Logging and monitoring technologies: How to buy and why

Every customer contact center has a number of reasons to record transactions. Think your call center may be different? Ask yourself the following questions.

Is your organization subject to compliance requirements from any level of governmental or regulatory agency?

Is it important that you limit risk or liability regarding transactions or the exchange of information?

Are you concerned about the quality of service your agents provide your customers?

Is the customer experience important to your company's strategic goals and its bottom line?

It's a good bet that most or all of these requirements apply to your situation. In today's business environment, all companies are focused on providing superior customer service... or should be. If you intend to purchase recording equipment to address these issues, it's best to start by defining the objectives of your call center.

Are you selling something or providing a service? Are you providing information or offering customer support? Are money or other assets being transferred? Or, is your call center performing all of these activities? Recording these events satisfies a number of objectives, all of which fall into two categories: "transaction verification" and "quality monitoring."

Transaction Verification

This category applies especially to financial industries such as banking, investment and insurance and firms trading in securities, commodities, utilities and other financial instruments, all regulated by the NASD and the SEC. Recording not only helps meet the compliance requirements set out by the NASD and the SEC, it also protects the bank, as well as consumers and investors, by being able to settle disputes quickly and definitively.

Transaction verification is important in a wide range of other industries, among them telecommunications, where the FCC closely regulates corporate interactions with consumers. For example, when consumers are asked to switch from one long-distance service provider to another, that decision to switch must be verified by a third party. Recording consumer transactions in compliance with requirements set out by the FCC can eliminate accusations of "baiting and switching."

Reducing Company Risk

There are many more examples that show the importance of transaction verification. For instance, one of the largest North American suppliers of ready-mix cement records phone orders specifying the volume and grade of cement. Imagine how much money is at stake when thousands of tons of pre-mixed cement arrive on a job site and it's the wrong grade? For this company, it's essential to determine who made the mistake.

Savings In Liability Insurance costs

Insurance providers recognize the value of using voice recording and, therefore, it's a widely accepted practice in the industry. Many insurers save considerable sums on liability insurance once voice recording is employed. For many businesses, owning a voice recording system is not unlike owning a building security system or a home security system. Voice recording systems can pay for themselves in just two years, based solely on liability insurance cost reduction.

Quality Assurance

The demand for quality assurance has fueled significant growth in call centers today. Datamonitor predicts a compound annual growth rate of 60 percent for quality assurance solutions to the year 2003. Not only are corporations recording samples of conversations between agents and customers, they are also looking at agent-PC interaction via desktop screen capture. By providing technology that can replay synchronized voice and screen sessions, today's quality management systems can recreate the entire agent session. They also provide online evaluation and automated reporting to pinpoint call center training requirements.

How To Buy

Once you have confirmed the need to record by identifying what to record, how do you select the right solution? Different recording techniques satisfy different requirements. Here's a general breakdown of recording options.

Full-time recording (or "logging") records all the calls, all the time. This method best applies to compliance and verification industries such as banking, trading, insurance, utility, etc.

Selective recording, or recording some of the call, some of the time, applies to verifying specific transactions that can be scheduled, but not all consumer interactions. It is also known as "event-based" recording.

Recording on demand (ROD) is initiated by the agent or supervisor and applies to verifying specific transactions.

Quality monitoring involves gathering a representative sample of call agents' voice and screen sessions for performance evaluation.

It is also important to know that there are three major options in which a voice recorder can interface with your system for recording.

Trunk side means the recorder is directly connected to the trunks leading into the PBX/ACD. It applies best to full-time recording of all agents.

Extension side records from the phone extension and can be analog or digital. This application works best with full-time recording of specific extensions.

Service observation recording is performed via a dedicated recording connection using the service observation feature. The supervisor typically uses the service observer port to conference into agent calls. This application works best with selective recording and quality monitoring because it permits a small percentage of calls to be recorded and requires fewer channels to record all agents.

