A Guide To Making The Most Of  Recording & Quality Monitoring Solution
When it comes to recording and quality monitoring technologies, contact center professionals are constantly bombarded with misleading information and confusing technical jargon. As a result, they often end up investing in a technology that isn't compatible with the specific requirements of the contact center's IT infrastructure, operational needs, or long-term growth strategy. In a competitive marketplace, there's little room for error. Compliance regulations get tighter every year. Demands for increased first call resolution, lower agent attrition rates, and greater productivity and profitability weigh heavily on contact center professionals. When the time comes to make a significant investment in a recording and quality monitoring technology, making the right decision can be daunting. That said, let's examine four of the most common mistakes made with regard to the selection of recording and quality monitoring technologies.

Mistake No. 1:

Lynn Grogan
Product Marketing Manager
Voice Print International

"We only need selective, part-time recording to manage quality at our call center. Other than for compliance purposes, full-time call recording isn't really of any use to us."

Selective recording is severely limited to the extent that the insights generated are skewed; they're based on the analysis of averages. These averages are usually derived from just a small percentage of recorded interactions – from five percent to ten percent of the entire call volume. Statistically, an average performance only would be evaluated. This means that there's an extremely high likelihood of completely missing the best and the worst interactions. However, if properly identified, these two groups of interactions are of the most interest and value to management due to the fact that they make the greatest impact on business performance – both positive and negative.

What's more, traditional selective recording systems force you to pre-define schedules based on which calls are to be recorded and retained. As this has to be determined in advance of the telephone interaction and doesn't allow for any logic related to the call's final disposition, this limits your options to only a partial snapshot of the entire picture. Worse, if performance evaluation requirements change the criteria for call selection or you suspect an integrity or fraud issue, you can't go back and retrieve calls that were never recorded in the first place.

Today's organizations are starting to understand that in order to be able to develop a good quality monitoring program, they need to be able to capture much more information. Full time recording with 100 percent records retention (or selective retention based on business rules) provides an accurate representation of activities as well as 100% insurance for compliance and liability management.

Mistake No. 2:
"Quality Assurance is just about scoring & training our agents."

Once considered just a basic business tool, the term "Quality Assurance" now pertains to much more than a simple service observe function and the subsequent "post mortem" analysis of agent behaviors. In order to compete in today's harsh economic climate, modern contact centers are equipping themselves with third generation quality assurance applications that tie performance of the call center to the overall business issues.

Redefining "Quality"
Third generation quality assurance applications bare little resemblance to the very basic quality monitoring tools of a few years ago. These powerful technologies have redefined the very meaning of the word "quality" in the contact center. They are proactive in nature – from a store of hundreds of thousands of recordings, they can automatically identify problems or trends the instant they become apparent, and then promptly alert the appropriate parties, prompting a host of automatic and management-triggered actions.

Just from the very narrow perspective of agent training and coaching, modern quality monitoring solutions offer automated capabilities that reach far beyond the walls of the contact center. In addition to enabling contact center managers to deliver multimedia training to agent desktops on a schedule- or rules-driven basis, track evaluation results over time, and quickly identify training weaknesses and flaws and implement prompt remedial measures, the new eLearning and analytics applications enable management to gauge the effectiveness of sales and service tools, such as scripting, training, calling lists, etc.

From Actionable Intelligence To Actualized Intelligence
From global enterprises to mid-sized contact centers, some of the latest business analytics applications can collect data and present real-time and historical performance information to agents, managers and executives within the call center environment. Key performance indicators, quality scores, scheduling information and service level indicators can be distributed to call center personnel using desktop dashboards, Web-based consolidated reporting, and TV monitor display systems. A superior analytics solution can monitor both telephony and business metrics in real-time – providing the tools to leverage that data not only into actionable business intelligence, but also into Actualized Intelligence, and dramatically enhance contact center performance. For example, by using an analytics application, a marketing executive can be automatically alerted to the fact that a specific marketing campaign is resulting in an above-average number of sales and drill down and listen to the individual agent/customer calls that have resulted in a sale to discover what the customer is responding to and why. This information can be used to strengthen and focus future campaigns, thus increasing revenue through highly successful, efficient marketing efforts.

Speech mining and analytics applications have also played a huge role in revolutionizing quality in the contact center by enabling organizations to understand what customers want, and how their agents are responding to customers. Speech recognition technologies listen to all conversations and keep track of what is being said, allowing contact centers to mine conversations and quickly identify call trends that until now were too costly and time consuming to uncover. Automated call scoring systems can run in the background alongside recording equipment and automatically generate agent evaluation reports.

Mistake No. 3:
"Open Architecture is standard these days. All the major vendors offer systems built around open standards and they all have the same degree of flexibility in integrations and scalability."

True open architecture is a beautiful – and rare – thing. Few vendors can honestly say that their systems are truly "open". Of course, most will claim that their systems are built around open standards, and only after some pretty aggressive interrogation will you finally get them to admit that this isn't really the case! For example, you'll find that some of their hardware components are proprietary and/or their voice and video files are proprietary – making them difficult to share and integrate with your other applications, thus increasing your long-term dependence on the vendor.

In order to achieve ease of integration with your third party applications, it's imperative to invest in a system with open file structures and a SQL database that's ODBC compliant, which stands for "Open Database Connectivity." Without these, you won't be able to access your call and screen files directly from any software application other than the one that came with your quality monitoring system.

Proprietary hardware and software limit a product's ability to interoperate with your existing and future applications and data. You may find that when the time comes to add functionality, or to change the way you record, or you want to leverage new integrations or storage strategies, your vendor will inform you that you'll need to "upgrade," which really means you need to re-architect your infrastructure.

Mistake No. 4
"All recording and quality monitoring systems require pricey ongoing maintenance contracts and costly professional services for customization."

Wrong. Some of the biggest companies provide the poorest levels of service – they're rigid and inflexible, unable to meet the unique needs of their customers. Such companies also have a tendency to play favorites – they will bend over backwards to service their biggest clients. However, if your organization's account doesn't quite meet the criteria for their "Premier League" of service, when you call them for support or maintenance you'll soon discover that you're far from their top priority.

Reasonable Expectations
When you invest in a recording and quality monitoring system, you're entitled to have certain "reasonable" expectations from that investment. It's reasonable to expect to be able to perform basic maintenance functions in-house, using your own personnel – without being forced to purchase ridiculously expensive proprietary components from your vendor. This is why it's crucial to invest in a system that leverages true open architecture.

Another reasonable expectation? Well, once again, it harks back to open architecture. All too frequently, instead of having the freedom to access recorded interactions from existing or future in-house CRM or Workforce Management applications, buyers are forced to utilize the vendor's proprietary software application. They end up enslaved to their vendor – trapped in an ongoing cycle of very expensive customization, upgrades, and maintenance. With open file formats and a non-proprietary platform, this is not an issue because the data formats are standard. In addition, your vendor should provide you with end-user accessible APIs (Application Programming Interface), and Active X tools that will enable your IT personnel to easily achieve all such integrations.

About Lynn Grogan:
Lynn Grogan is a Product Marketing Manager at Voice Print International, specializing in call center quality management and performance optimization.

About Voice Print International:
Voice Print International is a provider in the digital voice recording and quality monitoring industry. Voice Print's software-based, open architecture design offers unprecedented data management capabilities, seamless integrations, unlimited scalability and simple upgrades. Your information will never be compromised with proven, full-time recording capabilities and advanced security. Voice Print offers extensive records management options – including variable archiving and search and playback via multiple portals for use across an enterprise.