Highlights from a recent Regtech and Dubber Webinar

How can managers navigate through growing compliance complexities when work happens everywhere? How do you regain control in a business communication world that is siloed into multiple voice chats, video channels, networks and devices? Will AI technology save the day, or are technology firms spreading more pixie dust?

COVID complicates compliance but isn’t the only driver of complexity

COVID complicated an already complex compliance world, adding a plethora of systems, communications tools and places over which compliance now needs to be managed. The volume, velocity and virality of customer conversations across Zoom videos, MS meetings, WhatsApp recordings, mobile conversations…, calls for new ways to track and monitor mounting mishaps and breaches.

Although some regulations were paused at the outset, they are back in force.

Underlying the complications of COVID are a range of broader changes challenging compliance teams: New communications preferences (think WeChat, Whatsapp and Signal) amongst customers and employees; the rise of video as a dominant communications medium; and the inevitability of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in the workplace.

Discussion on these drivers, and the challenges they pose to compliance leaders were at the centre of our recent Webinar with Regtech.

A return to mandatory conversation recording

While call and conversation recordings are mandatory for crucial conversations in most countries, they’re limited by legacy solutions, and the ability to compliantly capture them on leading communications platforms where video, calling and messaging converge.

In many environments, 80% of crucial customer conversations are voice, yet less than 10% of these conversations are captured. This percentage slides down as more conversations shift off legacy communications systems. For financial institutions, 50% of customer conversations now occur outside of the call centre. The status-quo is not about to change soon; 61% of financial service CFOs plan to make remote work permanent post-pandemic.

The financial pain is real

Last year alone, $10.4B of compliance fines and penalties were handed to financial institutions. Many of them were related to data privacy breaches. So how do you capture, retain and analyse crucial datasets when user end-points are dispersed across mobile, web and many other channels?

Not surprisingly, in the UK, the FCA mandate to record every voice conversation returned after recognising growing compliance gaps in a dispersed workforce that continues to operate across multiple communication channels.

But in a new reality where employees are hopping across MS Team meetings, Zoom videos, WhatsApp recordings and mobile voice calls, the compliance chasm is still there and growing.

The drive to continuous compliance

“The industry has come a long way from the days when the only option to access data was through spreadsheets. Now huge amounts of data are available on the cloud, and can be accessed almost instantly. This is a massive improvement.” – Regtech Webinar

The C-suite is still largely unaware of its ability to mine voice data outside the call center. There’s a clear opportunity for chief compliance officers to preserve core compliance data in a compliance cloud and be a primary data source for businesses. And critically, to aggregate voice conversations from across the business in one record system.

At the end of the day, the ability to monitor customer conversations, end not knowing, and run them at scale shifts you into a new mode of continuous compliance.

AI, compliance risks and red flags

There’s a lot of talk about driving Artificial Intelligence (AI) compliance models, and some industry kickback. But the future of AI-driven compliance is bright, and from a functionality stance, the timing couldn’t be better.

“The industry is responding positively to the different aspects of AI and what it can deliver from a compliance perspective. The future of compliance lies in the ability to harness artificial intelligence for many compliance tasks.”

The question is, how do we get to the point where we can predict mishaps and conversations that can go rogue, rather than constantly looking in the rear view mirror? This is one of the areas where innovation, AI and analytics are most likely to deliver significant compliance benefits.

If you can predict problems more effectively, you can fix them faster and more easily. You can deliver more tangible benefits and reduce the likelihood of remediation projects.

Unified vs. siloed voice communications

Global compliance leaders can no longer afford to maintain the status quo. They need to continuously monitor voice and chat platforms no matter where their teams and customers are globally positioned. Country-specific data sovereignty requirements also need to be met. So to PCI, and myriads of other regulations.

A shift to continuous compliance intelligence

“At the end of the day, call recording is just an activity. What matters is creating a compliance record system driven by voice data. It’s about integrating that data with other data sources and applications. And then from that compliant data set, fuelling AI-enriched alerts, notifications, workflows, dashboards, and more.”

“Compliance leaders need to look beyond a single application to do this and target a data-first strategy that powers any application they desire.” Andy Lark, Chief Customer Officer, Dubber.

Leaders in the future will need to track and instantly retrieve datasets from cloud-based platforms, with storage capacities up to five, or even seven years. With the tsunami of data from myriads of voice and video conversations, it could pay to spend time on data-driven strategies to flag alerts, gain insights into potential risk, and expedite proactive compliance.

One of the key principles that guide us as a SaaS company is Dubber should get automagically better every day. So, over the past quarter, we’ve been busy behind the scenes making Dubber native to the world’s most popular calling and video solutions and adding cool new features.

Here are a few of the new places Dubber can be turned on with a click.

