We were excited to be able to sponsor lunch for the U-Haul team and prizes for team members recognized in the following categories (based on interactions recorded with CallCopy software of course): Above and Beyond, Most Improved, Overcoming the Objections, Perfect Tone of Voice, and Sharp Listening.

Thank you to our fabulous customers for the opportunity to be a part of this exciting event!

As you enjoy the week and take part in a host of agent-appreciation events, remember to celebrate people skills with these six simple tips from customer services guru and people-skills coach Kate Nasser:

1) An authentic smile changes everything. On the phone, in person, and even the words you use in text, chat, emails, and your website design should smile at the customer.

Studies show that a physical smile can actually change the way you sound on the phone.  Use this technique to your advantage.

2) Treat people the way they want to be treated — not the way you want to be treated.

This is important to keep in mind as every customer is different!

3) Be the sun, not a thorn. Even with thorny difficult customers, be the sun.  Shine light on the problem to be solved and fix it.

There will always be difficult customers; remember to not take it personally and to shine on!

4) A plane flies well on auto-pilot mode. Customer service doesn’t! Adapt to each customer — personalize and localize including personality type, culture, geographic differences, and generational differences.

Not only is every customer unique, but every contact is unique is well.  Use all information at your disposal to create the best customer service experience possible – every time.

5) Empathize before you analyze! Show customers you care and they will care enough to help you help them.

In most cases, customers are more than willing to tell you what they want or need.  Listen to their suggestions and be considerate of any emotional responses.

6) Kindness transcends constraints. (Tristan Bishop) There are obstacles and challenges in customer service and technical support. Kindness to the customer ensures a continued bond while you work to overcome the challenges.

Kindness is key.  In customer service, in life.

Whether your organization performs manual or automated quality assurance (QA), call center coaching forms are an integral component of an overall QA program.

Developing Call Center Coaching Forms

There are several components you’ll want to consider when developing call center coaching forms for your organization.  For example, your call center coaching forms and the weighting of different sections should mirror your organization’s customer service goals and priorities.  In addition, ensure that all requirements are met by involving staff from different areas and levels of the organization.  Regardless of these special considerations, there are certain components that all call center coaching forms should include, such as:

• A section analyzing the opening and closing of the call.
• Space to define strengths and weaknesses associated with system knowledge, resolution skills, product knowledge and familiarity with business processes.
• A section reviewing the overall communication skills of the agent.
• An area to identify applicable best practices and up-training opportunities.

Because these requirements overlap from industry to industry, many companies choose to base their call center coaching forms on a pre-existing or sample form (CallCopy provides several sample forms in our Contact Center QA Guide).

Once a form is completed, review the results with the agent, either by scheduling time with the agent for a coaching session, or by using a tool like CallCopy to share the evaluation with the agent.  Follow up with the agent directly, or use our tracking tools to ensure that the agent has reviewed the content.

Why Use Call Center Coaching Forms

Ultimately, the end goal of any QA program should be to facilitate increased customer satisfaction.  In addition, call center coaching forms can help improve agent productivity, ensure better transaction quality and reduce enterprise risk.

Learn more:

• cc: Quality | Quality Management
• cc: Agent | Agent Coaching & Training
• Download our Contact Center QA Guide
• Download our Improving the Customer Experience with Peer-based QM Whitepaper

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.

According to the Columbus Dispatch:

“Mary Ann O’Garro said a request for records in her grandson’s case revealed that Franklin County Children Services recorded some of her phone conversations with the agency. […]

O’Garro and her attorney, Susan Eisenman of Upper Arlington, said the recordings are especially troubling because the O’Garros live in the state of Washington, whose phone-recording law requires consent from both parties. […]

Ohio requires the consent of just one of the parties. Federal law is single-consent, too, but observers say past cases have left it unsettled as to whether federal or stricter state laws apply. […]

State government doesn’t have a policy on recording calls, and a few agencies surveyed say they avoid the practice.”

Advanced call recording systems can block call recordings by certain area codes, preventing situations like this all together.

Additionally, as a best practice, agencies and employers can require anyone on the phone to give notice to their customers that the call is taking place on a recorded system.  A robust quality management program can help managers enforce these policies.

CallCopy helps businesses and agencies solve problems like this every day.

» Download our Recording Laws Whitepaper today to get more information and best practices

» Learn more about how CallCopy can help your business achieve and maintain compliance

Topics include:

• Benefits of the peer-based QM model.
• Peer-based evaluations and supervisor calibration.
• The ideal environment for peer-based QM.
• How one company, Elgia, leveraged CallCopy to re-invent its QM program and drive a superior customer experience.

Download the whitepaper here: http://www.callcopy.com/document-library/whitepapers/peer-based-quality-management

The report is aimed at helping “contact center and IT managers find the right product, at the right cost for their contact center, regardless of size”. From a CallCopy perspective, in addition to the independent analysis of our product suite, the customer satisfaction survey provided some very intriguing results. The survey put into numbers the fact that we’re meeting our mission to “provide the highest levels of quality to our customers”.

CallCopy scored above the industry average in each of the six survey categories, including a perfect 5.0 in Implementation. In addition, CallCopy tied for the highest score in the Overall Vendor category, with a score of 4.6. While these are very encouraging results, we’re not going to rest on our laurels. We’ll be striving to do even better in 2009!

A 10-page excerpt of the report is available for download at:
http://www.callcopy.com/documents/dmg.html

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!