This trend shifted the duty to document and administer the customer, the business and the call (or transaction data), from being a joint affair between customer and enterprise - more toward being the responsibility of the enterprise. Customers want an easy life - they expect the enterprises to "know" them when they call.

Technologies such as modern telephony protocols, Call Centers, Workflow Management and Document Management Systems - help the "state of the art " enterprise to organize its data, and ideally, to recognize the customer by his telephone number (provided by telephony protocols), or by his customer ID (by letting him enter his customer ID in a preswitched dialogue with an Interactive Voice Unit (IVR)), or similar unique keys.

Efficient customer care centers, help desks, or telebanking centers provide a competitive edge for the business of today. It is important that the calls are be answered quickly and concisely by the most competent employees (agents) available, and in the shortest time (skill based routing). For all of those applications the Call Center represents the "front desk", creating a positive impression for each of its customers.

In this document ASC describes the application of voice and data recording to Call Centers and the benefits arising from this integration.

Let us look at the elements you will need to make your call center a really effective and acceptable customers window into your company:

In the following chapter we will address each of the listed subjects, in order to ‘sketch’ an image of the current environment in which "Voice Recording Systems" are acting on the brink to the aera of "Communication Recording Systems".

Communication Resources

You need to be aware of all the offerings of your telephone carriers, IP service providers and your PBX/ACD vendors. Telephone vendors can supply much more than dial tone these days. Telephone calls come with a lot of attached information, such as ANI and DNIS, and this information can help give your callers an improved and integrated service. You need to be aware of these capabilities, so you can develop business and workflow scenarios that use them to competitive advantage.

Telecommunications offerings are also making huge leaps beyond dial tone. The broadband capabilities of the "information highway" will stretch our idea of what a "call" really is. If customers can make video "calls" to your multimedia catalog database, what will you do about peak calling periods? Do you need the equivalent of an ACD to park calls in queue? What do the callers look at while they are parked -- cartoons, advertising?

What about Voice Over IP (VOIP)? It is telephony, but requires different identification of calls, and customers, as there is no definite caller number. It requires also different voice recording, due to the fact, that information is transferred in packages and concepts of channels and ports do not apply. Fax is well recorded with standard techniques, but reprint requires an artificial fax training session to follow the fax protocols. Web integration into your business requires elaborate e-mail and webserver message routing with still nonstandard Unified Messaging Systems.

E-mail and Web especially influence the structure of a call center, due to the asynchronous flow of information, the mixture of media, written notes on the one hand and written and/or spoken words (answer back calls) on the other:

• call centers will have to change working hours, since the home based web activity peaks about 9 p.m.
• inbound only call centers will have to introduce outbound calling (to telephone customers who click the "call me" button on the web site).
• call centers will have to implement Computer Telephone Integration (CTI) in order to be able to use screen pops when speaking to web customers.
• call center managers who employ agents with excellent telephone skills will require agents with strong typing skills or a mixture of both.
• the measurement of service levels will become much more complex.

Similar questions arise, and hold true when looking at media such as Radio, Broadcast and Radar. Synchronous recording and replay of voice and (screen) data are subject of interest in video telephony, Call Center agent evaluation and quality recording, as well as Air Traffic Control (ATC) related applications.

In all cases the ultimate questions will be:

• Do you wish to document something, just in case?
• How do you remind yourself to call back the customer on an agreed date?
• How will you get the contract details fast enough, so that the customer doesn’t wait?
• Are archive periods observed, backup procedures followed, authorization and access limits enabled?

These are not technical questions - they are business questions. Engineers can build video call machinery. But it is the business person who must decide how video calls should be handled. What will callers want? What will be most helpful and convenient for them? How do the business processes follow legal requirements? These are questions that you must decide.

ACD and IVR

Modern Call Centers are more than simple or sophisticated "Automatic Call Distribution" i.e. routing of calls according to preset rules. Terms like "Intelligent" or "Integrated" Call Center, indicate that some or most of the modern concepts of inbound and outbound call management are being used. These terms indicate that the hardware/software system providing the call center solution has been designed as an open system with Application Programmable Interfaces (APIs) for integration in complex infrastructures.

Inbound call handling is all about guiding the calling customer most efficiently for the customer – and most cost effectively for the company – to the best trained agent to service this customer to their satisfaction. The inbound call may well be handled first by an Interactive Voice Response Unit (IVR), receiving and welcoming the customer.

The IVR can:

• collect data from the customer
• using analysis of the data (‘D’), channels of the telephone trunk protocols.
• using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) techniques.
• by asking the customer to enter information through the dialpad of the telephone (sending DTMF tones).

