Free Research Report: Call Center Quality Assurance and Liability TDM and VoIP Call Recording Product and Market Report Summary, Authored by and Featuring Research from DMG Consulting

Friday, April 2, 2010 by Lauren Hugues
 Quality Management, Liability Recording & Workforce Optimization Product Report

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!


Complimentary Resource Guide: The ROI Benefits of Contact Center Recording, Quality Assurance and Call Center Performance Management Technologies

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 by Patrick Botz

Complimentary Resource Guide on the Compelling ROI Benefits of VoIP Call Recording, Quality Assurance Call Monitoring and Call Center Performance Management TechnologiesReady 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 Recording Software Advancements and Proven Best Practices

Friday, March 5, 2010 by Lauren Hugues

Voice Call Recording Software Advancements and Proven Best PracticesPhone call recording software plays a key role in many industries. It is a mandatory requirement in the majority of public safety organizations and within various industries, such as financial services and healthcare. With so much valuable information in vast number of customer interactions, the overwhelming majority of many organizations are now using call logging software. Telephone voice recording software helps many organizations optimize the customer experience, improve agent call quality, and minimize risk by providing receipts of oral commitments for dispute resolution, preventing privacy leaks and highlighting questionable employee conduct.


Analytics-Enhanced Call Recorder Software Solutions

Full-time voice call recording software with rules-based records retention, combined with the use of integrated desktop screen analytics, is in high demand by organizations to comply with increasingly complex privacy compliance regulations, including PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry - Data Security Standard). These new, analytics-enhanced telephone voice recording software technologies are helping organizations of all sizes identify sensitive information that should be protected from access or replay by unauthorized users, such as consumers’ credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, references, family members, etc. Analytics-enhanced call logging software technologies are also helping with the identification of certain types of interactions that matter most with regard to business goals and economic circumstances.

 

The Benefits of Desktop Screen and Telephone Call Recording

Many organizations are now adopting high-volume desktop screen recording software. Using phone recording software to review screens in conjunction with the corresponding call audio can expose and improve application navigation and workflow processes to reduce call and post-call handling time. Screen recording software is also a very valuable tool for evaluating the quality and efficiency of Web chat interactions. Voice and Data call recording equipment enables managers to see how front-line employees are handling multiple chat sessions simultaneously on one or multiple desktop monitors. Voice logging software is also being used to optimize the use of email and Web chat. Training managers are using the multimedia screen and voice recordings as best practice training clips, and to monitor the quality of email responses and Web chat sessions.

A Secure Digital Call Recording Software Solution

Full-time voice call recording software is essential for helping organizations manage compliance and liability issues. However, it’s imperative to implement a system that will guard data from unauthorized access with granular user and data security rules and end-to-end AES 256 encryption with key management. A comprehensive audit trail log should record 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.

 

To learn more about the latest advancements in phone call recording software, visit: http://www.VPI-corp.com/Phone-Call-recording-Software.asp

Using Dispatch Quality Assurance Call Monitoring Software to Improve the Effectiveness of Public Safety Communications

Friday, March 5, 2010 by Lauren Hugues

Using Dispatch Quality Assurance Software to Improve the Effectiveness of Public Safety CommunicationsDispatch quality assurance call monitoring software is more important today than ever before. Recognized as an essential component in the quest for improved performance, efficiency and productivity, public safety organizations are now placing an increased emphasis on the capabilities and deployment of dispatch quality assurance call monitoring software. In the midst of today’s consolidation and changes, many public safety and security organizations are being asked to do more with less resources. Therefore, it is even more important than ever before to maximize the productivity and effectiveness of current employees and resources. There is tremendous value in assessing recorded interactions with dispatch quality assurance voice logging software. As public safety organizations roll out new programs, new communications recording and dispatching technologies, and Next Generation 9-1-1 initiatives, a quality assurance program using automated dispatch quality assurance tool integrated with your call recording software can be invaluable for monitoring the adoption and success of your initiatives.