We recently announced the expansion of our AT&T relationship by offering compliant Unified Call Recording across 3 major AT&T networks: AT&T IP Tool Free, AT&T Hosted Voice Service and Cisco Webex calling with AT&T Business. This is only the start, as Dubber’s multi-network integration across AT&T and their partner platforms means users can now switch on Dubber with a click across AT&T’s Business portfolio, substantially broadening access to the customer voice insights across the entire enterprise.

Like you, we’ve found ourselves working from everywhere and relying on the best UC solutions to stay connected. Now, whatever you’re on, you’ll be able to record, get alerts and insights and do more. And you’ll be able to do it knowing you are complying with global data privacy and financial regulations – unlimited by storage constraints – with AI-enriched insights – and easy access through the Dubber App and Web console.

One of the great things about Unified Call Recording is all your recordings, data, transcripts and insights are in one place. So, if you are recording your own or your team’s calls and videos across mobile, Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, and Zoom – they will all be conveniently in your inbox. And unlike other solutions requiring hardware, professional services, unique SIM cards, and call forwarding, we’ve integrated Dubber with these platforms, so Unified Call Recording can simply be available at a switch.

Here are a few of the integration highlights

• Dubber on Zoom: The recent Dubber – Zoom integration made it possible for Zoom users to access enhanced recording and voice analytics of millions of Zoom meetings and Zoom phone conversations
• Microsoft Teams Compliance Certification: Dubber just became one of the first unified call recording solutions to receive the Microsoft Teams compliance recording certification. Finally, businesses in regulated industries such as banking, government, insurance and financial services can easily meet legal and regulatory obligations for their Microsoft Teams users in call centres, offices, and work-from-anywhere environments
• Salesforce – Dubber integration: The recent addition of Dubber to the Salesforce AppExchange solves multiple issues. Salesforce users can now compliantly capture customer interactions, reduce administration, proactively manage accounts, and continuously improve deals by accessing insights and sentiment analysis. The newfound visibility also means salespeople can quickly search for information in their conversations, opportunities can be filtered by keywords, and managers can help teams win more deals

Cool new features

Dubber just got better with a slew of features to level up the customer experience and end not knowing. These new features don’t just add clarity, they ensure compliance is better managed and disputes are more easily solved.

• Enhanced AI Speaker Detection: Dubber now has an enhanced capability to detect speakers in a recording. As a result, Dubber transcriptions are more beautiful and more conversational, improving overall readability and insights
• AI Question Detection: Another boost to transcription readability was made by adding question marks
• Legal Hold: Now compliance-focused teams can protect recordings from deletion by user, by retention period, or accidental, ensuring that every recording can be retrieved at any time
• Transcription crosstalk elimination: Transcription quality often reduces when it comes to deciphering crosstalk. Recognising the gap Dubber built-in dual-channel transcriptions. The new capability eliminates transcription errors caused by cross talk and improves transcriptions when a caller is in a noisy environment
• IdP SSO: Security is a crucial pillar of the Dubber Platform, which is why we’ve enabled enterprises the overarching ability to control security and identity information. New Dubber customers can configure idP SSO during the account creation process while existing customers can add this functionality by requesting it through their account manager or support contact

We’re not stopping here. Dubber will continue to power on to deliver Unified Call Recording and voice intelligence solutions and end not knowing.

Let’s chat if you’d like a demo of our new integrations and features!

How is Voice AI meeting a growing need for faster, more accurate compliance management?

And why does Voice AI work hand-in-hand with proactive compliance?

At a recent IBM – Dubber webinar and round table, compliance industry leaders across the country talked about major compliance mandates affecting their performance. They were troubled by the new Work-from-Anywhere reality and how it’s off-setting rising regulatory demands on financial services and other industries.

During the webinar, fintech expert and Chief Customer Officer of Dubber, Andy Lark, together with Anthone Withers, Head of Public Cloud at IBM discussed the rising role of voice intelligence in stepping up compliance and removing legacy obstacles. They focused on how voice intelligence technology is meeting a growing demand for proactive compliance reporting.

See key takeaways on how to meet rising regulatory demands in 2021

Research shows a growing need to manage voice data in compliance

A history of compliance failures, cross-border mandates, and the growing list of guidelines since the Hayne Royal Commission and GFC are turning compliance and risk management into an increasingly complex task.

The Hayne Royal Commission claimed compliance was highly challenged by the common malpractice of using voice conversations to sell inappropriate products to customers. Deloitte in response, advised the industry to invest in compliance programs that embed data into their DNA. With the shift to data-driven compliance, voice data was inadequately addressed or was missing altogether.

A once impossible task now possible

“Voice has largely been captured in silos and locked into those silos. A voice intelligence platform now enables any conversation to be captured from any eligible end-point, then stored and analysed in a single compliant cloud instance.” Andy Lark, Dubber.

When coupled with IBM Watson, voice data is transformed into intelligent compliance insights. The combination shifts financial services and other regulated industries from a rear-view perspective to always knowing in real time.