• connect the call to a message repeater with a prerecorded answer to the customer inquiry, and closes the call without any human intervention on the company side.
• connect the call with a ‘hold’ message, telling the customer, that currently all agents are busy and potentially telling the customer the approximate time that their call will be answered (based on average call answer times). This gives the customer the choice to call in later, or, for companies not wanting to loose any calls, the customer may be asked to enter their phone number to be called back as soon as possible.
• connect the call to the Call Center System for the call routing process to the next available and best skilled agent; this may be done simply, using the subject oriented groups the various agents are assigned to, or by using more complex skill based routing algorithms, that choose the agent according to the need the customer has. The skills may be those the agent should have by company policy, or those the agent volunteers that he has, or in fact those skills determined by regular agent evaluation screenings.
• take back calls from the ACD because the agent found, that the required service will best be supplied by the IVR.

This task traditionally is one of the marketing and sales department, and was done by looking up the customer data, getting the information, dialing the number and waiting. In cases where the extension was busy or nobody picked up the phone, the agent would wait and waste his time. If a connection was established, the agent had to then collect his thoughts and notes regarding the purpose of the call i.e. inquiring about due payments, questioning the customer about shopping habits, etc. Depending on the reason for the call, the conversation may become complicated, and notes would have to be taken down on paper. Later on these notes would have to be evaluated.

Outbound dialing both simplifies and speeds up the process greatly. Experts define the purpose of the calling campaign, select the customers to be called from the company’s customer database, and set up a conversation script. The agents will be trained in the scripts, and targeted toward speed and success. When the outbound calling campaign starts, Call Center dialers will perform the dialing of customer numbers. Several algorithms for outbound dialing (preview, precision, predictive, automatic, power), tailor the way customers are connected to agents, thus minimizing down-time, and optimizing post call processing times. Computer based scripting allows for online evaluation of outbound calling campaigns.

Certain agents may swap from outbound to inbound and back, depending on their skills, or on current system traffic.

Call Centers will not necessarily reside at the ‘published’ location. Technology allows for networked and distributed Call Centers, Call Centers "following the sun", Virtual Call Centers, etc. The caller will not notice (except for minor call set-up delays), that his call is not treated in the city of the dialed destination code. Call forwarding costs also, will be covered by the Telephone Infrastructure with the caller not effected. The question of costs can be heavily influenced by and even tailored to the company philosophy (e.g. charge for the help desk service or not). This can be done by choosing and publishing Contact Numbers, that are provided by Intelligent Network (IN) services, e.g. Freephone Service, Premium Rate Service and Shared Cost Service.

Calls may also be transferred to Home Agents nowadays, with all its consequences. Home agents act as full or part time workers, who may take over during peak hours, or during low traffic periods.

With the arrival of WEB connectivity, Call Center Managers should not plan to eliminate their IVR system. As customers want an easy life, they are willing to spend time in the web e.g. selecting the goods they want to order, but when asking the delivery dates, they still like to use the phone, simply for the reason of speedy answer. Interactions like this, can easily be accomplished by IVRs.

Gathering the information from the customer is one task. More challenging for a company, is to organise its knowledge, in a way that collected information can be compared against the customer data, and a match can be found.

Identification using the Caller Phone Number – if available – is commonly know as Automatic Number Identification (ANI), and Calling Line Identification (CLI). There are keys, customer ID, insurance number, etc. Caller identification enables an integrated infrastructure to pop customer data at the agent PC, even before the caller is connected to the agent the ACD selected.

Agents are grouped according to departments (Sales, Order Processing, Customer Retention, etc.) or subjects (Hot Line, Marketing Campaign for Product ‘X’), to be handled by the call center on behalf of the company. There may be an escalation process between groups, from groups covering the very first contact to the customer, trained to cover e.g. 80% of the average calls. Unresolved calls will be escalated to the next group, of trained experts, that will be able to resolve the rest of the calls, or e.g. may escalate some ‘tricky’ call directly into the R&D department for resolution.

Some other way may be chosen when a Workflow Management System (WMS) has been integrated. Notes regarding the unresolved process are taken, and entered into the workflow. The expert will work according to his workflow task list, and resolve the problem when it best fits his time schedule - not as in the first example, when the escalated call reaches him, and disturbs him in the analysis of an equally important customer query.

Documents and calls related to the identified customer can automatically be indexed and retrieved on demand from large archives, governed by Document Management Systems (DMS). Voice Recording Systems (VRS) offering interfaces to DMS (e.g. providing the call data as *.wav and *.txt files) rid themselves therefore from the permanent requirement, to also archive the recorded data on media, that again has to be labeled, handled, stored and archived. VRS of this type, may turn out to be solely recording devices with an interface to the DMS. Storage and replay will be the responsibility of the DMS and use capabilities of the standard PCs of today.

