Richard Marcia

Rich is Marketing Director for Coordinated Systems, Inc. (CSI), in East Hartford, CT. Enjoys writing, technology, sports, music, good reading and being a parent of his 2-year-old son. He lives and breathes his customers' call center experiences every day and uses his knowledge as resource and inspiration for his blog.

Everyone's talking about Screen Time

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Posted on 2011-08-12

Desktop analytics and screen capture are huge topics in the call center space these days.

For a starting point, centers can begin by looking for desktop activity improvements using integrated screen capture. Most mature call recording companies offer a synchronized screen and audio recording which allows supervisors to recreate the customer experience and evaluate the effectiveness of the agent.

Call centers want the ability to see what employees are doing with their screen time. Are the agents using applications effectively? Are the agents fumbling through the menus and icons? These are some of the questions which can be answered very cost effectively, using screen capture.

We've taken the simple integrated screen capture model and made it more flexible and intelligent:

With Virtual Observer, customers are able to use our Rules-Based Screen Capture and use business rules to...

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10 Ways to Boost Customer Retention

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Posted on 2011-04-06

Came across a great read from CallCentreHelper.com on tips for customer retention.
There are many forces at hand trying to weaken your customer retention rates:

- Increasing competition
- Economy
- Emerging technologies
- Changing customer expectations

I've taken the liberty of rewriting their list of tips and condensing the article down to some strong bullet points.

Adopt two or three of these ideas for a boost in customer retention:

- Prep the customer for what's coming next, prior to tranferring to another agent

- Add space in your CRM for interesting notes about the customer. Hobbies, Kids, Music, etc.

- Provide a comprehensive yet abbrieviated recap of what's been discussed.

- Compile an easy-access list of save opportunities for different categories of customers and calls.

- Use analytics at hand to anticipate customer behavior based on experience and...

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Automating the call scoring process with speech analytics

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Posted on 2011-03-07

Speech analytics used to be a big, intimidating, expensive undertaking, offered only by the call recording industry giants.
Now we've seen 8 or more other call recording vendors release their version of speech analytics.

Almost all of them have decided to invest in a technology from the UK rather than developing their own product - including my company, CSI.

It's a good business decision -- why reinvent the wheel when an existing, proven technology is out there with OEM / white label availability. Saves time and resources.

Some of the call recording companies have decided to just go to war with the same out-of-the-box vanilla features which come with the API.

A few, like CSI, have fully integrated the speech engine within their own optimization suite.

Some have taken it a step further and created unique, differentiating features. One such feature is the automated scoring feature from...

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Call Recording / Monitoring also beneficial to Marketing and Development Teams

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Posted on 2010-12-10

For over twenty five years, Baudville has been an integral part of recognition programs and practices in organizations across the country.
Baudville provides recognition products and expertise to businesses, schools, hospitals and non-profit organizations.
Kurt Carlson, Director of Sales for Baudville, recognized Virtual Observer as a key component in the success of their call center operations.
"If you run a call center, you probably already know the value and importance of remote monitoring calls for coaching, development and training. However, as a catalog direct marketer, the impact of Virtual Observer has been immeasurable when we’ve used it to play portions of calls for our Marketing team and Product Development teams."
"This has happened in three major ways: 1) Hearing how customers misinterpret catalog copy that could be written more clearly; 2) Understanding how...

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Call Quality Monitoring Is More Important Than Ever With Holidays Approaching

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Posted on 2010-10-28

Believe it or not, the holiday shopping season is less than one month away (Black Friday), or in some retail outlets, it is already here!.
Reports say that consumer spending in 2010 might be down this season. Other online reports show increased spending for Christmas.

This has some interesting effects in our space: online catalog companies, and e-tailers, are likely to see an increase in call center activity, as shoppers call in with questions, for support, to place orders, etc.; call center operations managers will be challenged to produce -- more upsells, more saves, increased customer satisfaction.

As always, it will also be important to reduce the costs of running the...

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8 ways Speech Analytics can help your organization ramp up call center quality

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Posted on 2010-09-16

It's a given that Speech Analytics has good buzz, but let's step back a second before we assume everyone understands what Speech can do for you.
Different people interpret Speech technologies in different ways. Speech is being used in more and more diverse applications every day.
For purposes of this post, we're speaking of Speech Analytics for the call center, where recorded calls are indexed by a speech engine and then made available for search and reporting.
Here are eight ways Speech Analytics can impact your quality process, in no particular order:
* Improve agent script adherence: Modify imperfect agent processes by quickly finding instances where agents have used slang ("Umm", "Err", "Yo", etc.)
* Flag important calls for evaluation: Highlight calls where customers have mentioned a competitor's name.
* Fine tune your training programs: Identify trends in the types of calls your center is receiving: are they sales calls or support...

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Enhancing Agent Assistance in the Call Center

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Posted on 2010-08-18

There are multiple ways supervisors can assist agents in doing a great job.
They can provide training, side-by-side coaching, one-on-one simulations, and more.
One of the more effective methods we have seen is available in our very own Virtual Observer call quality optimization solution - a feature set called "VO Live" which enables the supervisor to view agent desktops in real time.
"VO Live" is like mission control for the call center professional.
From their own desktop, the supervisor can view thumbnails of every agent's screen. This allows the supervisor, at a glance, to observe agents who may be having trouble using applications properly, or who may be not using the correct applications at all.
With a keystroke, the supervisor can click on the agent's thumbnail desktop and enlarge it to full-size.
The call center supervisor can then initiate a chat to help the agent in their current task.
If the agent requires additional help,...

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Nothing Casual About This Massachussets Company’s Growth

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Posted on 2010-07-23

Recently I visited Casual Male XL in Canton, MA and toured their corporate headquarters. I was really impressed by the catalog showroom, located next to their call center hub.
Casual Male XL is transitioning its’ call center agents to become "wardrobe assistants", where they have stocked a fully-inventoried showroom to provide the agents with a means of making stylish suggestions and complimentary add-on offers to customers placing orders. "It really helps to have all of the materials and colors in front of you," said Christina Shortall, Call Center Director at Casual Male XL.
Casual Male XL has expanded quite a bit since it’s early days. They operate 5...

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Future Contact Centers Are in the Hands of our Children

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Posted on 2010-06-11

This post doesn't relate to my company or the call recording space at all, but I wanted to share some interesting feedback I'd received relative to depicting the call center of the future, and -- in imaging the future, you must have to include tomorrow's workforce in the equation.
Thus, I wanted to share an article I had recently on FastCompany entitled "How the iPad became child's play" which positioned the Apple tablet as an excellent learning device for children - toddlers even.
I know this to be true. My son, turning 2 this week, has an innate sense of how to use my cell phone, my iPod and besides breaking a few keys off of my keyboard, my laptop computer. He knows which videos he wants to play, and which songs he wants to hear. I...

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Unified Communications Dealers: Enhance Revenue Streams with App Sales

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Posted on 2010-05-24

"App Stores" and the "App Market" are familiar phrases in today's tech world, gaining popularity with the emergence of the Apple iPod, iPad and Google Android devices.
In a logical, winning business move on the b2b side of things, many Unified Communications dealers are also building a diverse portfolio of applications for their customers.
Many such dealers are complimenting their phone system sales with application sales. Besides being a good foot in the door to large revenue telephony platform sales, application sales can generate a high-margin revenue stream of their own.
For years, telephony dealers have aligned themselves with the large, incumbent call recording vendors in order to bundle call recording and quality monitoring with their phone system solution sales.
The typical "Large-Call-Recording-Company" offering was typically a monstrous suite of features which shut out the small and medium sized enterprise and locked the bigger customers into a...

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