When Covid hit and created a new ‘work-from-anywhere’ reality, compliance teams needed to capture and track conversations over a huge set of new endpoints and apps including mobile, Zoom, MS Teams, Cisco Webex and more. Suddenly, the impossible task of managing voice data at scale called for voice intelligence tools powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The power of combining voice data with Watson IBM

Unleashing IBM Watson with Dubber Voice AI on conversation datasets ushered in a new way to analyse conversational data while managing it in a secure environment.

The IBM Watson – Dubber partnership made it finally possible for managers to gain insights into customer conversations and leverage predictive analytics. Managers could now use triggers on keywords and alerts to search and generate reports in real time.

A brave new remote world jeopardizes compliance mandates

“We’ve seen a surge in the use of Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and more. The meeting online tsunami has created the need for compliant call recording, with all recordings – mobile, web and traditional handsets, unified in one place.” Andy Lark, Dubber

This switch to off-premise communications gave rise to a new remote worker and a growing reliance on mobile devices and applications. With that, new compliance issues arose. For instance, when remote financial workers recorded a business meeting on a popular application, unknowingly they broke many industry compliance mandates.

In effect, the data was not stored in a sovereign way, a privacy notification was not issued and workers were not redacting key data. Personal call recording simply did not meet compliance standards.

Time to knowing

“The new challenge is the time it takes to know if your compliance standing has been compromised.” Andy Lark, Dubber.

Traditional approaches to call recording resulted in useful dashboards for managing a call centre but today do little to meet the needs of compliance teams required to search terabytes of data in real time across multiple end-points – Or more importantly, being alerted on information misuse and policy breaches.

“Together with IBM we solved this at scale by enabling vast conversational data sets to be created and turning them into compelling insights” – Andy Lark, Dubber

Let’s look at a typical bank breach use case: Let’s say there is a serious customer complaint flagged across five years. The average time to assemble data could take up to eight hours of needle-in-a-haystack work. But with Watson IBM and Dubber, the task is reduced to 10 seconds. Anthone Withers pivoted to other important advantages: “You have proof, you have a transcript highlighting keywords that shouldn’t be in the conversation and you have sentiment analytics. Better still, all these insights that expose risk can be pulled into dashboards and reports in real time.”

In summary

Digital acceleration and remote work added multiple communication end-points that began to severely compromise compliance and fraud detection, just as regulatory demands were growing. What’s become clear is; compliance solutions that integrate voice intelligence can produce more cost-efficient and more productive compliance practices, and finally, deliver proactive compliance.

A business needs to listen to and understand two key groups. Sure, customers are vital, they are, after all, where the revenue comes from. But the front-line employees who determine how customers view your business are also important.

You can build loyalty with both groups and get to know them better by listening to what they say. The big question is how do you listen?

Start by putting humans first

Bots and automation have a place, yet for most of your customers, talking to a real person on the phone remains as important as ever. Want proof? More than seven in ten Americans would rather talk to a human than deal a chatbot or other automated process.

Chatbots and FAQs are best when it comes to dealing with minor queries. When a customer faces a bigger problem, they prefer to speak to a human. That means a phone call.

It’s not hard to see why. We know the three pillars of customer service are; a quick resolution, knowledgeable service agents, and a fast response. Customers feel valued when they speak to a knowledgeable agent who can respond in detail and at length. They want someone to listen to them.

The price of not listening can be high: Three out of four stop using an organisation’s services after a poor customer service experience.

So investing in customer service with a human voice makes good business sense.

Know your customer

Listening to customers makes them feel valued. It also gives you an opportunity to learn more about their needs and wants than you could ever get from an automated system.

By getting to know customers better, you can give them what they want. You can tailor your services, make appropriate offers. This pays off with more customer loyalty and that fuels more revenue.

Most businesses still have a long way to go when it comes to understanding customers. Almost a third of customers say they are frustrated that businesses don’t understand them or their needs.

One of the best ways to improve is by learning from mistakes.

Advances in voice AI and sentiment analysis provide the tools needed to filter negative calls to quickly identify customer complaints, or instances where customer service was lacking.

Understanding what your customers don’t like can be just as important as figuring out what they do. Analysing negative calls can identify areas for improvement – whether across products, services or experiences – and create opportunities for wins. Using data-driven decision making, businesses can increase sales, grow loyalty, and even improve their employee experience by reducing the number of negative customer calls they receive.

Do it right, do it once

One top customer frustration is having to repeat themselves when switching between channels or agents.

When a customer has to run through their problem a second time or repeat their personal details they see their call is not being resolved quickly. It also makes it look as if the person taking their call is not knowledgeable. That fails two of the pillars of customer service.

If you can’t provide a smoother, unified experience, your business will fall behind those who do. This is important if you offer omni-channel service. If you can’t offer it across a single service channel, you’re in trouble.

