoIP telephony environments, and across any number of locations. Powered by VPI Fact Finder™, VPI's powerful desktop screen contact center analytics engine, the call logger tags important employee screen events and facts to call recordings for automated call classification and analysis centered on key business issues.

In recent years, it has become generally recognized that recordings of customer interactions contain a vast amount of intelligence about an organization’s processes, customer satisfaction, front-line employee performance, revenue opportunities, and chances for improvement of strategic position in the marketplace. Recorded interactions between agents and customers are a veritable gold mine of business intelligence, yielding insights into agent performance, product or service perception, and customer satisfaction. Intelligence garnered from customer interactions can be used to improve managerial decisions and investments made by strategic-level departments such as sales, marketing, human resources, research and development, finance, or operations.

VPI EMPOWER offers a rich, business-centric set of tools that make a significant impact on an organization’s bottom line – mitigating risk, enhancing call center quality assurance, streamlining call center reporting, improving call center coaching, and optimizing call center performance management. VPI EMPOWER combines and enhances the benefits of VPI CAPTURE PRO, VPI QUALITY PRO and VPI PERFORMANCE. Individually, each software solution is robust and powerful, but they are exponentially more valuable when integrated.