Blog Post

Cisco customers across their Webex^® Calling, UCM-C, HCS, and CUCM services can unlock the power of voice data with Unified Call Recording and voice AI from Dubber. Automatically capture any call, receive a complete transcript, and access insights – from keyword alerts to sentiment analysis. You can even automate workflows and export data to dashboards and applications like Salesforce and Tableau through Dubber’s open API.

Legacy call recording and analytics restricted basic call recording to specific applications and a limited range of devices – often requiring costly storage and with poor scaling potential. Dubber is fully native to Cisco Webex^® Calling and can support UCM-C, HCS, and CUCM services too. As a cloud platform, Dubber’s Unified Call Recording doesn’t require any on-premise hardware or software: radically reducing costs and unlocking infinite scalability. Whether you’re considering moving to the cloud, or you want to future-proof your on-premise or hybrid solution, Dubber call recording is available to you. We create the ideal cloud environment, all in one solution.

Four things you can do when you turn calls into data

Unified Call Recording from Dubber is optimized for compliance with regulatory directives such as MiFID II, GDPR, Dodd-Frank, PCI DSS, and Cisco’s CASPRx. But the benefits don’t end there. Many businesses are choosing to record their calls to learn more about their customers and to identify opportunities to reduce churn, sharpen investment decisions, and inform business development.

Transforming calls into data through transcription opens up huge potential for analysis and allows voice data to be integrated with existing business systems:

1. Faster time to conversations and activity: Quickly review transcriptions and use instant search to find conversations
2. Instantly report on customer and employee experience: See sentiment ratings for every conversation, including individual emotions
3. Unify voice data with big data: Export call data for analysis within data visualization tools. Integrate call data within Salesforce and other CRM tools to build detailed customer profiles
4. Real-time alerting and notifications: Monitor when keywords are spoken during a call to track campaigns or potential issues. Create automated alerts for negative calls to help reduce churn and increase customer loyalty

How easy is it to connect?

Getting the benefits of Unified Call Recording and AI takes minutes and requires no on-premise equipment or storage. It’s as easy as using your existing Cisco solution.

If you’re considering call recording for your Webex^® Calling, UCM-C, HCS, or CUCM solution, sign up today by ordering directly from Cisco – we’re listed on Cisco Commerce Web (CCW).

You can also talk to one of our team if you’d like more information. And, if you are a Cisco reseller, we’re here to help you.

With a dispersed workforce, collaboration can feel difficult to achieve. Remote workers can often feel separated from their colleagues and their visibility of business operations can feel restricted. In departments that have a lot of direct contact with customers, this can cause customer interactions to feel disjointed.

Collaboration is critical to sales

According to Salesforce’s State of Sales report, 77% of sales teams rate collaboration across departments as critical or very important to the sales process. Customers increasingly expect salespeople to be informed about any previous interactions with a business, even if this was with a different department. Having complete visibility of a customer’s journey with the company is invaluable when trying to understand their needs and how they can be met.

An interconnected way of working with colleagues and other departments within a business can lead to the discovery of new opportunities. It is becoming increasingly common for sales and customer service teams to securely share information with each other to work more effectively. When customer interactions are correctly documented within a CRM such as Salesforce, everyone with access to a customer account can assess how well that account is performing, and understand the status of the relationship with that customer.

End not knowing with a record of customer interactions

Of course, documenting customer interactions takes time and effort. What if you had a solution that captured every single customer call, even when they were handled by a remote worker on their mobile device, or over an IP connection? And, even better, those calls were fully transcribed by speech-to-text AI for an accurate record of exactly what was said?

Where traditional call recording solutions rely on expensive on-premise storage, and only capture a small fraction of calls made across a business. Unified Call Recording captures voice conversations directly from the service provider network, and from communication solutions such as Microsoft Teams. With work no longer confined to an office or contact centre, companies who are looking for complete visibility across their business are looking for agile communication solutions that match our new dispersed way of working.