Pull it all together

Creating a unified customer experience needs a central repository of data from all previous conversations. The smartest way to achieve this is by using cloud native unified call recording that integrates voice data with existing business applications. Voice AI can turn those recorded conversations into a transcript.

When you pull data from previous conversations into a CRM system, data that includes a full transcript, your customer service agents can refer back to earlier conversations. This means customers don’t need to repeat themselves.

In the future consumers want more, not less, human interaction. Your business wants better customer interactions. Technology means you can do both at the same time. Better interactions mean you can make better personalised offers. You can adapt future conversations to the customer’s individual style and remember previous conversations so customers are not asked to repeat themselves.

Engage your staff

Your customer service employees define your customers’ relationship with your business. The more engaged they are, the better your business will perform. They’ll collaborate better and have higher productivity. Engaged workers are more likely to stay and less likely to take time off work. They will be enthusiastic about their work and about your business.

Keeping customer service workers engaged means a better customer experience. It also means cost savings: for a 100-employee organization, a 10 percent improvement in employee retention reduces costs by $50,000. If you can cut your staff turnover from 20 percent to 18 percent, that means two fewer employees to hire and onboard.

Staying engaged with remote working

Your customer service employees are more likely to stay engaged if you make their working life as easy as possible. That means giving them all the tools they need to do their job. This is especially true with remote workers who may miss human interaction.

Be wary of app fatigue. Using too many tools can disrupt workflows and drain productivity. Unified communications helps people stay focused. Most workers prefer the idea of having all communications in one place. Many workers believe a unified platform would help them achieve a better workflow, be more productive at work, and help work feel less chaotic.

Giving your workers a single, central repository of customer interactions will give them the insight they need to provide a better service.

Unified Call Recording and Voice AI

Unified call recording and voice AI will help you listen better to the voices that matter for your business. You’ll have a better understanding of your customers and their needs. At the same time, you’ll have valuable insights into keeping your employees engaged and focused.

Voice AI can bring things to your attention and even expose wants or needs that are not directly expressed. It can give you the information you need to deliver a better customer experience. You can reduce negative calls by learning from complaints. AI software can analyse and identify customer sentiment alerting you to problem areas. Positive calls can help you train staff and identify the best performers.

You can integrate AI voice and call recording into unified communications platforms and CRM to capture information at every customer touch point. This has the added benefit of easing app fatigue with your employees.

You can become a better listener by delegating some of the listening to Voice AI

Today we announced another major deployment of Dubber – this time at the heart of one of the world’s largest networks – AT&T.

Dubber will be launching compliant Unified Call Recording and Voice AI on 3 AT&T Networks: AT&T IP Toll-Free Network, AT&T Hosted Voice Service and Cisco Webex Calling with AT&T Business in the United States. What makes AT&T so special is that they are the first of the major service providers to deliver on the promise of Dubber Unified Call Recording.

It’s an unequivocal validation of our strategy to enable conversations to be captured across multiple end-points and unified in the Dubber Voice Intelligence cloud.

This reflects how modern businesses operate. We jump from calls on Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex to responding to customers on mobile devices and taking calls in service centres. What is crucial – for compliance, productivity, and visibility – is that all those calls can be integrated into one place and used to enrich systems of record like Salesforce.

That’s how, with AT&T, we can end not knowing for any business of any size. And that’s equally true for state and local government and education.

A Unified Approach.

Dubber is the only Unified Call recording and Voice AI solution running across multiple AT&T Voice business services – creating one place for all voice, video and text data to be harvested and leveraged instantly.

1. AT&T IP Toll-Free
2. AT&T Hosted Voice Services
3. Cisco Webex Calling with AT&T

Native + Cloud = Advantage

Business, state and local government have been trapped for years on legacy call recording solutions often requiring hardware, storage (that increases in costs the more you record) and only connected to specific applications.

Together with AT&T, we will enable customers to capture conversations from any eligible end-point – a simple feature add-on, and then AI-enrich and store their voice data in one place. They’ll be able to access all this safely and securely, meeting critical compliance and regulatory mandates.

Data is immediately available to analyze and to pull key insights from. Key insights that make material improvements to business operations, customer experience, and compliance mandates, all of which takes place in a vastly more dispersed work environment than ever before.

As a simple and easy to deploy feature upgrade, Dubber Unified Call Recording and Voice AI can be added to any of the listed AT&T services. Customers can easily connect voice data – including conversational content, sentiment analytics and call meta-data to big data sets, applications such as Salesforce, and more.

Central to the Dubber on AT&T offering is compliance. Not just that experienced by Financial Services enterprise and others in regulated industries, but also regulations such as PCI and HIPPA. Answering the broad range of compliance mandates faced by a business means Dubber on AT&T addresses every element of compliance – from how calls are recorded to what data is retained to how data is stored.

