Get Success of Call Centers with Latest Technology

The latest technology are very important in the call centers industry, Call center have two major sections first the inbound where calls are received for help services and the second is outbound where calls are made by agents mainly to sell products. Call centers are extremely popular now a days.

The benefits of Call centers are unlimited. To make the consistency in the success and the growth of the call centers we can use these latest technology for Call centers. These latest technology are as follows:

1. Automatic call distributors: All Inbound call centers need a system to process calls and other interaction types like email and chat, as necessary. Automatic call distributors or dialers are core call center systems to improve performance of these two underlying systems. Outbound call centers require a dialer to place and complete calls.

2. CRM: Call center servicing application is the second most important technology in call centers. Agents use the servicing application to respond to customers with an understanding of their relationship and value to the enterprise. Call center agents also use the servicing application to document customer issues or requests and steps that were taken to address those issues. This creates a record of interactions that can be accessed the next time the customer reaches out for help.

3. Campaign management system: Outbound call center organizations require a campaign management system (CMS) to let the dialer know whom to contact, or to produce a list of phone numbers or email contacts. A more sophisticated CMS will allow agents to record how each customer has responded to a given campaign.

4. Call recording systems: All sales contact centers and many customer service environments – inbound or outbound – require recording systems to capture all interactions so that they can be replayed if there is a question about an interaction. Some organizations just capture calls; others capture both the call and related screens used to service the customer. The most sophisticated recording systems capture all interaction types, not just calls.

5. Interactive voice response systems: Speech recognition systems are self-service tools that automate the handling of incoming customer calls. Advanced interactive voice response (IVR) systems use speech recognition technology to allow customers to interact with the IVR by speaking instead of pushing buttons on their phones. IVR/speech recognition systems can help companies keep their costs down and often automate the handling of 40 to 85 percent of all incoming customer inquiries in industries, such as retail banking, credit card, brokerage, insurance, health care and utilities. Some enterprises also claim that IVR/speech recognition improves service quality, since an automated system can be available when live agents are not on duty. An increasing number of outbound call centers – particularly those doing collections and sales -- are using IVR systems to increase their effectiveness and productivity.

6. Workforce management software: It is used to forecast the volume of calls (or other interaction types, like emails and chat sessions). Workforce management (WFM) software can help call center managers schedule the optimal number of agents to meet projected needs, taking into account agent breaks, training classes, planned vacations and unplanned sickness. WFM software can automate the process of determining the number of agents that must be hired to ensure that customer transactions are handled at a specified service level. WFM is considered essential for inbound call centers with 100 or more agents or smaller centers that are complex, operating multiple sites and/or handling a variety of interaction types. Recently, outbound call centers have also started to use WFM.

7. Quality management applications: These are used to measure how well call center agents adhere to internal policies and procedures. These applications are increasingly considered mission-critical for inbound call centers, as they give management insight into call center performance. Quality management (QM) applications are starting to be used in outbound call centers and will eventually become as valuable in those environments as they are in inbound centers.

8. Computer telephony integration: Connects the ACD to the servicing or CMS application. At the most basic level, it delivers a "screen pop," bringing up the customer's account on the agent desktop when it delivers a call. This saves the agent from wasting time looking up customer information and it saves the customer the aggravation of having to provide redundant identification or account numbers. CTI is a major productivity tool for many call centers.

Call centers are complex operating environments that depend on a wide variety of sophisticated technology to process transactions. While call center technology is essential, it's really the agents who leave a lasting impression on customers and they are the key to retaining clients and enhancing relationships

Do You Know Recording of Telephone Calls Gives Positivity to Business?

Your telephone calls can be record anytime from anywhere with the help of latest technologies. It's very risky in term of recording telephonic conversations of any personal matters if we talking about our general day to day life. But for call centers staff training recording is advisable to verify information given by customer after the call and to keep the track. Every calls are important and to make the reliability percentage high the call centers are providing a secure, impartial and utterly reliable services.

Mostly call centers are using the call recording technology and other business are also do the same and why they need to do that because of some following listed reasons.

1. To easily resolve the disputes - This is the number one reason why most businesses purchase a call recording solution. It allows them to easily resolve disputes and protect themselves with recorded evidence that can provide an impartial record.

2. To get better quality - Recording calls can be helpful to detected errors and often corrected before they become costly mistakes. The routinely verifying call recordings make the shipping process more smooth, this information could be confirmed or corrected saving considerable money. Not only this, but customer satisfaction is improved.