Keeping customer data secure

It is important that collaboration does not compromise on data security. While sharing detailed records of customer conversations can benefit sales and customer service teams, it is vital that customer information is not shared with more parties than necessary. Businesses should look for a solution that allows for secure sharing of data. Audio files should not be downloaded, as this could open up risks for the data being shared with multiple parties. Instead, sharing should be undertaken with expiring links that only allow access for that user, with a restricted time period and a cap on the number of playbacks.

Organisations should also check that any solution allows for the creation of teams with specific access permissions. Depending on the requirements of the team, recordings may only be accessed by supervisors with administrator controls, or may be shared with other team members for greater visibility over customer interactions.

Case study: APAC-Central

APAC-Central, Inc. supplies materials, paving and construction services across Northwest Arkansas, the Arkansas River Valley, Oklahoma and Southwestern Missouri. We spoke to their IT systems analyst Dustin Bowden about how Dubber has facilitated collaboration across the business.

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

Dustin Bowden: We wanted a call recording solution that was compatible with our new phone system to ensure our customers are billed correctly.

D: How did Dubber help you solve this problem?

DB: The Dubber solution gives us the ability to error check ourselves after taking an order. If a dispatcher gets a call and then can’t remember a detail when inputting the order, they can just check the recording rather than calling the customer back. The team like that they have the ability to share recordings as well as being able to set up teams. This means they can reference each other’s recordings when talking to a customer who has previously spoken to a different representative.

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

DB: I have received great customer service. Paul has been very helpful with everything we needed to get up and going. The Dubber system is easy to use and our users like it better than what we used on our old phone system. It fits seamlessly with our phone systems: it just works, and works well.

Adrian Di Pietrantonio is the co-founder and EVP, global channels at Dubber. At the recent Cavell Cloud Comms Summit, Adrian spoke about Dubber’s vision of becoming the global leader in unified call recording and voice data as a service. Here he gives us an overview of Dubber’s mission and how we are answering business problems with our Unified Call Recording and voice AI cloud platform.

We started with a simple question – why is the value of every conversation lost the moment the call ends?

How many times do you have a call, meeting, or presentation, only to lose the value of the conversation instantly? Details are forgotten, there’s no agreement on the key points that were made, no evidence of agreements, and the conversation can’t be easily recorded for compliance, training and more.

How often do you wonder what sales, customer support or team members are saying to customers? Why can’t you get real-time visibility of customer satisfaction?

It became clear that service providers were making connections – but not realising the full potential of those connections.

Voice data – held within every call – was clearly one of the great untapped sources of value for any service provider due to the ability to address three critical business pain points:

• improving customer satisfaction
• improving business performance
• meeting compliance mandates

The need for a new approach

As we looked at existing approaches it was clear they were built for the pre-cloud era and restricted the ability of service providers to participate in the voice data race. We saw a multitude of challenges:

• High-cost, inflexible infrastructure limited call recording to a small set of customers
• The cost of applications and infrastructure frequently meant less than 1% of voice calls were captured
• Call capture was confined to a single line or device – most frequently in the call centre – not reflecting how workers operate across devices and networks
• Solutions required significant investment with no way to economically add end-points or start with a flexible, scalable plan that reflected real-life use cases
• AI and the cloud were limited in their use. Data was trapped in the vendor application – limiting the ability to integrate with applications and Big Data

The Dubber answer

We created Dubber to unlock the potential of voice data for service providers, with the ability to capture every call on the network and infinitely scale.

Our innovative new model records directly from the service provider network and can be provisioned as a feature by the service provider. Offering affordable plans that are charged per user per month. Our solution captures conversations across SIP connections, mobile networks, Broadsoft, Cisco, Microsoft Teams and more: all with single-click provisioning. We call this new approach Unified Call Recording because all recordings are unified in one place – reflecting how businesses work today – via the Dubber app or web portal.