2020 was certainly different. And 2021 will be different again.

While 2021 will see the continuing acceleration of the dominant trends of 2020, it will be a different year again as enterprises and governments shift from a scramble to adapt to a new normal, to reshaping their futures based on new conditions.

Plato was right: necessity is indeed the mother of invention. During the COVID-19 crisis, one area that has seen tremendous growth is digitization, meaning everything from online customer service to remote working to supply-chain reinvention to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to improve operations. Healthcare, too, has changed substantially, with telehealth and biopharma coming into their own. – McKinsey

Here are our views on what these new conditions mean for governments and enterprises in the context of Voice Data as a Service and Unified Call Recording.

1. Endpoints have been dispersed, for good

The overnight shift to remote work meant the scattering of communication endpoints from one centralised location to home offices and makeshift desks all over the world. This opened the door to mobile and Internet Protocol (IP)-based communication becoming the main channel for business conversations.

Enterprise adoption of Unified Communications solutions as the dominant communication tool will accelerate in 2021 – driving the need to answer broader enterprise needs for compliant conversations on these platforms.

“As organisations raced to deploy communications platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex, they faced new pressures to ensure that communications across these channels were in compliance with industry regulations. This has shifted the requirement for call recording from being application-specific to the need for Unified Call Recording – due to the need to capture every endpoint.” – James Slaney, COO

2. Compliance optimisation

The pressure to maintain compliance with industry regulations isn’t going anywhere, in fact it accelerated this past year.

Compliance has remained a primary driver for call recording, however, we have seen a new emphasis on utilising the data to understand the customer and ensure employee wellbeing as part of a more proactive approach to compliance and business continuity.

2020 saw voice data emerge as a principal driver of optimising compliance programs to deliver a real-time view and reduce costs and complexity. This too will accelerate in 2021 as business leaders look to seamlessly integrate voice data with big data sets, applications such as Salesforce and more.

“Employers are feeling the distance between themselves and their employees and are keen to know more about the wellbeing of their staff, as well as wanting to be on the front foot when it comes to reducing risk and complying with industry regulations. This has led to organisations looking for ways to rapidly undertake audits – making keyword search and custom alerts more important than ever and relegating old world systems that don’t enable real-time search to the back seat.” – Russell Evans, CRO

3. The paradox of contactless customer experience

Satisfying customers through digital and contactless experiences means getting closer to customers, even while they are further away.

The lack of customer intimacy implicit in digital channels created more demand for voice communications. Leading organisations increased efforts to listen harder and automate customer experience (CX) reporting. Traditional approaches to net promoter scores that delivered CX insights quarterly or annually have begun to be replaced by AI-enriched voice and digital data that provides real-time insights. Analysing customer experience and employee experience identifies the true drivers of engagement and loyalty.

“Ending not knowing what was said, what the customer or employee experience was, or how the organisation is performing from a CX and EX standpoint is more important today than ever. 2021 will see traditional methods -– which present data months after it happened or worse, are based on hearsay – with real-time voice data analytics derived from Unified Call Recording. Enterprises will rapidly shift from time-lapsed CX to continuous CX, and reap significant cost savings as they do it.” – Andy Lark, CMO

4. Closing the business continuity chasm

2020 made the term “unprecedented events” seem like the understatement of the century. Business continuity planning was upended by the coronavirus pandemic. Organisations were forced to reassess their approach to every aspect of their operations and communications: from call centres to supply chains.

Business applications easily managed in data centres and wired to end-points had to be rapidly reassessed as workers dispersed, and legacy call centre approaches rethought. Cloud and network-centric approaches will accelerate in 2021 as enterprises look to reduce costs and fully virtualise approaches to voice interactions.

“We saw a shift in enterprise focus towards building out more UCaaS capability, which drove interest in the potential of voice communications as a valuable source of data. There was a growing desire to understand conversational data and turn it into actionable insights through the use of AI. Businesses began to understand that voice data can be used to improve operational performance, especially with the increase of digital and distanced transactions.” – James Slaney, COO

5. Mobile as the primary communication channel

The rise of mobile communications skyrocketed throughout 2020. Without an office and the accompanying communications systems, employees resorted to using their mobile as their primary communication channel. With the rise of 5G this adoption of mobile devices will only continue to increase.

While some regulators hit pause on compliance mandates for employees working from home, most – including the FCA in the UK – now require compliant call recording of conversations between bankers and customers.

This leaves businesses reevaluating their communications solutions and their compliance requirements. In order to ensure compliant and critical record keeping, businesses need to be able to capture calls directly from the network.

