Public Safety 9-1-1 leaders have tirelessly educated government law and budget makers about the dire need to update antiquated 9-1-1 communication systems (including recorders of emergency communications).  The calls for sustainable funding to pull that off were finally heard and acted on - the Next Generation 9-1-1 Advancement Act of 2012, signed by President Obama on February 22, 2012, is the first major step in that direction. The Act provides a one-time appropriation of $115 million for 9-1-1 implementation grants. Undoubtedly, this significant legislation is a positive move towards providing better service to all Americans who reach out to 9-1-1 in times of need.  See NENA’s website for more: http://www.nena.org/news/84644/

The 9-1-1 implementation coordination grants will fund training, IP networks and NG9-1-1 services and infrastructure. Both state and local entities are eligible grant recipients.  The passage of this Act is a testament to the hard work of the 9-1-1 industry.  "State and local 9-1-1 agencies are facing tremendous pressures, both from ever-tightening budgets and from outdated legal frameworks," said NENA Director of Government Affairs Trey Forgety. NG9-1-1 will allow Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) to receive text messages, pictures, video, and data, in addition to the voice calls they handle today. 

Recording, analysis and quality assurance (QA) is an inseparable element of this technology upgrade; technology and the architecture behind a new-generation VoIP-based NG9-1-1 recording system and QA solution will have a fundamental impact on a PSAP's future success.  The next PSAP communications recorder you invest in must have all the qualities that are important today – such as interoperability and easy integrations between heterogeneous PSAP applications and technologies - as well as the native ability to perform basic performance management operations and finally, the ability to conform to the evolving requirements of NG9-1-1.  Review the resource guide authored by well-respected industry analyst Pelorus “Next Generation 9-1-1 Recording and Quality Assurance – Are you Ready?” for more detail.

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.

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!

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!

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 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.

VPI, the premier global provider of contact center recording and analytics, quality assurance call monitoring and workforce optimization software solutions for enterprises, trading floors, government agencies, and emergency service providers, announced today that VPI EMPOWER has received a 2009 Product of the Year Award from Technology Marketing Corporation’s (TMC®) Customer Interaction Solutions magazine, the leading publication covering CRM, call centers and teleservices since 1982.

"I am pleased to honor VPI for its hard work and success. VPI has displayed true innovation and excellence in the development of its VPI EMPOWER suite of analytics-enhanced contact center recording, call center quality assurance and workforce optimization solutions, and is dedicated to improving the contact center experience as well as the ROI for companies that use them," said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC.

VPI EMPOWER is a powerful, modular suite of Web-based contact center recording software and contact center optimization solutions, comprised of applications for multimedia communications recording and contact center analytics, quality evaluation, electronic learning and call center coaching, and real-time call center performance management. VPI EMPOWER marks a radical departure from the conventional solutions currently available to contact centers. Built upon the foundation of VPI’s long-established, proven technologies, VPI EMPOWER leverages VPI Fact Finder™, a ground-breaking desktop screen analytics technology that automatically detects events and data directly from application screens being used by employees and tags them to appropriate points within recorded interactions. This enables automated classification and more meaningful, targeted quality assurance call monitoring focused on key business issues, such as customer churn, first contact resolution, missed up-sell opportunities, product issues, long hold and handle times, multiple transfers or escalations, and much more. VPI EMPOWER contact center workforce optimization software delivers a significant advantage in just weeks, with an easy-to-use product that requires minimal training.

"We are deeply gratified that VPI EMPOWER has been honored as Product of the Year for Exceptional Innovation by TMC’s Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine," said Patrick Botz, vice president of solutions marketing at VPI. "This prestigious award is a testament to VPI’s commitment to providing innovative, world-class digital and VoIP call recording, call center quality assurance, call center reporting and call center coaching solutions that enable organizations to rapidly and affordably maximize the potential and profitability of their customer contact center operations.
 

VoIP call recording software has finally come of age, offering the same advanced level of functionality and reliability as traditional recording systems. Organizations across the globe have recognized the tremendous benefits of VoIP communications and IP call recording software. New IP Communications platforms allow organizations to flatten, consolidate and extend their communications architecture. VoIP communications are also enabling a trend toward smaller, distributed contact centers.

The Significant Benefits of VoIP Communications
Reduced operational costs are often one of the major drivers for investing in VoIP communications and VoIP call recording software. In a recent survey conducted by IDC – a global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets – 63.4 percent of business respondents reported the need to cut costs as the primary reason for upgrading to a VoIP service. Overall, IDC estimates that a VoIP system can reduce telephony-related expenses by 30 percent. In a traditional TDM environment, moving and adding telephone lines can be expensive. For example, the average employee moves desks once per year and the cost to move a traditional phone is $75.14 per change, and changes can take days to complete. Whereas, in a VoIP telephony world, moves, adds and changes can often be performed via a single Web-based software interface.

Enhanced disaster recovery is also a significant benefit to VoIP communications and new VoIP recording software systems. Prior to the advent of VoIP communications and IP recording software, the ability to re-route communications during a natural disaster had been achieved via the services of multinational corporations with the budget to build alternative circuits to reroute their traffic. However, the flexibility built into IP-based voice communications has given small businesses access to the same disaster response capabilities as large corporations.

Today’s more advanced IP recording software systems also have tremendous benefits versus traditional recording systems. If planned and implemented properly, centralized voice call recording can remove the need to implement recording capabilities at remote sites and provides for more efficient use of IP call recording resources.

VoIP Call Recording Software - What You Need to Know
There are several things to consider when implementing a new VoIP call recording software system. Voice call recording systems should use open standards and protocols and be able to adapt to evolving needs in order to interoperate with future technologies without replacement. Proprietary, hardware-based call recording systems are becoming a thing of the past.

Organizations are embracing the many benefits and capabilities offered by new VoIP communications platforms. However, all too often, the ability of their VoIP call recording software system to fully leverage those capabilities is somewhat lacking. Some voice call recording software systems can only record audio in very specific environments and have great difficulty capturing all of the important call information or metadata necessary to easily search for and find important calls. Some IP call recording software systems simply hit a wall and cannot record IP telephone, radio and multimedia communications in certain environments. It’s crucial to implement an advanced VoIP recording software system that can adapt and evolve as needs and technologies change, as well as extensive functionality to fully maximize the capabilities of the latest VoIP platforms.

To learn more about the latest developments and advancements in VoIP call recording software, visit http://www.vpi-corp.com/Call-Recorder.asp