In order to answer data compliance mandates, such as GDPR, we needed a unified storage solution. So we created the Voice Intelligence Cloud. This needed to be, well, intelligent. Capturing calls and transcribing them is a commodity service today. We wanted our AI to bring value by delivering alerts, full and accurate transcriptions, customer sentiment analysis, and much much more.

Finally, we wanted the data captured from voice calls to be available for enterprises to connect to their systems of record. Through the Dubber API, we enable simple and easy connections to Big Data sets, applications like Salesforce, and dashboards in Google Data Studio, Tableau and other business intelligence tools.

Real world applications of Dubber

The Dubber solution is deployed across over 200 Service Provider networks globally today. Our Foundation Partners work with us to unlock significant revenue, retention, and differentiation by offering voice data as a service for diverse use cases:

The independent auto parts trader

Unified Call Recording enables the business to create a record of every call, and attach it to orders as evidence of the customer request. This solves two problems – giving distributors clarity on what was being asked for and providing the company with evidence of the order. They see customer satisfaction data in real-time and can view the performance of every customer contact.

The mid-sized betting company

Dubber provides chain-of-custody over customer orders and requests – eliminating costly dispute resolution processes on bets placed. Voice data also indicates trends based on sentiment, keywords, and operator – allowing business decisions to be driven by insights.

The large financial institution

Unified Call Recording is the only way for large banks to meet the compliance mandates set out for lenders. Real-time recording retrieval replaced slow and time-consuming SQL searches on legacy call recording – which often showed that the call wasn’t ever recorded. The Dubber solution ensures call recording across any device in any location and automatically sends custom notifications for specific keywords and call sentiment scores.

The question for service providers is: if data is the new oil – and voice data is its richest form – are you ready to create value from it?

Sales reps are using their intuition, rather than data insights, to prioritise leads. As data becomes the driving force behind business decisions, here’s how voice data and AI can help sales teams to succeed.

End not knowing

What is more important to a sales person than a conversation with a customer? The most valuable of these most commonly occur over the phone, when a back-and-forth over email is just not good enough. But as soon as the call ends, the information and insight held within the conversation vanishes. With 67% of salespeople saying that enforcement of activity logging is stricter than in 2019, accurately recording customer interactions is more important than ever.

A sales person could try to capture the substance of a conversation themselves, taking notes either during the call or trying to remember the key takeaways once the conversation has ended. This is a drain on their productivity, and isn’t all that efficient: they will be distracted if they try to take notes while they are talking, and might not remember every detail if they are writing after the conversation is over.

Recording calls is the only way to preserve the value in a conversation, but traditional approaches have been focused on fixed lines within an office environment and things have moved on – even more so in a post-COVID world. At a time where offices are hastily erected at kitchen counters around the world, calls are being taken over the web, on mobile devices, and IP connections. It’s impossible to capture these conversations without a solution that is built in the cloud with the agility to record every call, no matter where it happens.

As businesses adapt to operating in a world with face masks, social distancing, and an increased reliance on technology for communication, customer service and satisfaction is more important than ever before. Sales teams are differentiating themselves from the competition by using AI to improve internal processes and customer experiences, with 57% of high-performing sales organisations using the technology. A true understanding of a customer’s needs and their feelings about a brand or product can give a salesperson the edge, but this takes time. With huge volumes of call data, it’s impossible to drill down to insights at such scale. The solution is voice AI.

How to boost conversion rates by up to 30%

What if every single conversation within a business could be harnessed to power data-driven decision making? Voice AI transforms recorded conversations into data that can be used by businesses to gain insights into everything from the efficiency of business processes, to product development, to the success of marketing campaigns, to customer satisfaction. Not only can companies combine this with other business data for 360º visibility, they can even use conversational content to power automation within the business.

