The last three years have brought great innovation to the Quality Management/Liability Recording market. The leading solutions have extended beyond their original mission of recording calls to protect companies from lawsuits and performing quality assurance.
If you haven't evaluated these products in the past three years, they're definitely worth a look. Contact centers of all sizes — large, medium, small and multi-site — will realize great benefits, both hard and soft, from these enhanced suites. The projected payback is between 9 and 12 months.
There are over 30 vendors active in the Quality Management/Liability Recording market. Most of them sell contact center, liability recording and public safety solutions.
There are many good products for contact centers and in the 2003/4 timeframe, market leaders started to differentiate themselves with value-added modules. In 2005, the market is bifurcated between vendors that concentrate on the classic quality management/liability recording mission and those that have extended their capabilities to provide value to the greater enterprise — going beyond the boundaries of the contact center.
The best of today's traditional quality management/liability recording products include the following capabilities:
- 100% recording, advanced retrieval and playback features
- Ability to record voice and screens simultaneously
- Capacity to handle multi-channels — voice, e-mail, chat, collaboration
- Computer telephony integration (CTI)
- Software for evaluating and analyzing agent performance and trends
- Reporting (standard and ad hoc)
- Application programming interface (APIs) and software development tool kits (SDKs) to facilitate integration to CRM and other servicing applications
- Standardized platform (technology stack) for entire suite
- Maintaining one copy of recorded calls
- Support for both TDM and IP recorders
The new and differentiated suites also include:
- eLearning — learning management systems that can be used to author and deliver training programs based on the results of quality management evaluations or departmental needs.
- Coaching — tools for rapidly creating and deploying coaching sessions, communications or best practices for agents.
- Surveying — IVR-based systems that survey customer satisfaction.
- Performance management — scorecards and dashboards that align the objectives of the contact center with the goals of the company; scorecards can be developed for agents, teams, groups, centers, sales, marketing and the executive suite.
- Speech analytics — applications designed to structure unstructured conversations so that customer insights can be captured and analyzed.
- Analytics — on-line analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities that allow an organization to "slice and dice" data collected from the quality management and recording system, automatic call distributor (ACD) and CTI events.
- Screen auditing/Back office — agent monitoring of a back office function. The monitoring is initiated by an event on a screen, not by a phone call.
The leaders offer all of these capabilities and modules in a portal-based performance management framework designed to allow end users to easily gather and disseminate information.
Like the traditional offerings, the enriched products improve contact center productivity by reducing agents' average handle time, improving first-call resolution and curtailing agent attrition. Similarly, all of the products in the market enhance quality by measuring agent adherence to internal procedures and processes.
What differentiates the new breed of quality management/liability recording solutions is that they have many additional ways to reduce operating expenses and improve quality, including eLearning, coaching and surveying capabilities. They reduce customer inquiries by quickly identifying the root cause of operational issues — it's more cost effective to avoid an inquiry than to resolve one.
The portal-enabled quality management/liability recording suites are performance management-oriented. They provide a 360-degree view of agent performance and the customer experience. The new suites are designed to function as a central repository, gathering relevant data on contact center and agent-level productivity, quality, training, customer survey results and new sales.
Speech analytics is an important feature in the evolving market. It rapidly identifies customer trends, operational challenges, product opportunities and competitive situations. Speech analytics functions as an early warning system for quickly identifying problems that need to be fixed and customer needs and wants. Customers freely share new product ideas with contact center agents, but today this information is generally wasted because most companies do not have tools for collecting, analyzing and using this invaluable input.
The architectural and functional advancements in the greater quality management/liability recording market provide great benefits and opportunities for contact centers looking to improve productivity, quality, customer satisfaction and revenue generation. These new suites have a fast payback and contribute to the corporation's profitability. They are a "must have" investment that should be a priority in 2005/6.
Donna Fluss of DMG Consulting has written a superb in-depth report on the Quality Management/Liability Recording Product marketplace. Detailed analysis of all the companies that play in this space, plus numerous insightful statistics and analyses. See more information here.