 

Benefits of Dispatch Quality Assurance Software

Integrated dispatch quality assurance call recording software can be extremely valuable in improving the efficiency and accuracy of emergency communications. Quality assurance helps improve productivity and reduce staff turnover. With new Web-based dispatch quality assurance software tools that automatically assign the appropriate customized evaluation form, public safety and security organizations can objectively evaluate individual call taker quality or performance of multiple call takers during entire incidents, regardless of how many locations, units and jurisdictions involved. In addition to enabling thorough evaluation of call taker performance with regard to fast, efficient, accurate and high quality call handling, dispatch quality assurance software helps public safety and security organizations ensure that call taker and dispatcher processes are working properly and within compliance.

 

Advantages of Console Screen Analytics

Today’s advanced multimedia phone call logger and dispatch quality assurance call monitoring software solutions use screen analytics to easily capture important fields, values and data from desktop monitors and console screens. This can be achieved without requiring organizations to perform expensive back-end integrations to the applications running on employee desktops. By being able to tag data like “Incident Type” from the CAD system to recorded calls, organizations now have the ability to evaluate calls by incident type. For example, an organization may determine a need or desire to listen to all or a high percentage of calls recorded by their voice logger related to a certain incident type such as robberies, domestic violence, medical-related calls or homicide.

 

Additional Advantages of Automated Coaching

Public safety organizations are using the assessment scores from their dispatch quality assurance call monitoring software to improve their training programs and automatically assigning targeted, supplemental coaching to those call takers that need improvement in certain areas identified by quality assurance evaluations. With an integrated, automated coaching solution, public safety and security organizations can quickly and automatically deliver feedback and training content that addresses the needs of each call taker, dispatcher and supervisor. Advanced coaching solutions enable authorized users to access training content and reports on results of training via customized Web dashboards or desktop tickers.

 

To learn more about best practices for using and the latest advancements in dispatch quality assurance call monitoring software, visit http://www.VPI-corp.com/911-Quality-Assurance-Management-Software.asp

 

Complimentary New Resource Guide: Next Generation 9-1-1 Communications Recording and Quality Assurance - Are You Ready?

Friday, March 5, 2010 by Patrick Botz

Can your current voice logging system handle NG9-1-1 communications? How effective is your dispatcher quality assurance call monitoring program?

Public safety emergency communications have never been on the threshold of greater change than they are today. PSAPs, both large and small, are now preparing for Next Generation 9-1-1 to keep up with the rapidly evolving world of mobile, multimedia and IP communications. This ground-breaking resource guide discusses what you need to look for in a new call logger and quality assurance system to meet the challenges arising from Next Generation 9-1-1.

 

Use the promo code VPIBLOG to download your complimentary resource guide, authored by analyst Dick Bucci from The PELORUS GROUP and sponsored by VPI, to learn:

 

Download your complimentary copy of the NG9-1-1 guide to learn about new digital call recording and VoIP recording software to effecitvely manage next-generation multimedia communications.The goals and benefits of NG9-1-1 and how to ensure a smooth transition.

The implications for public safety voice logging recorders - learn why the majority of voice call recording systems installed today cannot be cost-effectively scaled or modified to support NG9-1-1.

What to look for in new call recorder software to effectively meet NG9-1-1 requirements for IP communications support, open architecture, flexibility and scalability.

How a well-designed quality assurance program can help you monitor and improve the effectiveness of your NG9-1-1 program roll-out initiatives.

 

Get your complimentary copy of the resource guide "Next Generation 9-1-1 Communications Recording and Quality Assurance" today.

Call Logging Software: Managing the New Compliance Laws with the Latest Phone Call Logger Technologies

Thursday, February 18, 2010 by Lauren Hugues

Managing the New Compliance Laws with the Latest Call Logging SoftwareTechnologiesTelephone voice recording solutions are essential for recording agent-customer interactions and associated telephony and screen data. However, in this new age of cyber crime and identity theft, the inevitable emergence of strict regulations to help protect sensitive customer data has resulted in many organizations being forced to scramble to update or replace their existing phone audio recorder solutions in order to adhere to the latest legislative guidelines.
 

The PCI-DSS, a set of comprehensive requirements for enhancing payment account data security, was developed by the founding payment brands of the PCI Security Standards Council, including American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa Inc. International, to help facilitate the broad adoption of consistent data security measures on a global basis. Announced in January 2010, PCI-DSS requirement 3.2 states that organizations must not store sensitive authentication data subsequent to authorization – even if encrypted. Sensitive authentication data consists of magnetic stripe (or track) data, card validation code or value, and PIN data. This data is deemed particularly sensitive as it can be used by to generate fake payment cards and create fraudulent transactions. 