3. More Secure - The simple presence of a call recording solution on company lines often acts as a deterrent to all types of security breaches employee calls. Such security inappropriate calls can be detected with the call recording software and then used to either address the problem with the employee or if necessary to act as evidence.

4. To give clearer understanding - Training and performance reviews are made easier when call recordings are easily available to trainers and managers. Trainers can use the call recording software to search and find calls that exemplify excellent customer service or salesmanship. These can be easily emailed to colleagues as an example or played in a training meeting to give the clear understanding.

5. Easy to track records- A sales manager can use the call recording software to review calls that resulted in successful sales and give ways to improve the sales staff by taking the track from the voice recording software. A marketing manager can listen to the same calls and discover what offers are working best, or the reasons customers give for not taking those offers. This helps the marketing department choose the most successful offers and create better offers in the future.

6. Take feedback your self only - Having the opportunity to record calls gives you the capability of being able to monitor your customer service levels along with staff performance. This allows your company to have a head start on your competition with the opportunity to continuously improve your service level.

7. Set Target- Training is easy when you are able to monitor both sides of a telephone conversation on your business telephone systems. Recording calls allows you the benefit of hindsight, giving you the opportunity to assist your team in achieving their goals and improving sales.

8. To be present with voice even physically not available - Do you work away from your office and rely on administrative staff to send letters, emails and faxes on your behalf? Save everyone’s time by allowing your PA to record your urgent correspondence that can be typed immediately without the hassle of scribbled messages.

Customer interaction needs to be analyzed in order to understand and improve organizational performance. A call recording solution from Liquid Voice enables conversations to be stored as a permanent record and accessed on demand.

These above are the factors of using the call recording in the call centers to improve the customer care services in for better result.

Audio Visual Technology

The latest audio video technology are very helpful to make internal meeting or presenting a business proposal in a good presenting way. Projectors and other audio visual equipments are used in every step. In call centers the audio video technology are very useful for example the audio technology of the call center need to be very good. As latest technology in the IP phone systems are in use by the call centers.

Today in call center business it is essential to have the basic idea of audio-visual equipments to interact with the clients. Mostly the audio. Most advanced audio visual equipment today works systematically and are controlled by various programs and it requires some amount of skill and technical know-how to handle such equipment. IT is playing an important role in various aspects of our work life.

To give the best performance to the call center customer to satisfy them call centers are giving the full training and the understanding to the user these audio visual equipment come with their training manual and other documentation to run the equipment. There are few call centers are giving the customer care support for this also. Audio video are giving the multitasking environment to the call center company's.

Call Centers are doing the call conferencing and video conferencing to provide the remote services to the clients and to interact the agents too. Now a days very fast and clear audio video equipment are available in the market which are giving the fruitful result to the call centers. There are some basic points that you should learn before you get on to handle any equipment. It is important to learn these points because they can make or break your show and without knowing these it would be almost impossible for you to run the show. You should know all the details in respect to power sources, connection wires and cables and proper placement of the equipment. You need to take care, as even the slightest fault in switching the equipment on can cause total system failure.

Maintenance of the Audio video equipments are being taken care by a special team. If all equipment will get the good care then the performance will be remain as new always. Play around with your audio visual equipment for some time and you will slowly get to learn more about it. User manuals and tech support guys can definitely help you have a better understanding of the equipment however, the more you use them the better control you will have on them. And this will make your business deals more successful.

Who need speech analytics technology?

Speech Analytics is a term used to describe automatic methods of analyzing speech to extract useful information about the speech content or the speakers.

One use of speech analytics applications is to spot spoken keywords or phrases, either as real-time alerts on live audio or as a post-processing step on recorded speech. This technique is also known as audio mining. Other uses include categorization of speech, for example in the contact center environment, to identify calls from unsatisfied customers. Speech analytics technology may combine results from different techniques to achieve its
aims. For example knowledge about where certain keywords were spoken in a customer telephone conversation could be combined with knowledge about which speaker (customer or contact center agent) spoke the words and perhaps knowledge of how often the two speakers were talking at the same time as each other.