“Where call recording was once confined to the domain of the call centre, enterprises raced to understand how to capture conversations from mobile devices across wireless and IP connections. Unified Call Recording and Voice Data as a Service became a priority as organisations looked to capture calls from anywhere, enrich voice data with AI, and aggregate that data for broader enterprise use.” – Russell Evans, CRO

6. Work changed forever

Vaccine rollouts bring promise of a return to old freedoms, but in the meantime, communication and collaboration is likely to remain virtual. A Gartner survey of company leaders found that 82% plan to allow employees to work remotely at least part of the time after the pandemic, and 47% will allow employees to work from home full-time.

“The move to remote work has continued the shift to the cloud, with businesses moving away from application-specific and infrastructure-based call recording solutions. Organisations are demanding cloud-based and network-based offerings to complement the new way of working, and a landscape of business that looks like it has been permanently altered.” – Andy Lark, CMO

7. AI pixie dust is everywhere

Any tech solution offered in 2020 had AI attached to it in some form. It was also the year in which organisations saw through the hype and started to look to the real power of AI to automate workflows, enrich data and generate insights.

The application of AI to create intelligence and actions from conversational data will accelerate in 2021. At the most basic level we will see improvements in the ability to accurately transcribe voice data. At the same time advances in conversational outcome predictions will provide enterprises with the ability to significantly improve customer and employee experience.

“Anyone will have seen that in recent years vendors have begun sprinkling AI into every conversation, but what remains is the gap between the technology and understanding of where AI fits and how it can benefit businesses. Poorly managed voice data and AI only adds to the ‘info-besity’ many enterprises experience, further limiting their ability to get clarity from large data sets. Voice AI is more than just transcription, and decision-makers need to be sure they are getting the right data and insights to optimise their organisation.” – Russell Evans, CRO

8. The rise of voice data in the cloud

If data is the new oil, 2020 made it clear that voice data is the largest untapped source of rich insights available. Once isolated to individual applications and business functions, 2021 will see voice data break free of silos and discrete endpoints to become unified in the cloud.

We are seeing an increase in demand for data, as businesses are using this information to fuel continuous intelligence that can inform their everyday business decisions and actions. Gut feelings are no longer enough – the growing complexity of the world requires data-driven organisations.

“While Voice Data as a Service across mobile, UC, and SIP connections is a critical differentiator for service providers, the broader opportunity is in unifying that data in the Voice Intelligence Cloud and letting AI enrich it. This enables enterprises to turn compliant call recording into continuous compliance monitoring.” – James Slaney, COO

Here’s to ending not knowing in 2021!

2021 will be different

2020 was anything but the year any of us expected. Predictions made in January seemed to have little relevance by March and vapourised by July.

So where should Service Providers, UC solutions and their Resellers focus to maximise revenue and opportunities in 2021?

While some geographies, notably Australia and New Zealand are returning to a degree of certainty, for many others, uncertainty remains the norm. What is clear are the growth opportunities that have accelerated in response to new customer and business needs.

1. Dispersed workforces + Proliferation of end-points = Shift from connections to mining the value in conversations and content

Workforces will continue to disperse, increasing the demand for unified communications and security solutions that enable Government and business to work across many endpoints. Remote work practices will continue to reshape work itself, accelerating adoption of Cloud solutions. And 5g will only add fuel to the fire.

Action: Service and Solution providers – and their partners – are seeing continued strong demand for UCS and UCaaS platforms. And targeting those opportunities is the first step to underpinning growth. The second step is to develop solutions that answer broader needs for compliance, security and productivity.

Unified Call Recording is central to developing these solutions – moving Resellers from simply selling connections to delivering value from multiple and dispersed end-points in the Cloud. That value ultimately will come from ending not knowing and providing insights into every customer and employee interaction.

1. Big Data + Voice Data = Bigger Big Data that’s compliant

Voice interactions with customers and between employees either rank first or second as a form of communication. And yet they account for a fraction of the Big Data pool accessible by most businesses. The moment the conversation ends, the value within the content is lost.

2021 will see a rapid shift to capturing voice data – driven by the new economics of Unified Call Recording and the Voice Intelligence Cloud aggregating conversations as data from any end-point.

Action: To take advantage of this rapidly emerging multi-billion dollar market opportunity for Voice data as a Service (VdaaS), Service and Solution providers – and their partners – need to present UCR as an integral part of the UCS sale and a key ingredient for compliance, business continuity and improving customer experience.

Default call recording solutions associated with many VOIP products typically don’t meet Enterprise-grade data and security policies or satisfy regulatory requirements. Many only store recordings for a limited time, offer poor transcription, and do not offer any form of speech analytics or voice data AI. Dubber Unified Call Recording and voice data intelligence is compatible with most VOIP products, and can be added without the need for any further hardware.

1. Ecommerce Acceleration = Need for continuous intelligence

Ecommerce growth rates are now in high double digits with nearly every business under pressure to accelerate digital transformation with the aim of improving customer experience. But to improve customer experience, businesses need to shift to continuous customer intelligence.