 

The PCI-DSS regulations are requiring organizations that handle credit card transactions over the phone to delete all archived recordings that contain sensitive authentication data. In order to comply with these new regulations, many organizations are having to delete all of these verbal receipts because the process of listening to the contents of potentially hundreds of thousands of call recordings would be cost prohibitive and labor intensive. Unfortunately, the many calls that do not contain sensitive data will also be deleted – calls that should be retained for quality assurance (QA) purposes and liability management.

VPI’s rules-driven call logging software solution enables organizations to maintain PCI compliance by identifying the calls that cannot be accessed and archived due to data sensitivity issues as well as those that can be safely archived for use in QA and liability management. The VPI CAPTURE PRO call recording software solution leverages unique desktop screen analytics that can detect events and data directly from application screens – such as an employee entering sensitive credit card authentication data into a field on screen – and tags them to the recorded interactions. This enables automated classification for deletion of all audio and video recording files containing sensitive authentication data and helps ensure compliance with the latest PCI-DSS regulations. And as an added bonus, VPI's phone audio recorder makes valuable non-sensitive data related to the interaction – such as call date/time, call direction, Customer ID, Agent ID, sales or collections amount, number of transfers, and hold time – is still kept and made available in interactive reports for analysis into key business issues and opportunities. For more information on VPI’s compliance call logging software solution, visit: http://www.VPI-corp.com/PCI

In addition to offering highly advanced screen analytics capabilities, VPI's phone call logger provides built-in end-to-end data encryption and key management, file watermarking, and detailed audit log reporting. Cost-effective and very affordable, VPI solutions enable organizations to gain a lasting advantage – with open standards and service oriented architecture, the VPI telephone voice recording solution has the flexibility to grow and evolve in order to adapt to your changing environment. VPI customers benefit from unsurpassed versatility and ROI as the unified platform supports virtually any PBX – digital or analog, TDM or VoIP, individually or blended – with a unified interface and industry standard file formats.

Call Recording Software: Can One Telephone Call Recorder Meet All Your Needs - Both Now and in the Future?

Wednesday, February 17, 2010 by Lauren Hugues

 

Call Recording Systems: Can one system meet all your needs - both now and in the future?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 Technologies – Now Doing Much More Than Ever Before

Wednesday, February 17, 2010 by Lauren Hugues

Voice Logging Technologies - Now Doing Much More Than Ever BeforeVoice 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.

Call Recording Software by VPI Enables Organizations to Affordably Record Contact Centers, Branch Offices and Home-Based Agents

Monday, February 15, 2010 by Patrick Botz
Call Recording Software by VPI Enables Organizations to Affordably Record Contact Centers, Branch Offices and Home-Based Agents

The contact center environment has evolved considerably over recent years. With the increased deployment of VoIP, home-based agents, and overseas outsourcing, organizations are benefitting from significant cost savings and efficiencies that were previously unattainable. However, in order to maximize performance, manage liability and ensure compliance, it’s crucial for organizations to implement an advanced, full time interactions recording solution, such as VPI’s communications software system.

VPI’s digital and IP call recording system was developed to reliably record 100 percent of call and data interactions in high-volume, single or multi-site environments of any size. Organizations are able to determine what to retain, for how long, and on which storage device by implementing flexible, intelligent business rules. The VPI call logging software can efficiently unify recording from any number of audio and data sources and multiple locations –TDM and VoIP telephony audio as a standard, while employee desktop screen recording, email and Web chat are optional. With centralized access and administration via secure Web-based interface – authorized users of the Cisco call recording solution can quickly and easily access call recordings and associated data from multiple system and locations – including home based agents – and create, review and send reports.

VPI’s telephone call recorder has been designed to guard data from unauthorized access with granular user and data security rules, comprehensive audit trails, and end-to-end and AES 256 encryption with key management. Every call within the VPI application is wartermarked in real time to ensure authenticity. VPI’s optional PCI Compliance Pack restricts access to calls with sensitive, personal information to help ensure compliance with PCI-DSS regulations.