By recording customer conversations and transcribing them from speech to text, voice AI can then be used to make day-to-day decisions more effectively. Using AI in sales has even been shown to boost conversion rates by up to 30% when interacting with sales leads¹. With voice AI, call data can be integrated with a CRM to automatically populate accounts with records of every single voice conversation, including a full transcript. Sales reps can refer to call transcripts to recap customer needs and formulate tailored offerings based on their exact requirements. 69% of the highest performing salespeople had automated logging of customer notes.

Transcripts and recordings also act as evidence, meaning that crucial conversation with a customer will never be lost. Agreements can be referred to, and disputes can be resolved quickly and easily with an exact record of what was said.

The cure for churn

Sentiment analysis can also be used to gauge a customer’s feelings about a brand and even indicate those who might be about to churn. Voice AI analyses the words spoken by a customer to rate each part of a conversation, and the call as a whole, with positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. Using APIs, calls rated with a negative sentiment score can trigger an alert or even automate process, such as creating a task in a CRM such as Salesforce.

With the detailed records of previous interactions, salespeople can make hyper-personalised contact with leads and existing customers to help to nurture a relationship. Where once a customer might churn after a negative conversation, with automated alerts and task creation sales reps can proactively maintain relationships with contact that puts their needs first. Understanding customer needs was the number one reason for AI adoption, as stated by sales teams surveyed by Salesforce.

Not only are calls rated by sentiment, but voice AI can actually identify specific emotions based on what a caller said, allowing for an even more tailored approach to selling. Questions might indicate an analytical or tentative customer who might require more evidence of the benefits of a product or service, whereas someone making more active statements might be more confident in their opinions and be more ready to close the sale.

Case study: Dorsey & Dorsey

Dorsey & Dorsey Inc. is an insurance provider in Oklahoma. We spoke to their call centre manager Drew LeHew about how Dubber has improved sales performance at the company.

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

Drew LeHew: We weren’t happy with our old call recording provider as calls had to be manually recorded, which resulted in us missing important conversations. We wanted to protect ourselves against liability and have recorded calls to use as part of staff training.

D: How did Dubber help you solve this problem?

DLH: The simplicity of the solution was the most important thing for us. We have complete peace of mind knowing that every call will be recorded automatically and will be easy to find when we need to. Recording our calls has allowed us to diffuse disputes very quickly and we’ve seen an improvement in the overall performance of our agents due to the enhanced training we can now offer using recorded conversations.

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

DLH: The Dubber solution has given us a great system for monitoring calls and then using them as a training tool for our agents. Not only is every call recorded but we can easily retrieve important conversations and tag them for future use.

As a manager of a high call volume call center, Dubber call recording provides reassurance knowing all of our calls are recorded and easily accessible. Recording our calls with Dubber has allowed us to take our training to new heights as managers can listen to more calls and share them with their agents to find areas for improvement. I’d highly recommend the solution.

If you’d like to learn more about how Dubber Unified Call Recording and voice AI can improve sales performance, speak to a member of the team today.

¹Hansen, I., Hilbert, M., Travis, T. and Zijadic, A. (2019) Predicts 2020: AI for CRM Sales Technology Must be Balanced With Analytics, Training and Change Management Considerations. Stamford, USA: Gartner.

If you’re a Cisco customer, chances are you’ve used MediaSense. This built-in call recorder came as part of Cisco products to capture your phone conversations.

MediaSense is nearing the end of its days. Cisco stopped selling the call recorder back in 2017 and this year will be formally ending its support for both 10.x and 11.x versions.

I’ve been relying on MediaSense, what should I do?

The official deadline for the end of MediaSense is October 31st 2020. If you’ve been relying on it to record your calls, the time is now to look for a new solution. And we’re here to help. Dubber joined Cisco in 2019 to provide Unified Call Recording and voice AI services for their Webex Calling service and we now support their UCM-C, HCS, and CUCM services.