The CTI Factor

Computer-telephony integration (CTI) allows voice recorders to make intelligent decisions about when and what to record. With CTI, voice recording systems can "tag" calls with additional information to facilitate location and retrieval. The ACD provides real-time information to the recorder via the CTI server. This includes call details such as dialed number identification service (DNIS) or Caller LD. (ANI, or automatic number identification), IVR

(interactive voice response) activity, agent I.D., position and extension. Any of these can be used as a parameter for initiating voince and/or screen recording as well as conducting specific queries for retrieval. For example, you can choose to record all calls routed to agent Smith (wherever he may be seated) coming in from a specific toll-free number. One week, one month or even one year later all those calls can be retrieved using the same parameters.

We can think of CTI as the glue that binds a variety of call center applications within the computertelephony environment. These applications can include IVR (interactive voice response) units, intelligent call routing, screen pop and predictive dialers. CTI also allows these applications to use corporate databases. For example, cutomer codes from a corporate database can be linked to telephone calls. This allows the user of a CTI voice recording application to search for all calls related to those data, such as customer account numbers or Social Security numbers.

Enough Storage, When You Need It

Another key area to consider when determining your recording solution is storage. You need to determine how much storage is required for online, immediate access, and at what point you start to archive your data. Archived data can take longer to retrieve because the tape may need to be placed in the logger for playback. However, a good archival system will tell you, after you enter your search parameters, exactly which tape to insert into the logger.

You will need to have a good idea of the number of lines and the expected volume of calls the voice logger will be recording. It is also important to determine the time frame of calls you're most likely going to need to retrieve.

In a full-time recording environment, there are commonly two "peak periods" in which high volumes of recorded calls must to be retrieved and verified. For example, a utility will experience a peak period after the monthly billing is mailed, due to customer inquiries about their bills and the need to verify the original conversation. The second peak period occurs at year-end when, for example. equal-payment billing is reconciled. In this scenario, it would be most efficient to have at least one month of calls online for immediate access and then have a library of archived tapes ready for the year-end peak period.

Depending on the compression ratio, you can have thousands of channel hours online for immediate access. To determine your online requirements, you can use simple math. Multiply the average number of calls per agent times the average length of call, times the number of agents, times the number of days you will require immediate access.

The latest technology has significant capacity for hard disk storage; i.e., up to 105 GB or 38,000 hours online.

One way to increase immediately accessible audio is a multi-DAT autochanger, which allows a number of DAT tapes to be inserted into the logger. A 6-DAT auto-changer, for example, allows up to 25,000 hours of unattended recording, all accessible without manual intervention.

After defining your online storage requirements, you can then choose your archiving needs.

Archiving

There are currently two common methods of storage for today's voice loggers: digital audio tape (DAT) and magneto optical (MO) disk. A typical DDS-2 DAT tape holds about 500 channel hours, while the DDS-3 will hold about 1,500 hours. Proprietary compression techniques offered by independent vendors will allow you to multiply this ratio significantly. Another archiving media option on the market is AIT (advanced intelligence) cassette. The AIT cassette has a capacity of 25 GB per cassette, while the double-sided MO offers 5.2 GB, or 2.6 GB per side.

Recording The Right Calls

Due to the nature of selective recording, fewer channels and less disk space are needed to record specified calls or perform quality monitoring. This is because recording can be scheduled according to various criteria, including specific agents or extensions, CTI events, call direction, length of call, and in the case of quality assurance, number of calls per representative, wrap-up time, etc. Calls that do not meet your criteria are not recorded.

When monitoring for quality, supervisors have a limited amount of time to review agent calls and may record and evaluate between five to ten calls per representative per month. Therefore, since a select number of calls are being recorded, fewer channels are needed for quality assurance recording.