Speech Analytics in contact centers can be used to extract critical business intelligence that would otherwise be lost. By analyzing and categorizing recorded phone conversations between companies and their customers, useful information can be discovered relating to strategy, product, process, and operational issues. This information gives decision-makers insight into what customers really think about their company so that they
can quickly react.
Source: wiki


Speech analytics technology providing organizations with insight into sales, service and products pulled not just from call center reports but truly from the voice of the customer. Yet it has also brought a dilemma for organizations deploying it. Who should really own speech analytics? Does it belong under the management of the contact center? Marketing? Analytics/business intelligence (BI)? It's a question organizations need to
consider when they're purchasing speech analytics tools.

Essentially, there are four ways for an organization to purchase speech analytics. Vendors that have developed speech analytics typically promote just the core speech analytics functions, parsing recordings for meanings, establishing patterns and alerting users to unseen connections. In the contact center, agent performance optimization vendors are pushing the technology from the workforce optimization side. Speech analytics
are a way to measure agent skills and train them.

outsourced call centers are bringing speech analytics to the attention of their clients as an add-on service. There is a disconnect between what speech analytics could do in theory and what it is actually being used for, speech analytics is not very different from other forms of analytics in that it provides insight into unseen patterns or hidden data connections.

People who run contact centers have traditionally worked in operations silos and are often tasked with cost control. They need to learn the language of profits and revenue. They're going to have to collaborate with business people who don't care about the activities in the call center -- they care about the outcomes.

Today's questions about speech analytics are indicative of a larger trend, he added. Increasingly, technology purchasing for the contact center needs to extend beyond IT. In fact, that began 10 years ago with the emergence of Internet protocol in the call center. As speech analytics and other channels emerge in the contact center, purchasing processes need to reflect that changing environment.

What has to happen over time -- and what will happen in forward-thinking centers that will become the leading edge -- is they have to knit their contact center management with the realm of traditional analytics as well as CRM, networking and telephony. Then you'll stop seeing the distinction between speech analytics and a broader overall analytics category that combines information from the contact center with other relevant streams.
That's going to change the nature of management structures that oversee the contact center over time.

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Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency

DTMF (dual tone multi frequency) is the signal to the phone company that you generate when you press an ordinary telephone's touch keys. In the United States and perhaps elsewhere, it's known as "Touch-Tone®" phone (formerly a registered trademark of AT&T). With DTMF, each key you press on your phone generates two tones of specific frequencies. So that a voice can't imitate the tones, one tone is generated from a high-frequency group of tones and the other from a low frequency group. Here are the signals you send when you press your Touchtone phone keys:












In technical words: Dual Tone Multi-Frequency, or DTMF is a method for instructing a telephone switching system of the telephone number to be dialed, or to issue commands to switching systems or related telephony equipment.

The DTMF keypad is laid out in a 4×4 matrix, with each row representing a low frequency, and each column representing a high frequency. Pressing a single key (such as '1' ) will send a sinusoidal tone of the two frequencies (697 and 1209 hertz (Hz)). The original keypads had levers inside, so each button activated two contacts. The multiple tones are the reason for calling the system multifrequency. These tones are then decoded by the switching center to determine which key was pressed.

DTMF keypad frequencies table





DTMF event frequencies





The engineers had envisioned phones being used to access computers, and surveyed a number of companies to see what they would need for this role. This led to the addition of the number sign (#) and star (*) keys (also known as humphries), as well as a group of keys for menu selection: A, B, C and D. In the end, the lettered keys were dropped from most phones, and it was many years before the humphries became widely used for vertical service codes such as *67 in the United States and Canada to suppress caller ID.

Present-day uses of the A, B, C and D keys on telephone networks are few, and exclusive to network control. The levels of priority available were Flash Override (A), Flash (B), Immediate (C), and Priority (D), with Flash Override being the highest priority. For example, the A key is used on some networks to cycle through different carriers at will (thereby listening in on calls). Their use is probably prohibited by most carriers. The A, B, C and D tones are used in amateur radio phone patch and repeater operations to allow, among other uses, control of the repeater while connected to an
active phone line.

DTMF tones are also used by some cable television networks and radio networks to signal the local cable company/network station to insert a local advertisement or station identification.

Spectral Analysis of Dual-Tone Multi Frequency (DTMF)

References:
searchnetworking.com/
nemesis.lonestar.org/

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Call Centers have been affected by the damage of Undersea Cables

An earthquake off Taiwan, measuring 6.7-7.1 on the Richter scale, knocked out Internet links to India for 20-25 minutes and affected Reliance Communications’ FLAG and VSNL’s SEA-ME-WE-3 under-sea cable systems, even as telecommunications around Asia was severely disrupted, with Internet services slowing and financial transactions being hindered, particularly in the currency market. However, BPO and IT services across India remained largely unaffected.