We offer pain-free migration for all of your MediaSense recordings to our cloud platform, and the chance to upgrade to the Dubber Voice Intelligence Cloud, with no need to invest in any new equipment. We record directly from the Cisco network so all calls are recorded, whether they happen on a fixed line, mobile device, or IP connection. Our services are available on a subscription model so there is no long-term commitment required.

How does Dubber compare to MediaSense?

Plus:

• By upgrading to the Dubber Voice Intelligence Cloud every call is fully transcribed with sentiment analysis
• Customer alerts based on call content
• Compatible with Webex Calling, UCM-C, HCS, and CUCM services

The Dubber platform is efficient and cost effective: with an open API for easy provisioning and integration with other business tools such as Tableau. We have ready-to-use Google Data Studio templates, and will soon be launching a dedicated Salesforce app. Our secure and scalable cloud platform offers long-term, unlimited storage that can help with regulatory compliance – with no restrictions on the amount of minutes recorded or stored.

Once you record your calls with Dubber, you get access to our Voice Intelligence Cloud – fully transcribing every single call and enriching call transcripts with detailed information about caller sentiment and tone – even identifying seven different emotions. This data opens up the potential for businesses to gain valuable insights from their voice data, search for calls by keyword, and automate processes based on what was said during a phone call.

Try out Dubber call recording and voice AI for free

To ease the transition to the cloud, we are offering free recording migration to all MediaSense users as well as free call recording for the first 90 days. Make sure you don’t lose out on the critical function of recording your calls and contact Dubber to access the free offer.

We offer three plans to suit your call recording requirements, along with increased support services. You can stack as many licenses as you need, there are no minimums required. Each license comes with unlimited recording minutes, and unlimited storage – making it perfect for compliance with industry regulations.

Our conversations are rich with information; but this valuable voice data is lost as soon as the call ends, or is trapped within proprietary call recording solutions. Voice is the largest untapped data source for most businesses, but if it is siloed its true value is lost. This is why we have introduced Data Exporter. This easy-to-use feature unlocks the voice data of a business and allows companies to truly unify their data to create a single source of truth.

When businesses export voice data and combine this with other internal data sources, they have the potential to tap into valuable insights. This can help to: develop dashboards to visualise contact centre agent performance, monitor and report on customer experience, deliver compliance reporting, access conversational content for investigations and customer remediation, enrich CRM data, and automate workflows. This kind of data cannot be extracted from chatbots or email and so is a valuable source of business intelligence.

What can businesses do with exported voice data?

Whether you’re a huge enterprise with a team of data scientists at your disposal, or you’re a small business owner who’s more comfortable with an Excel spreadsheet, data is key to making business decisions. We give you complete ownership of the data you collect from your calls, allowing you to use it in the way that best suits your business needs.

When you export data from Dubber, you are able to view call information, including sentiment ratings, tone and emotion. This kind of data can give a real insight into customer satisfaction and provide businesses with a better understanding of how customer conversations unfold.

You can unify exported voice data with data from other areas of the business, allowing for greater visibility. This is key to making your data work for you: with no more siloing of information, you get a 360º view of business trends and can more easily spot patterns.

Businesses can use contact centre analytics tools to compare data such as call volume, IVR path, and user numbers to analyse business patterns. Data can be exported to visualisation tools such as Tableau – or to tools that users are familiar with, such as Excel.

Improve customer satisfaction

Improving customer satisfaction and net promoter score is a key driver for businesses. By continually monitoring customer satisfaction using sentiment data, businesses can work to ensure satisfaction throughout sales, service, and complaints processes. Companies can use the knowledge gained from this analysis to raise customer satisfaction levels and increase the customer retention. Using Dubber’s Voice Intelligence Cloud, businesses can display sentiment and tone analysis. When viewed alongside call themes they can see how sentiment and tone changed over time.

Improve dispute resolution

Good complaint handling reduces overall operational costs. Businesses can analyse their exported voice data to ask questions of their complaints process. This data can show if complaints have been dealt with fairly and correctly by the customer service team, and whether anything could have been done differently. Customer service teams can identify common barriers to dispute resolution, alongside the root cause of complaints. This gives businesses the opportunity to address underlying issues and ultimately reduce incoming call volumes.