Handling a lengthy call, transferring calls, notes related to this call and from previous calls, handing documents and data relevant to this customer to the next call center agent taking over responsibility, and keeping track of the actions required for completing the call - may be well worth the investment in call and screen recording devices for certain companies, where these calls are critical for security, money, etc. As reasons for this kind of transaction monitoring are somewhat obvious, another reason for this investment is of equal importance for call center operations: agent evaluation, training, and promotion, i.e. Quality Monitoring.

Every organization has its legacy systems -- the MIS applications that keep basic business records. In most companies, these applications run on mainframes and are maintained by a separate MIS department. They are massive systems, a crucial part of your business operation, and they are not going to be changed very quickly. As a call center manager, you will probably have to take them as they are.

But you need not limit your MIS resources to just those systems. Developments in desktop computing and client-server architectures allow you to add capabilities and features without disturbing the older systems.

The older systems automate corporate bookkeeping, but you need additional systems to automate customer service. Not the record keeping part of customer service; but rather the call-handling part. You need a good data network to let you reach into the legacy systems; you need computing power in your department (probably from desktop systems and shared servers); and you need modern application creation software that lets you define automated call flow applications without spending years writing old-fashioned code.

Having your own system resources, under your control and with better capabilities than the legacy systems, becomes even more important as you move beyond traditional call centers. If you want to present a customer's account summary in multimedia graphic format, the raw data will still come from legacy systems. But it is the new systems in your call center that will convert this information into multimedia graphics, and send it on its way to the caller.

An intriguing system component adding on to the range of MIS is the capability of todays voice recording systems to search for calls done by a certain customer, calls received by a certain call center agent, calls received for a dedicated bank account, customer ID insurance number, etc. From that list of calls, the one with the correct time, or the correct attachment note may be selected and requested for replay. The replay request locates the correct medium (hard disk, DAT tape, MOD disk, DVD disk, etc.) in the archive "media" library, retrieves the call audio data and starts the replay very quickly without manual interaction at best - or at worst, after a walk to the media room, search for the media, exchange media, then walk back to the replay location.

Located calls of interest can be downloaded to the hard disk of the PC as standard *.wav files together with the call indexing data in *.txt files, then copied to audio tape, or transferred via e-mail to some other person of interest.

One of the keys to success in any call center is people management. With a call center as the main point of contact for customers and prospects, a company´s reputation is only as good as the voices on the telephone representing that company.

As a call center manager, you have learned the value of service representatives who enjoy helping customers and have an innate sense of good customer service. You look for these qualities when you hire, and you reward and promote staff who exhibit them. And you constantly have to monitor their skills and attitude.

In an outbound telemarketing campaign, for example, the marketing department develops a detailed script to ensure that agents are delivering the right messages. Supervisors then need to be able to monitor whole conversations to see that the script is being adhered to.

In the case of inbound calls, certain levels of professionalism are set and, again, the supervisor will want to check on the quality of the responses across a wide range of customer situations.

Special samples of these recorded calls may also serve the call center agent as a reference document to help him on into a promotion or a new job (National Vocation Qualification).

More and more companies employing call centers are becoming systematic in their approach, by evaluating agent performance against set business criteria. Ideally the supervisor will be able to electronically generate a questionnaire on any relevant aspect of the agent’s area of expertise. CTI tagged calls of the agent under evaluation, will be selected according to some random or systematic pattern and drawn from the voice recorder for replay on a desktop PC, where the evaluation will take place. The criteria can range from how an initial greeting was given, to how well the agent probed for further customer needs. The evaluations let Supervisors compare the skill levels found within their team, and may provide a history for trend analysis. This will provide an indisputable basis for promotions and also flag training courses required to support the agent (Integrated Agent Evaluation and Training Scheduling Tools).

Even greater advantages will be provided by specific applications to record and review the synchronized voice and screen data (Voice Recording and Screen Capturing). This enables a supervisor to replay screen shots and key and mouse activity, that go with each part of the verbal communication. Supervisors will get a complete overview of the transaction, including unspoken but essential elements to later clarify an agreement or dispute. Supervisors will ‘hear’, how agents are verbally interacting with customers, and ‘see’ how they are using software applications for taking orders or providing customer service.

Let’s summarize this in ten good reasons for capturing agent screen activities in addition to voice:

Quality evaluation recording activity may either be based on bulk recording, where the desired set of calls can be picked from the mass storage, or, a dedicated selective recording campaign, set up in order to gain selected calls and data so that the evaluation may be done later. While the first case is a standard requirement, CTI based call filtering, using call indexing information, such as extension number, or in the case of free seating, Agent ID, will serve the needs of the second scenario.

Monitoring technology is a good investment. If you give agents regular, fair and timely feedback, you motivate them to do a better job. They know how to improve their performance the next time around or learn from calls you share as good examples. The monitoring process also helps agents to feel more appreciated; they know what they are doing has a purpose. This is not only good for the agent, but also good for you, your call center and your company´s overall corporate image.

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