With this in mind, CallCopy has partnered with Dick Bucci of Pelorus Associates to bring you 10 Secrets to Boosting First Call Resolution, a new eBook loaded with best practices on how to improve satisfaction and cut costs through increased FCR.

“First call resolution is an essential metric for any best-in-class contact center for two simple reasons: it drives customer satisfaction and reduces operating costs.”

This eBook provides an inside look at the many benefits associated with increased FCR, alongside real-world techniques on how to do so, including steps you can take to measure FCR, ways to identify the causes of repeat calls, insight on how FCR relates to customer satisfaction, and, of course, the 10 secrets to boosting FCR.

So, whether your focus is on the bottom line, keeping customers happy, or striking a balance between the two, chances are your organization can benefit from improving FCR.  Download the eBook now to get started.

» Download 10 Secrets to Boosting First Call Resolution

When the brunt of the storms rendered other Columbus, Ohio offices (and offices across the country, for that matter), non-operational, we were able to work from home thanks to our communications infrastructure and our own CallCopy software.  As the Avaya Insights blog points out, snow days don’t mean what they used to….

For many organizations, hazardous weather conditions have historically meant that when school districts close, parents are forced to either try to find a babysitter at the last minute or take the day off to watch their kids. Inclement weather also traditionally means longer, more dangerous commutes for employees, shorter work days, and above all else, lost productivity.

But that was then, and this is now: our software can record our work-at-home IP phones, and our tools can be accessed remotely via VPN. To ensure our continued operations, we utilize the same technologies that our customers rely upon.

One customer leveraging this functionality is Mohawk Flooring. Using CallCopy software alongside their Avaya Unified Communications infrastructure, Mohawk was able to ensure business continuity despite a crippling ice storm impacting their Dallas, Texas facility several months ago. Agents were able to work from home during the ordeal, eliminating risky commutes and decreased productivity.

To remain competitive, businesses need to be well-equipped to handle inclement weather or even more extreme scenarios such as a pandemic, flu outbreak or natural disaster.

Fortunately, CallCopy’s solutions allow businesses to rest easy knowing that their employees can maintain productivity regardless of the situation. Our contact recording and screen capture technology allows organizations to manage the performance of remote workers – so they remain both safe and productive.

Many organizations understand that there is value in implementing a speech analytics solution, but struggle with defining best practices and objectives associated with an effective program.

Speech Analytics Best Practices:

1. Identify key words and phrases that matter.
   Your organization is unique.  Make sure you define the key words and phrases that make the most sense for your organization and align with your business goals.  Remember to include names of competitors, phrases indicative of decreased customer satisfaction (such as “I want to cancel,” “speak to your supervisor” or “frustrated”) and other service-level KPIs.  If needed, fine-tune the software to recognize non-standard words such as jargon, slang and foreign words.  Also, be sure to include other departments in the process, as they will be able to provide additional insight into the words and phrases important to other areas of the organization.
2. Share the knowledge.
   One of the benefits of speech analytics is that it allows you to extend the business intelligence gathered within your contact center throughout the entire organization.  In effect, this means tearing down the virtual wall between the call center and other areas of the organization, and allowing the knowledge gained during customer contacts to be shared cross-departmentally (think sales, marketing, collections, fraud and other departments).  Historically, this information may have been lost or communicated less effectively as agents are pressured to move on to the next call in queue.
3. Coach and train your agents.
   Use the key word/phrase mining and silence detection capabilities in your speech analytics software to improve processes and identify agent coaching or up-training opportunities by understanding trends and underlying issues. For example, extended pauses by the agent could indicate a need for additional product training.
4. Mine all of your calls, not just some of them.
   By mining 100 percent of your calls, you will be able to pinpoint the occurrence of those critical key words and phrases to give you a better (and more accurate) frame of reference while enabling a full view of corporate insight. This is particularly important when monitoring for uncommon, yet critically important phrases that may be missed when only a subset of calls is mined.
5. Listen to your customers.
   Your customers give you information with every call.  An effective speech analytics solution allows your organization to zero in on the critical pieces of information, and extract meaningful data without wasting time or resources on the less significant segments.  Analyzing and understanding this data allows you to makes actionable business decisions based on the wants and needs of your customer base.

Ultimately, speech analytics best practices can help your organization improve customer satisfaction through agent coaching and up-training opportunities, improved process adherence, trend and key word /phrase identification and extendible business information.  Applying speech analytics best practices to your organization will allow you to better understand your customers by providing you with valuable insight, and the tools needed to turn that insight into critical business intelligence.

» Learn more about CallCopy’s speech analytics solution.

“[Speech analytics] gives us information that we had no other way of getting,” she says. “The only other way we had of getting it was to have our agents write up these conversations or have phone recordings transcribed. And that was prohibitively expensive….”

“Our customers tell us what they want and it falls onto the deaf ears of agents who are being rushed to move on to the next call. Speech analytics doesn’t get rushed.”

These comments speak to the value that speech analytics solutions offer. Phonetics-based speech engines can constantly extract data from  all contact recordings, searching for valuable nuggets of information that provide powerful data for many business units in an organization, not just the contact center. Rather than relying on front-line agents reporting information ad hoc, or asking supervisors and quality management staff to report and analyze intelligence gathered from reviewed calls, speech analytics allows for constant querying of critical business data.