ChooSing The Best Screen Capture Technology

The single most important factor when choosing a screen capture technology is the overall impact that screen recording will have on network bandwidth. The second most important factor is detectability. If agents experience screen slow-down due to monitoring, they will be alerted to the monitoring session and may modify their behavior. Screen recording solutions that take continual snapshots of agent desktop activity, known as "screen scrape" technology, require a tremendous amount of network bandwidth and can easily overload most networks and/or slow down agent applications. Screen capture technologies that record only the deltas, or changes to the screen, have a much lower impact on network resources and are undetectable to the agents.

What To Look For In A System

We've discussed the need to record and the tremendous growth in the importance of quality assurance recording. We've also touched on the various technologies available to meet call center logging needs. Following is a checklist of points to consider when weighing different recording equipment options.

A scalable solution with an open architecture. When you shop for a recording/quality assurance system, look for one that is scalable in both hardware and software so it can grow with your call center. Also, ensure that applications are ODBC-compliant and can be integrated with, as well as upload, your current databases.

Flexible recording platform. As your call center grows, your recording needs will vary and expand, and you will need a vendor that can support full-time, selective, ROD, quality assurance and screen capture recording on one logger platform. In the future, this recording solution should accommodate different types of recordable media such as e-mail, fax, IVR, instant text chat and others.

Integration capabilities with the leading ACDs. Your recording solution should integrate with the leading ACD providers and preferably be built around a technology partnership between the logging/quality assurance provider and the ACD vendor. Equipment grounded in this relationship will help guarantee that any changes to your ACD technology will not impair your-ability to perform logging and quality assurance operations. The same holds true in choosing CTI products - choose equipment that will allow for change and growth without sacrificing any logging and quality assurance functions.

Computer-telephony adaptability and migration to different applications. Look for a logging/quality assurance application that has API (application programming interface) capability and will allow integration, now and in the future, to the specialized computertelephony applications in your call center, such as predictive dialers, IVR and others.

Adaptability of quality assurance solution to existing quality assurance programs. Nearly all call centers are implementing some form of quality management, even if it's a paperbased, live service observation. For this reason, call center managers and reviewers are likely already comfortable with a certain process. Your quality assurance application should offer the capability to automate these processes and significantly reduce reviewer workload without forcing your quality assurance department to adopt entirely new practices.

Screen capture technique and your LAN, Look for a data capture application that has low impact on network bandwidth and is undetectable by the call agent when a monitoring session begins.

Archiving, redundancy, alarms and security. In mission-critical logging scenarios, look for robust loggers with a high fault tolerance, advanced system alarms and, in the event of failure, either hot-standby or redundancy capability. In environments where data preservation is critical, remote archiving is a must. Also, look for logging applications with sophisticated, multitiered security access - you want system access controlled, but you don't want this process to be cumbersome.

Future Call Center Technologies

Call centers are rapidly evolving into contact centers, funneling all methods of communication into a single entry point. Voice, e-mail, Internet and chat boards are combined into a single contact record for each individual customer. As bandwidth to the desktop has become broader and more sophisticated, call centers have rapidly deployed single point of contact technology, allowing customers to communicate their requests through any of the media mentioned above. The "single point of contact" trend is also the direction in which recording technologies must evolve. It will involve voice over Internet Protocol (WIP), a purely digital data recording system that allows all communications media to be combined, and it will redefine the purposes of recording.

A Partner For Success

Not surprisingly, the single most important decision is choosing the right partner. While it's important to be aware of all of the above, your solution provider should be able to walk you through the entire process, determining the right solutions and configurations for your company. When seeking a solution provider, you should look for a proven track record and references to substantiate technical and integration expertise, research and development resources for future applications, training, consulting, support and user services. These factors will point you toward protecting your investment over the long term.

Jackie Wiedner is director of applications for NICE Systems. She is responsible for marketing and development of NICE's recording and quality management products. NICE Systems is a provider of integrated digital recording and quality management solutions.

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Copyright Technology Marketing Corporation Oct 1999
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