VPI’s telephone voice recording system integrates seamlessly with the VPI EMPOWER suite of workforce optimization software solutions, including VPI PERFORMANCE, which offers real-time call center reporting and performance analytics and delivers vital performance information, highlighting areas where adjustments need to be made on an agent, group, queue or site basis. Managers can view real-time and historical performance metrics, consolidated across multiple systems and locations, which may include virtual contact centers and outsourced and home-based agents.

The integrated telephone call recorder and VPI PERFORMANCE call center performance management solution offers dynamic, Web-based call center reporting tools that allow authorized users to conveniently access, analyze and drill through data to quickly identify the root cause of problems or successes 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 allows management to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time with employee desktop dashboards, tickers and scorecards.In addition to successfully managing compliance, liability and quality in virtually any environment, VPI’s telephone recording software equips organizations 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 dissatisfied, poorly managed agents and the loss of high-value customers.

Telephone Call Recording Laws, Regulations and Best Practices for Ensuring Compliance: What You Need to Know to Avoid Costly Fines and Legal Fees

Tuesday, January 12, 2010 by Patrick Botz

Telephone Call Recording Laws and RegulationsDo you record or plan to record your calls and/or desktop screen activity? Do your employees discuss sensitive information over the phone? If so, there are serious telephone call recording laws and phone call recording regulations that you need to be aware of. To avoid costly violations and ensure customer credibility, you need to become familiar with the new and evolving digital call recording laws, voice call recording regulations, and industry standards that most profoundly impact organizations today. You should make a point of learning what you can do to avoid violating these call recording laws, and where to go when you need help. The information in this article on telephone call recording laws and regulations is not intended as legal advice. Always check with your legal counsel to learn more about how voice logging regulations can affect you and your organization. Let’s discuss some of the most common telephone call recording laws and phone call recording regulations impacting organizations today.

 

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS)

Established by American Express, Discovery Financial Services, MasterCard Worldwide, Visa International and JCB, PCI-DSS regulations are intended for organizations that accept credit cards and record those interactions with call recording equipment. The regulations forbid the insecure storage of unencrypted credit card numbers, PIN numbers, and other personal information in databases and digital call recording software systems. Digital call recording software systems should be able to identify, encrypt and restrict access to sensitive customer information from unauthorized users. According to the PELORUS Group, a leading independent market research and consultancy company in the financial services and telecommunications industries:

 

1.     Contact centers can easily become unsuspecting violators (of PCI-DSS compliance regulations) because of the practice of recording private customer information in data and voice call recording software systems.

2.     Unless agents are specifically authorized to see this information, their unrestricted access is a violation of PCI-DSS.

3.     You can avoid potential violations by investing in telephone recorder software that blocks or encrypts recordings that contain card numbers.

 

Health Insurance Portability and Protection Act (HIPPA)

The HIPAA Privacy Rule protects the privacy of individually identifiable health information. With regard to call recording laws and call recording regulations, it’s imperative that organizations have the ability to identify, restrict access to and encrypt specific interactions containing sensitive information from unauthorized users.

 

Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA)

Designed to eliminate abusive, deceptive, and unfair debt collection practices, the FDCPA mandates that collectors must identify themselves, including the name of their firm, and explain that the purpose of the call is to collect a debt. With regard to telephone call recording laws and regulations, all interactions must be day and time stamped, and all calls recorded in order to assess employee compliance.

 

Telemarketing Sales Rule

The Telemarketing Sales Rule prohibits sellers and telemarketers from making false or misleading statements. The Federal Communications Commission may assess a fine of up to $11,000 per violation. Seven pieces of information must be provided by the employee during the call - such as identity of the seller, the nature of the goods or services offered for sale, the full cost of all offers, etc. Download Your Complimentary Copy of the Telephone Call Recording Resource Guide: Critical Call Recording Laws, Regulations and Best Practices for Ensuring Compliance

 

Learn more about call recording laws and call recording regulations and how to avoid costly fines and legal fees with latest in analytics-driven phone call recording software – download your complimentary copy of the white paper “Call Recording Laws, Regulations and Best Practices for Ensuring Compliance,“ authored by renowned analyst Dick Bucci from The PELORUS Group at http://www.VPI-corp.com/Call-Recording-Laws