Highly Anticipated 4th Annual Call Center Optimization Forum Will Provide Contact Center Professionals with Groundbreaking Strategies and Proven Best Practices to Boost Performance and Profitability

A full schedule of cities and dates was released today for the highly anticipated 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum (http://www.OptimizeYourCallCenter.com). The fourth annual event, which has garnered rave reviews from industry experts and attendees alike, will be hosted by the Call Center Network Group (CCNG), and Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC), the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP) and CRMXchange, and sponsored by VPI, Cicero, Pipkins, FurstPerson and Mindshare Technologies – pioneers in the development of best-of-breed call center optimization technologies. The nationwide series of educational seminars is tailored for call center professionals challenged with keeping up with the latest performance optimization strategies, techniques and solutions. In an effort to maintain a free and open exchange, the Forum is open to end-users only – registrations submitted by non-sponsoring vendors and consultants will not be accepted.

“Over the last three years, we have been delighted by the remarkable success of the Call Center Optimization Forum,” said David Hadobas, president and CEO at CCNG. “We’ve diligently maintained contact with attendees in order to ensure that they’ve had the most rewarding experience possible and we’ve been deeply gratified to hear their success stories upon having implemented the strategies and best practices learned at our events.” Hadobas went on to explain that attendee feedback is crucial to the success of future events. “We listen to our attendees and act upon their opinions and advice. As a result, the agenda for the 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum is more informative and engaging than ever before.” In addition to the event’s various educational seminars and workshops, attendees that register and attend will receive many additional benefits, including a one-year full CCNG individual membership (a $150 value), connection to a 90-minute Call Center School Online Training Class of the attendee’s choice (a $275 value) and a registration to the 2011 CRMXchange Virtual Contact Center Conference.

Attendees will learn how to fully maximize the value of key contact center solutions for pre-hire assessment and simulation, workforce forecasting and scheduling, quality monitoring and performance management. They will also discover the importance of implementing the latest solutions for customer experience management and post-contact surveying and customer feedback. With support from leading call center industry networking and educational organizations including CCNG (Call Center Network Group), The Call Center School, CRMXchange, QATC and SWPP, the 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum seminars will outline breakthrough strategies and techniques that can be used to exceed customer expectations, raise performance standards, intelligently reduce costs and achieve attendees' personal career goals. The seminars will reveal powerful new, cost-effective ways to hire the right employees, set and track the right performance objectives, accurately forecast workload and schedules, improve quality of service, measure and boost customer satisfaction, and win the support of top executives.

Due to limited availability, early registration is recommended in order to guarantee a place at any of the following Call Center Optimization Forum seminars:  

CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA (April 7^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Charlotte

WASHINGTON DC (June 2^nd) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/WashingtonDC

OMAHA, NEBRASKA (July 14^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Omaha

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS (August 8^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Boston

ORLANDO, FLORIDA (September 15^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Orlando

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (November 10^th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Las-Vegas

To register or for additional information on the upcoming 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum seminars, please visit http://www.OptimizeYourCallCenter.com.

About Call Center Optimization Forum

The Call Center Optimization Forum is a worldwide series of educational seminars tailored for call center professionals challenged with keeping up with the latest performance optimization strategies, techniques and solutions. Hosted by the Call Center Network Group (CCNG), CRMXchange, QATC and SWPP, and sponsored by VPI, Cicero Pipkins, FurstPerson and Mindshare Technologies – pioneers in the development of best-of-breed call center optimization technologies – the event is designed for executives, managers and IT decision-makers who need to stay informed about the latest industry trends, best practices, and rapidly evolving contact center optimization technology. Attendees will have the unique opportunity to learn about industry best practices from multiple experts in the field at one time and see demonstrations of the latest advancements in call center technology. To learn more and register to attend, visit: http://www.OptimizeYourCallCenter.com.

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."

VPI invites you to download this insightful Frost & Sullivan authored white paper to learn how advanced call center performance management and contact center analytics solutions and integrated call center coaching and training tools can identify and address employee skill gaps and deliver the right information at the right time - enhancing performance and driving greater effectiveness in meeting customer needs.

Download your copy of the complimentary white paper authored by premier research analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, to learn how to:

• Make Better Decisions with Real-Time Information

• Provide Real Time Metrics to Motivate and Empower Employees to Improve

• Achieve Consolidated Reporting from Multiple Systems and Locations

• Drill Down Through Dashboards and Reports to Identify the Root Cause of Problems

• Ensure Alignment of Operational Objectives with Corporate Goals

• Benefit from attractive ROI and Quantifiable Call Center Optimization Benefits

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!

Learn How Desktop Screen Analytics Can Improve Your Contact Center Operations and Customer Satisfaction Faster and More Affordably Than You Ever Thought Possible.

As the economy starts to recover, contact centers are being asked to continue to reduce their operating expenses while further optimizing the customer experience - without making major resource investments. Desktop screen contact center analytics is a new, practical, easy-to-implement solution to this challenge. Enterprise and contact center managers who want to rapidly and cost effectively identify insights about business processes, call center quality assurance, customer needs and agent performance issues should seriously consider desktop screen contact center analytics.
 

This white paper offers valuable insights and advice that can help your organization survive and thrive in the year ahead.

Download your complimentary white paper at http://www.VPI-corp.com/Screen-Analytics authored by prestigious industry analyst and research firm DMG Consulting, to learn how:

• Desktop screen analytics can rapidly identify broken business processes, customer issues, and call center coaching and training needs by targeted quality assurance call monitoring of your call recordings, automatically categorized by customer names, IDs, sales values and more.

• Screen analytics can change your contact center from reactive to proactive with automated notifications based on agent screen activity - identify "at-risk" customers while there is still an opportunity to retain them.

• Near-real time insights and views into your most important customer interactions will reveal the path to improved First Contact Resolution (FCR), decreased service costs, increased revenue, and reduced risk.

• Screen analytics can greatly enhance the accuracy of speech analytics applications by providing contextual information.

Phone 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

Dispatch 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

Telephone 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 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.