Call Center Solutions

This section of our technical library presents information and documentation relating to Call Center Company Technology and Best Practices plus software and products. Since the Company's inception in 1978, DSC has specialized in the development of communications software and systems. Beginning with our CRM and call center applications, DSC has developed computer telephony integration software and PC based phone systems. These products have been developed to run on a wide variety of telecom computer systems and environments.

The following article presents product or service information relating to Call Center Vendors and customer service help desks.

Listen, record and learn

The Holy Grail of marketing is to devise and implement a campaign that hits the right people with exactly the right message. Sounds simple, but as we all know, in practice it’s incredibly difficult…which is why cold calling, direct mail and spam are still the main weapons in the marketeer’s arsenal. But things are changing.

The emergence of new interaction recording and analysis technologies within contact centres has massively increased their ‘value’ to the business. The ability to turn information passed between customers and agents into business critical data that is vital to the planning, development, deployment, feedback and measurement of marketing campaigns has put contact centres squarely into the marketing mix.

Unstructured audio, visual and business data passed between customers and agents contains critical information that can improve the decision making process and overall business performance. New technologies including word-spotting, emotion detection, event-based recording etc provide the marketing function – along with Human Resources, Product Development, Customer Liaison and Training – with valuable, targeted data that is vital for campaign planning, targeting, roll-out assessment and evaluation.

For example, ABC Bank launches a campaign to increase sign up to a new bank account called ‘SuperSaver’. ABC Bank already has a sizeable customer base and owns three large contact centres to manage the day-to-day queries and transactions with its customers. The marketing team at ABC can employ word-spotting technology to record all interactions between customers and contact centre agents whenever the phrase ‘SuperSaver’ is mentioned in phone calls, e-mail or any on-line communications.

What are ABC’s customer saying about SuperSaver? Is it a good product? How does it compare to the competition? How easy is it to get information about SuperSaver? Is it right for its target demographic? Using interaction recording and analysis technologies, marketers can gain swift access to hard data that is 100% relevant to the campaign they are working on.

By setting up policies – such as word spotting - within existing interaction recording programmes (which have historically focused on monitoring the quality of agents, providing data for agent training, dispute resolution etc.,) this approach remains extremely cost effective while enabling executives to proactively identify and respond to challenges, make the most of opportunities and adapt quickly to change.

Specialist agencies

The emergence of these technologies has also strengthened the offering of the specialist tele-marketing agencies and Business Process Outsourcers that manage all aspects of campaigns, from delivery through to feedback and measurement. By turning customer interactions into hard, actionable data, these companies can guarantee effective measurement and evaluation of campaigns, which is especially important if there are service levels in place. These technologies also provide total campaign management in terms of customer feedback, enquiries and even sales. In short, these agencies appear to the customer as the company, handling all of the interactions generated by whatever marketing campaign is being undertaken.

Obviously, by choosing to outsource, companies need to know that they will enjoy significant returns on their investment. They need to be shown that their campaigns will deliver the expected results and they need to feel confident that third party agencies can represent their brand – and therefore their reputation – professionally. Customer interaction management systems allow marketing agencies (both external and in-house) to do this.

At their heart, these technologies record customer and agent interactions and turn that information – often referred to as ‘soft data’ – into hard information that can be analyzed and acted on.

When these solutions first came to market, their obvious use was for monitoring the quality of call centre agents with a view to tailoring training and HR policies to better suit the needs of the workforce. However, as the technologies developed, the usefulness of recording customer interactions moved beyond merely monitoring staff.

Front-line tools

As these recording and analytical technologies developed, vendors and end users started to realise that the data they were capturing and analysing could be used for much more than just performance monitoring. Companies like NICE Systems have been in constant product development cycles, creating software that allows companies to fully interrogate the data captured and then use that data to deliver demonstrable business benefits.

These technologies are allowing contact centres to become front line marketing tools, while also giving third party outsourcers the ability to differentiate themselves on issues such as quality, delivery to SLAs, measurement of previous performance etc. They sharpen the awareness of decision-makers by giving them direct access to relevant interactions, enabling them to concentrate on information that has a real impact on their business.

Marketing is all about metrics and making decisions based on intelligent analysis of information. Call recording in contact centres now goes far beyond the scare mongering ‘Big Brother’ issues and allows contact centres to play a fuller, and more vital, role in business growth.

By Martin Roberts, VP of Marketing & Business Development EMEA, NICE Systems

CRM Call Center Software

Database Systems Corp. (DSC) has been providing CRM Customer Relationship Management solutions to businesses and organizations for 2 decades. TELEMATION is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application employed in a wide variety of organizations including contact centers, help desks, customer service centers, service bureaus, reservation centers and corporate call centers. The package has extensive CTI features and is fully integrated with our PACER phone system. TELEMATION operates on Linux, Unix or Windows servers. Software programmers can develop call center applications quickly using the robost features found in the Telemation toolkit.

Call Center Phone System

The PACER is a call center phone system that handles inbound and outbound calls for a wide range of contact centers. Calls are either initiated by the phone system or accepted from the outside and distributed in an intelligent fashion to your service agents. The PACER includes ACD and IVR components, plus call recording capability. Using industry standard components, the PACER phone system has features and functions that can only be found in large scale PBX’s, but at a fraction of the cost. And the PACER has predictive dialing capability that cannot be found in most of these larger phone systems. The PACER phone system can connect calls to your employees working at home or in a local or remote office. The PACER communicates with applications written on Unix, Linux, or PC servers over a LAN. For a complete product presentation, download our PACER demo.