Beyond Call Recording: An Interview with Darin Cooper
Sound Communications (SCI) has been serving Call Centers since 1983, and it’s hard to imagine 30 years more full of changes. The Call Center industry has grown tremendously since we began selling headsets all those years ago, and the technology in use today bears little resemblance to the first voice recorders we installed in the 1990s.
Darin Cooper is SCI’s Chief Technical Officer and a nationally recognized expert in call recording. Having joined us in 1998, Darin has seen these industry and technological changes from the front lines. We sat down with him to get his perspective on the past and present, and to comment on the future as Call Centers move beyond call recording.
Who were the original users of call recording?
In the early days of our industry, only the largest business call centers recorded their interactions with customers. In the public sector, call recording, or logging, was primarily associated with military applications and later, 9-1-1 centers. Calls were recorded using VHS, heavy-duty cassette, or even reel-to-reel tapes. While the recordings were there, accessing and using them was difficult at best.
How did that change in the 1990s?
Digital technology entered the mainstream, and call recording changed in a big way. By using computers to do the recording, all kinds of limitations fell by the wayside. Now one recorder could handle a far greater number of channels, and the recordings could be indexed and made easy to find. Over the next 10-15 years, companies developed recording hardware and software that took advantage of PC chips and operating systems, and rapidly grew into multi-national giants.
Who uses call recording in our 21st century?
Today call recording is available to everyone, from individuals to call centers with thousands of seats across the globe. Industries that consider recording a requirement include banking, insurance, healthcare, transportation, public utilities, education and more. The key difference is that now these users are not only looking for recording — that’s just the backbone. Today’s recording user wants Workforce Optimization.
Workforce Optimization: can you define that term for us?
Workforce Optimization is integration between various technologies and best-in-class solutions that lets a Call Center see strong, tangible benefits from their call recordings. When I can take what I’ve learned from a call recording and use it for Agent Evaluation and Agent Coaching, then I can start to trend and analyze my Call Center’s performance. I can also use that information to learn how to automate scheduling of my Call Center agents, a technology known as Workforce Management. I can even start to use the recordings and information I’ve collected for things like Speech Analytics. Analytics technology lets me bubble to the surface things that I didn’t know, whether about my agent population or about my competitors or about things going on in my industry. Then I can make business decisions based on that information.
That sounds fascinating, but overwhelming! How does a Call Center decide where to start?
It is a lot to take in, isn’t it? That’s why we focus on modular solutions that let customers add functionality as needed, and we try to step a customer through a solution based on their most immediate need. For example, in a lot of cases a customer will come to us just with a need to record calls for compliance.
Once that need is met, we look at the solution to see which pieces and parts of it make sense for that customer. For Call Centers, the next logical step is often quality monitoring. From there we can build off what we’ve learned and help the customer decide when and where it’s time to leverage their system further by adding Workforce Management, eLearning, Enterprise Feedback Management, Speech Analytics, Data Analytics or other recording-focused solutions.
You mentioned modular solutions. Can you expand on that?
Sure. Actually, call recording-based solutions can be modular in a couple of ways. The software can be purchased in a modular fashion, so you begin with recording and then add other functionality as appropriate. But the sizing of the solution itself can be considered modular, or scalable, as well.
For example, a Call Center could start with recording and quality monitoring on a single server. In the future, we can expand channels on that server, add recording servers, move the QM off to a separate server with other applications, or take other steps to ensure the solution continues to meet the customer’s needs.
Whether it’s an enterprise with thousands and thousands of seats or whether it’s a small number of seats at a single location, we provide solutions all the way from top to bottom for all of these products that allow us to be flexible and scalable. When the contact center grows, we can grow with them.
Are there any other trends that you see impacting recording in the Call Center?
Yes. Current trends affecting us are VoIP, non-voice interactions and virtualization. Actually, all of these make it easier for the Call Center to supply and manage the hardware used in the recording solution.
For years we provided turnkey hardware for call recording and WFO applications. From there, we would take the interaction and database it, warehouse it, and make it accessible and portable to the end user. In many cases we still do, because that gives the customer the comfort of knowing that anytime they have an issue, whether it’s operating systems, application or hardware, they have only one call to make–to us–and we will take care of it start to finish.
But those trends you mentioned are changing this?
Recording traditional telephony requires specialized hardware, and that’s another reason why we typically provided the hardware and the software to capture the interaction. As Call Centers move to VoIP, the need for that specialized hardware goes away and it becomes more attractive for them to supply servers that meet their corporate standards. For many organizations, those standards include virtualizing to the greatest extent possible.
The same holds true for non-voice interactions. Contact Centers now interact with customers via emails, faxes, instant messages and social media. These are captured via screen recording, and again no specialized hardware is required.
What’s your long-term prognosis for recording-based solutions in the Call Center?
Workforce Optimization, and the call recording it’s based on, is here to stay. For the 21st century Call Center, success is largely dependent on the ability to acquire, train and maintain good agents. It’s a lot easier to get a good agent that is ramped up and trained and keep that agent than it is to constantly churn and burn on agents.
Every agent wants to come to work everyday and do the best job they can. It’s up to the Call Center to give them the tools and the applications that allow them to learn and do that job so that they have an impact for the customer. By using all of these applications together, ultimately I empower my agents and that in turn keeps my agents and my customers.