Action: Service and Solution providers – and their partners – integrating Unified Call Recording and Voice Intelligence into their UC offerings are able to differentiate, offering businesses the pathway to continuous intelligence from every customer conversation. Rather than reporting on NPS or customer satisfaction at the end of a quarter, customer experience – along with sales, marketing and agent performance can be made available in real time. And through open APIs, that data can be used to fuel dashboards, via applications such as Salesforce.

1. AI + Voice Data = Better Decisions

By 2030, AI products will contribute more than $15.7 trillion to the global economy. The use of AI to analyse and predict human behaviour will become standard practice for businesses looking for trends across their business in customer experience and behaviour, churn reduction, cross-selling and marketing.

Up to 90% of a company’s data is defined as unstructured. Traditionally this type of data, particularly phone calls, has been difficult to capture and analyse. Dubber AI solves this by providing the ability to analyse voice data for sentiment analysis, keyword identification, and transcription – enabling companies to draw on this data to drive strategy and decision making.

Action: Shift to presenting AI-first solutions that automate the delivery of continuous intelligence from conversations. Critical use cases such as compliance and creating records of crucial conversations are an imperative for every regulated business. But the benefits don’t stop there.

By looking for AI beyond the conversion of voice to data, solution providers can show how that same data can be used to provide a productivity edge and improve data overall.

That same data is as valuable internally as it is externally to measure employee performance and sentiment across the distance of remote working. Businesses can also make use of voice data to provide transcripts of meetings to teams, saving on note taking, and creating further efficiencies.

1. Distance + Increasing Regulatory Scrutiny = Compliance Complexity

Demands by Regulators to Know your Customer (KYC) and a shifting data and privacy landscape is creating a growing demand for complete solutions to answer needs for rapid investigations, continuous compliance reporting and voice data management.

The UK’s exit from the EU will mean that the GDPR will have major implications for European businesses who process or store data in the UK. Businesses who operate within the European Economic Area (EEA) and record their phone calls must check that their protection of voice data is sufficient for a post-Brexit world.

Action: With the increase in UC communications, and the resulting level of data being stored in the cloud, Resellers will need to understand the data laws impacting the collection and storage of conversational data. And solutions that lower the cost and burden of compliance reporting through real-time search, alerts and notifications are vital.

If 2020 wasn’t what we were expecting, 2021 is shaping-up to deliver as many surprises. Service and Solution Providers, and their partners, can ready themselves to turn change and uncertainty into opportunity by focusing on the shifts and creating the solutions to answer the needs they surface.

Voice data is central to creating these solutions as businesses increasingly turn to it to drive their decision making, predict customer behaviours and guide business direction.

If you’ve ever dealt with a legal hold request, you’ll know how difficult this mandated preservation of information can be to manage. But there is a solution that can reduce the cost and complexity of complying with a legal hold request.

What is a legal hold request?

A legal hold (or litigation hold) request is when legal counsel asks an organisation to preserve information that could be relevant to litigation, an audit, or investigation: including electronic records such as emails, instant messages, and voice recordings.

A company may have multiple active litigation cases – each with its own legal hold requirements. Legal holds cover anyone who might possess relevant information, called custodians. The list of custodians may change throughout the process so companies need an agile solution that can quickly and easily place new information under legal hold.

For companies with information in multiple locations such as employee devices, on-premise servers, and data centres: beware. This distribution of data could cause your risk and compliance teams a headache. Having one centralised location for records makes identifying information and placing it under legal hold much easier.

Dubber’s Legal Hold feature

Businesses can prepare for external events that might impact their business. These might include a simple late payment issue with a customer, litigation, regulatory audit, or even government investigation.

To rest assured that any voice recordings and their associated data can be held for investigation quickly, easily, and effectively, all CALL DUB and DUB AI licences now include our new Legal Hold functionality as standard. This vital compliance feature is included at no extra cost to provide reassurance that recordings can be preserved should the need arise.

How does it work?

Dubber’s Legal Hold functionality allows users to tag single or multiple recordings as held. Selecting multiple recordings at once assists organisations in complying with a legal hold request and preserving large quantities of information at short notice.

Once a recording is tagged as held it can be played, downloaded, and shared as with any other recording – but cannot be deleted under any circumstances. Held recordings are protected from erasure even when the retention period for the recording expires, if the user associated with the recording is deleted, or the overall storage period expires.

Dubber users can already store and manage all of their recorded voice data securely and efficiently in one single, consolidated archive within the cloud platform. With unified record keeping and automated retention periods, compliance procedures are streamlined and these now include legal hold requests.

Legal Hold allows users to target specific recordings for analysis without the need for technical assistance or expertise. Recordings can be tagged as held in bulk by filtering recordings by customer, keyword, or user. Only users with admin permissions can tag recordings as held, standard users are unable to use the feature or use filters to locate held recordings.