Understand first contact resolution

First contact resolution (FCR) provides an overview of customer resolution across various call types and shows the related sentiment and tone. FCR rates are determined by analysing spoken content within calls to find language relating to repeat contact such as ‘third time of calling’ or ‘last time I spoke with…’. When this is exported for analysis alongside CRM data and PBX records that show multiple interactions with the same users, businesses can determine the FCR rates for their calls.

Unresolved calls also provide an opportunity for deeper analysis around root cause and the frequency with which these escalate to negative call outcomes. Analysis of these calls can provide training insights.

Inform day-to-day business decisions

As well as using voice data to look at the big picture, businesses can also use it to inform everyday operations. Customer teams can export sentiment data to CRMs to inform a more personalised approach to customer interactions. Customers who are shown to be frequently exhibiting emotions such as fear or anger could receive a different approach to those who frequently show positive emotions on calls. Calls with negative sentiment can be used as a training tool for contact centre operators to learn how to alleviate negative emotions.

Particularly at this time when many businesses are operating with a remote workforce, management may want to use sentiment analysis to check on employees dealing with an increased number of calls with negative sentiment ratings.

Not a data scientist? No worries

Not everyone has the time or resources to undertake huge data science projects using expensive software. If you’re new to data science, we have you covered with our own set of templates for Google Data Studio. They will help you take your first steps into the world of analytics and business intelligence.

Available as standard for all Dubber AI plans

All businesses with Dubber AI plans will be able to use the Dubber API to export recording data up to a range of 31 days. Exports are presented as a csv spreadsheet where each row represents one recording, and include voice AI information. This allows data from recorded calls to be extracted in bulk. The new feature is included as standard through the API.

We’re very excited today to be announcing general availability of Dubber Unified Call Recording and voice data intelligence on Telstra’s TIPT, Liberate and SIP services in Australia.

Telstra TIPT, Liberate and SIP have stood out as some of the most reliable and efficient ways to connect with customers. Now Government and Enterprise can double the value of those connections by putting the content in every call to work – improving customer experience, mitigating risks, and improving productivity.

For the first time, companies in Australia can easily purchase cloud based call recording across any connected device – including mobile, for their entire business, with no expensive hardware costs, software to install or costly storage to manage.

Legacy Enterprise call recording has traditionally been limited to call centre environments, doesn’t scale easily and only captures a small number of the calls made. These limits made it difficult for Enterprises in regulated industries to comply; critical activities such as customer sentiment reporting and knowing your customer couldn’t occur in a timely way; and integration with applications and Big Data were restricted. Covid-19 further exposed its weaknesses as businesses missed capturing and converting calls from mobile devices and a dispersed workforce.

Now, with Dubber’s infinitely scalable cloud platform and Voice Intelligence Cloud being integrated into Telstra’s TIPT and Liberate products, companies can turn on call recording on demand, for any user. Flexible plans mean they can scale-up or down easily, and it works for sole traders, SMBs and the largest of Government and Enterprises.

This opens up whole new opportunities for businesses to understand voice data and gain valuable insights into their business. Want to understand call sentiment for every branch location in a bank, or franchisee outlet? That can easily be done using Dubber’s in-built sentiment analysis tools. Want to have a transcript of important customer calls integrated into Salesforce? Easily done as a standard part of Dubber’s service. Running a medium sized financial planning firm and need to record landline and mobile customer advice calls for ASIC record keeping and compliance purposes? We’ve got you covered.

Once a company starts deploying “whole of business” call recording, they can also take advantage of valuable insights from their voice data using advanced artificial intelligence and speech analytics tools. Want to trigger notifications every time a competitor is mentioned in a voice call inside the business? How about triggering a direct mail campaign offer to a bank customer every time a customer mentions “credit card” on a voice call? All of this is possible and much more when businesses are able to use the information inside their company from voice data.