Internet services have been disrupted in large parts of the Middle East and India following damage to two undersea cables in the Mediterranean. There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, and India suffered up to 60% disruption.

UK firms such as British Airways have told the BBC that call centers have been affected by the outage.

Industry experts said it could take up to one week to repair the damaged cables and resume full service.

International telephone calls, which have also been affected, are being rerouted to work around the problem.

Neither of the cable operators have confirmed the cause or location of the outage but some reports suggest it was caused by a ship's anchor near the port of Alexandria in Egypt.

"Information technology companies, software companies and call centres that provide online services to the UK or the US east coast are the worst affected," Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

India is the world leader in offshore outsourcing, with the remote servicing of IT or other business processes worth an estimated £24bn.

Linchpin Technologies of Call Center

New technologies are leading the way in the evolution of the contact center. By the revolution in communication and information technology have led to a boom in call centers across the world. Call centers use different technologies to join with a customer. As focal points of communications, contact centers were the first to integrate voice and data technologies, deploying interactive voice response (IVR) systems that linked caller information with database records to accelerate response and improve customer service.

Today's challenge is providing personalized service that can handle both voice and multi-media contacts (fax, email, voice mail, Web interaction). Enterprises are also incorporating a new array of contact center services such as video, wireless access, and compatibility with personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other smart devices.

There are so many versions of software and upgraded technology in the market to fulfill the requirement of call center. Different major technologies are:

Email Management: Email is the most commonly used medium for customer contact.

IVR: In telephony, interactive voice response, or IVR, is a computerized system that allows a person, typically a telephone caller, to select an option from a voice menu and otherwise interface with a computer system. Generally the system plays pre-recorded voice prompts to which the person presses a number on a telephone keypad to select the option chosen, or speaks simple answers such as "yes", "no", or numbers in answer to the voice prompts.

Guided speech IVR: The Guided Speech IVR approach for call centers is a hybrid model that integrates live call center agents with all the advancements of speech in a new real-time approach for callers. This new approach creates a "safety-net", as the new role for the agent as a guide who assists the automation invisibly helps the caller using human intelligence and transcription to ensure the correct computerized service is provided.

CTI: Computer telephony integration is technology that allows interactions on a telephone and a computer to be integrated or co-coordinated. As contact channels have expanded from voice to include email, web, and fax, the definition of CTI has expanded to include the integration of all customer contact channels (voice, email, web, fax, etc.) with computer systems.

ACD: In telephony, an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) is a device that distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals that agents use. It is often part of a computer telephony integration system.
Predictive Dialer: Predictive dialer systems are commonly used by telemarketing organizations involved in B2C (business to consumer) calling as it allows their sales representatives to have much more customer contact time.

WFM: Workforce Management encompasses all the responsibilities for maintaining a productive and happy workforce. Sometimes referred to as HRMS systems, or even the larger ERP systems.

TPV: Third party verification is a process of getting an independent third party company to confirm that the customer is actually requesting a change or ordering a new service or product. By putting the customer on the phone (usually via transfer or 3-way call) TPV provider asks a customer for his identity, that he is an authorized decision maker and to confirm his order.

Virtual queue: Virtual queuing is a concept that is used in inbound call centers. Call centers utilize an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) to distribute incoming calls to specific resources (agents) in the center. ACDs are capable of holding queued calls in First In, First Out order until agents become available.

Voicemail: It is a centralized system of managing telephone messages for a large group of people. In its simplest form it mimics the functions of an answering machine, uses a standard telephone handset for the user interface, and uses a centralized, computerized system rather than equipment at the individual telephone.

Voice Recognition: VR is the task of recognizing people from their voices. Such systems extract features from speech, model them and use them to recognize the person from his/her voice.

VoIP: Voice over Internet Protocol, also called VoIP, IP Telephony, Internet telephony, Broadband telephony, Broadband Phone and Voice over Broadband is the routing of voice conversations over the Internet or through any other IP-based network.

Speech Analytics: Speech Analytics is a process of analyzing recorded human speech in order to collect information about what was said. In contact center environments, Speech Analytics is used to mine recorded phone conversations between agents and their customers. By carefully “listening” to hundreds or even thousands of calls, Speech Analytics automatically identifies important business intelligence that helps managers reduce contact center costs, increase customer retention and satisfaction, and improve agent performance.