• DMG has published a detailed report examining the market:
  2009-2010 Speech Analytics Market Report and Consulting Services
• Visit CallCopy’s Speech Analytics Page for more information

It is not hard to see why ShoreTel has enjoyed such steady growth.  The team that put the event together were excellent hosts, and the channel partners were very enthusiastic.  I know they say “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” but in this case I’m sure hoping the enthusiasm and success we saw last week goes global!

For our current and prospective ShoreTel distributors, we are excited to meet with you and demonstrate our technology.  Our three ShoreTel-certified call recording solutions are suited for small business as well as enterprise call centers.  We will demo cc: Discover’s call and screen recording, as well as our robust suite of quality monitoring tools.  We will also have information available for CallCopy Essential, our new recorder specially packaged for small call centers that need VoIP call recording.

In most cases, station side recording is preferred.  One key factor is that with trunk recording you are not able to record PBX calls.  For example, if one employee calls another employee, that call does not cross your inbound / outbound trunks and cannot be recorded via trunk tap.  With station-side recording, all internal calls can be recorded as well as other general inbound/outbound traffic.  

With station-side recording it is also easier to segment the calls, especially if you do not have a computer-telephony integration (CTI) module active on your ACD/PBX (TSPAI, JTAPI, TAPI, etc.).  The advantage in splitting the calls out is that a customer may call one department, and get transferred to another department.  Since two agents are handling the call, and recordings are commonly used for quality monitoring on your agents, having two recordings is preferred so the agents can be evaluated independently, and so you can permission access to the recordings differently.  You may not want a billing department supervisor to hear a tech support call and vice versa.

This kind of segmentation can be accommodated through a trunk-tap, but without CTI data this is done using SMDR information, which is not available until after the call has torn down and may not always be available in enough time for accurate use.  This is especially true if SMDR is being used to trigger a recording start or stop and not just to update recordings with details like ANI, DNIS, agent extension, or queue description.  Also, different switches may have limitation on how trunk channels are tracked and reported, making it difficult to match SMDR and even CTI data to recordings when a call has been transferred several times.

Most CTI-driven active integrations, such as Avaya DMCC (CMAPI), Nortel DMS, and Cisco JTAPI will behave like a station-side recorder.  This is also the same with passive VoIP recording (packet sniffing).  One exception is the ShoreTel TAPI/WAV integration, which behaves like a trunk recorder in the sense that is does not deliver audio for PBX calls; however you do have the ability to effectively separate recordings for each agent leg of the call.

Perhaps the biggest downside to station side recording is the wiring.  Station side recording can be a passive tap /cross connect at the 110-or 66-block in your telecom wiring.  Depending on what stations are to be recorded, you may also be able to do a split on a full amphenol cable between the PBX and the punch down blocks, which can be a cleaner wiring job. 

With analytics, the real value is not just finding a keyword or phrase (word spotting), but in understanding the context in which that key word or phrase is used.  For example, key word spotting may tell you when a competitor’s name is mentioned, but what you really need to know is why that competitor’s name is mentioned.  True speech analytics does this, looking at the surrounding language and determining if there are indicators for churn or praise, for instance.  There is a big difference in a customer saying “I am leaving you to go to competitor X” as opposed to “I am staying with you because you are so much better than competitor X.”  The competitor’s name is mentioned in both circumstances, but the data has little meaning until you can determine why it was mentioned.  If you are not able to answer the latter question, you are missing the value afforded through speech analytics and you’ll end up swimming directionless in a sea of data.

One if the biggest misconceptions I’ve come across is the tendency to confuse speech anlytics with a dictation machine.  Training a technology to understand your voice for dictation is very different from a technology that understands millions of voices, each with different accents, colloquialisms, and vocal undertones.  The variation in the voices and the increased vocabulary raises the complexity exponentially, which means more servers, processors, and time to complete the analysis.  Speech analytics is not yet to the point where you can confidently “read” the full content of a recorded call.  And if you could, would you want to?  Remember, spoken language is different from written language.  You do not have the benefit of punctuation, tonal inflections (such as sarcasm), and general grammar.  Sometimes your ear is the best tool for the job!

Commenting on the awards and the winners, Raj Wadhwani, President of ContactCenterWorld.com added, “It is clear that so many companies in the industry deserve recognition and we raise our hats to them – congratulations. These are the vendors whom we should make sure make our short list when we look for solutions because clearly they have very satisfied customers.”

We are proud to accept this award.  The dedication we put forth to provide our customers with the highest quality products and services pays off when they show their appreciation like this.  Thanks to all of our customers who voted for us! 

It all starts with an evaluation of the contact center’s current operations.  To take it from the top, is it a sales center, a support center, or both?  For the sales center, the biggest returns come from coaching and training, which helps to improve baseline conversion rates as well as ticket value through better upsell or cross-sell promotions.  For the service center, the return is focused more tightly on KPI’s such as first call resolution and a more stable, predictable average handling time, both of which make it easier to forecast call load and ultimately serve to drive down the total workload.

For our customers who do not operate as traditional call centers, compliance and dispute resolution top the list.  A single dispute at a trading firm can easily reach six figures.  We have credit union clients who have been able to gain a full return in a matter of weeks by using their CallCopy system to track down potential fraudulent activities and stop those activities before they impact the business.