End the productivity and visibility trap

Unified Call Recording can capture customer calls and automatically log them within a CRM such as Salesforce. But to earn some serious points with your sales team, give them the gift of voice AI. This can act as a personal assistant to your sales reps: transcribing their calls so they never have to take notes ever again.

Recordings and transcripts can be used to inform lead prioritisation, the coaching of team members, and much more.

According to research by Salesforce, 67% of sales people say that enforcement of activity logging is stricter than in 2019, and 63% of reps log more details about customer interactions than they did in 2019. The reality is most sales leaders bemoan the fact that Salesforce isn’t up to date or current. What if you could automate this logging for your sales team and get them back to selling?

For most sales teams this can equate to another day of selling every week. Another day!

End not knowing

Ever wondered what was said? How the customer was really reacting?

Rather than hearsay, how about letting AI tell you.

With sentiment analysis, positive and negative conversations can be identified to coach new and existing team members, create alerts for negative calls, and track campaigns, competitors, or trends in customer enquiries.

Sales teams need to understand the needs of their customers and build trust through listening. But are they being supported by business tools, or being let down by them?

“Sales leaders today are plagued by not knowing and no one likes surprises – particularly at the end of the month or quarter. Customer experience is equally impacted as salespeople transfer what was heard into manual notes and back into CRM platforms. Unified Call Recording accelerates sales momentum – giving back valuable selling time to reps and, critically, ending not knowing. Implementing Unified Call Recording should be a priority for every sales leader.”Russell Evans, CRO, Dubber

Bring it all together

Unified Call Recording enables it all to come together. Every conversation captured from any end-point. No salesperson works on any one device or platform. We jump between Webex, Teams, mobile, and more. So record and capture every conversation and, with them all in one place, seamlessly integrate with Salesforce and your preferred data visualisation dashboard for real-time record keeping and insights. Set alerts on keywords and more.

How would your sales performance improve if you gave every salesperson back five, ten or more hours every week?

One of the first places to start is reducing admin, manual and inaccurate record keeping, and searching for what was said. While effectively documenting sales activities can be vital to ensuring customer needs are addressed and performance is monitored and improved it doesn’t need to be done by hand.

End not knowing

What if you knew what was actually said? In customer-facing roles, such as those in sales or customer service departments, time can often be wasted trying to ascertain or prove what was said during a previous conversation. In order to end not knowing, sales teams need a call recording solution that captures 100% of calls for evidence of conversations. And that’s just the beginning. If a solution has added voice AI that can transcribe speech to text, a full transcript can accompany a recording for an accurate record of exactly what was said.

Things get even more interesting when you introduce an open API to the picture. This allows developers to facilitate integrations with existing business tools and applications, including CRM systems. Call recordings and their transcripts can be stored within a customer account for detailed and accurate records of every interaction the business has had with a contact.

Discover instantly

Rather than scouring manual notes or looking at inaccurate records in Salesforce, what if every conversation was captured as it was said? Sales teams would no longer waste time doing detective work to confirm agreements or resolve disputes – their time can now be spent generating revenue for the business. With absolute proof of what was said, sales reps can refer to a recording or transcript without delay. With a user-friendly interface, or integration with a CRM application, salespeople could even refer to a previous conversation with a customer while they are talking to them on the phone.

Coach and train based on real customer conversations

Recording sales conversations creates a bank of real-life examples of customer calls, which makes ideal training material for new employees. With the addition of sentiment analysis, calls rated with positive or negative scores can be easily identified to show successful customer interactions, and the kind of negative calls they might encounter.

Case study: DeSpir Logistics

DeSpir Logistics combines the best practices of logistics and technology to pioneer a new method of secure transportation logistics. We spoke to Sierra Villarreal, who covers security and compliance, to hear more about how Dubber saves the company time.

Dubber: What was the challenge that brought you to choosing Dubber?

Sierra Villarreal: We wanted a record of our calls in order to have a record of what was agreed upon during conversations with customers.

D: How did Dubber help you solve this problem?

SV: Dubber provided a great, affordable solution that meant we had a record of every agreement made over the phone. We can get to the facts on the first phone call; instead of wasting many hours following up on phone calls and emails trying to prove something was said on a phone call.

We also use calls to help with training new and existing employees on certain situations, calls, questions, etc. Most of all, we SAVE time!! We are no longer paying employees to spend hours investigating claims a customer made on a phone that wasn’t recorded. We can now use that time on sales. The company is saving money due to investigation hours reducing because of Dubber!!!

D: What was the process of going live with Dubber like?

SV: The Dubber portal is extremely user friendly. The easy to use solution makes it easy to retrieve a call in seconds, even while on a call with a customer, meaning we can reference a conversation to confirm details of agreements and resolve any disputes with customers with absolute proof of exactly what was said.

If you’d like to learn more about how businesses save time with Dubber, speak to a member of the team today.