This call is being recorded

Until a few years ago, contact center agents were monitored only infrequently. But advances in technology mean that more and more agents are being recorded and monitored almost constantly.

“You may hear that phrase ‘This call may be recorded for quality purposes,’” says Patrick Botz, senior vice president for VPI, a vendor of software for contact center technology based in Camarillo, CA. “Well, now, it's going toward ‘This call will be recorded for quality purposes.’” Not that the messages actually say that, he adds, “but a lot of companies today are recording all their calls.”

Many contact center operators are taking advantage of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), the falling prices of system memory, and the increasing flexibility of digital archiving to record and monitor their agents' every move. This is creating more opportunities for better customer support, better training, and better management, experts say. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's also creating more opportunities for mismanagement, and some consultants say that the technology must be deployed carefully to avoid making agents — and customers — more unhappy than they would be if the technology weren't in place.

VICTORY THROUGH VOIP

VoIP makes it more cost-effective to record calls than ever before. “You can record a lot more extensions… in one system than you can in a traditional environment,” Botz says. With a traditional system you could maybe record 96 agents at once; VoIP now makes it possible to monitor 256.

The digital technology creates more flexibility in other ways as well. Some systems, for instance, make it possible for an agent or a manager to start recording even once a call is under way. Jim Puchbauer, senior product marketing manager for FrontRange Solutions, a Dublin, CA-based supplier of integrated management software solutions, says it is also possible to record all the way back to the beginning of a call even if the call was not originally supposed to be recorded. FrontRange integrates voice solutions with another of its products, the GoldMine sales contact software package.

Of course, adding more data to the hard drive isn't necessarily desirable. But vendors say that the technology to monitor calls is keeping pace with the technology to record them. By using these new systems, the manager now has an increasingly clear view of the whole center, say proponents of the technology. These days, some systems have the capacity to view not only telephone calls but other kinds of records as well, including e-mail and instant messaging.

What's more, Botz says, many centers are using automated surveys to monitor performance. Following their call, customers are transferred to an automated survey and asked to rate how satisfied they were with their service.

SPEECH ANALYTICS

Perhaps the tool creating the biggest buzz in call centers at the moment is speech analytics, software that allows users to track recordings for certain phrases. Companies seem most interested in using the technology to ensure that statements necessary for legal compliance are being read and that phrases in a script that are supposed to be repeated actually are.

The technology isn't perfect yet, according to Botz, but “it's getting more and more accurate almost every month. Right now, I would say, it's between 80% and 90% accurate.”

The program first converts the recording to a transcript, and then it reviews the transcript to find instances of a particular word not just in a single call but in every call, to within a high degree of certainty, Botz explains.

Some contact centers also use speech analytics to help “bucket” calls into particular categories. For instance, if you want to rate how consumers felt about a call, analytics engines can be more accurate than agents in gauging their satisfaction, Botz says.

But Kathleen Peterson, founder/chief vision officer of PowerHouse Consulting in Bedford, NH, is skeptical that computers' ability to analyze calls will ever eliminate the need for human managers. A speech analytics system, for example, may flag calls in which the tone of voice is raised but ignore a conversation spoken in a calm tone — even if the customer and agent are both exasperated.

“The developers are trying to suggest that because of all their analysis they can identify just through these indicators that they know a bad call when they see one,” Peterson says. “But there's much more passive aggression than there is flat-out screaming.”

DATA MINING

Having all this information available is making it easier for managers to understand more and more about the overall performance of the contact center, experts say. And some new systems allow managers to examine what is and isn't working in much greater detail than was ever possible in the past.

“If you see that your Group 32 is doing a lot worse than the overall average, you can drill down through Group 32 and find out exactly which team in that group is doing badly,” Botz says, “and then you can drill down through that team... down to which agents, down to which calls were bad and which calls resulted in no sales.”

VPI's Activ! Performance Suite, like many other systems, is available on a modular basis and as an add-on within a VoIP environment. Other established suppliers of contact center monitoring software include Verint, NICE Systems, and Witness Systems; eLoyalty and Cisco are also making aggressive plays in the market.