And there are great opportunities for Telstra channel partners too. We believe that Dubber cloud call recording services can drive significant new demand for TIPT, Liberate and SIP services. Liberate in particular, is the first mobile service in the country that will have network layer, integrated call recording available.

We call this the “democratisation” of call recording for businesses and individual users. It will completely change the call recording industry in the months and years ahead.

Now more than ever, businesses are moving towards agile workforces that aren’t tied to a location or device. Infrastructure and operations leaders are looking to create perimeterless workplaces that enhance operations while maintaining high security standards.

As we have seen over recent weeks, digital business requirements have accelerated the adoption of cloud services in order to support remote workers. Cisco’s video-conferencing Webex service registered a record 324 million attendees in March, with usage more than tripling in the APAC region. With workers switching from office PCs, to laptops in their home office, to smartphones or tablets in their living rooms, businesses need to ensure that they can do their job, no matter the device. This changing work style is described as a perimeterless workplace.

Mobile access to business tools require appropriate security precautions to ensure that access to information is controlled. With users transitioning between devices, networks, and applications, it can be difficult to maintain a seamless experience. By migrating to the cloud, organisations can enable these new ways of working without the need for local networks or VPNs and still maintain security standards. The adoption of cloud services allows users to be productive across a range of devices.

Removing perimeters with the cloud

Dubber cloud call recording and voice AI has been designed with remote work in mind from the very beginning. We connect to service providers directly through their networks: capturing calls directly from the source and securely storing them in the cloud, with no need for any on-premise equipment. With no up-front investment required, companies can access our call recording and voice AI services on an affordable monthly subscription. Businesses of all sizes can connect to our services through their telecommunications provider, with no minimums to prohibit smaller firms or self-employed workers. With global data centres, recorded calls are protected by the latest cloud security protocols while maintaining data sovereignty. Not only can calls be captured across fixed-lines and mobiles, with the appropriate permissions they can be securely accessed from any device or location.

Access and security permissions

In order to ensure information security, access management must be put in place for remote workers. Traditionally, access to data may have been restricted to internal networks within offices or corporate-owned devices. Within a perimeterless workplace, access is granted to specific users through authentication, authorisation, and single sign-on.

Within the Dubber platform, permissions settings and team structures are put in place to restrict access to recorded call content. Depending on the permissions status of the user, they may be able to listen to no call content, only their own calls, or the calls of their team. You can read more about our security practices on our security page.

Application integrations

Users working across devices and locations expect a seamless experience. They want to be able to use the same applications wherever they are working. This is why we made the Dubber portal available to use as a mobile app, desktop app, or through a web browser. Our open API also allows for integration with existing business tools, allowing recorded content to be accessible from applications that users already feel comfortable with. Integrations with CRM systems enable organisations to create detailed customer profiles with recorded calls and their transcripts stored alongside other information.

For more information on how our cloud services can be implemented across a remote workforce, talk to one of our team today.

Unifying your business communications is more important than ever before. With the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting working practices, and telecommunications services providers such as Telstra beginning to disconnect older technologies such as ISDN services in Australia, many businesses may be thinking about migrating to a scalable unified communications solution in order to remain connected.

It is expected that cloud communication solutions will replace services such as ISDN, offering significant savings and flexibility for businesses. Voice services will be easier to manage remotely, and the same communications can be deployed across multiple locations for greater integration and resilience. Connecting through the cloud, rather than physical phone lines, frees employees to work remotely. Cloud solutions also allow for omnichannel communications, which are particularly important for businesses as customers increasingly expect to be able to contact companies by a variety of methods.

What is ISDN and why is it being shut down?

The first telephone networks, built in the 19th century, were made of copper phone lines that sent voice data. This technology makes up the public switched telephone network (PSTN), which has been used ever since. The integrated services digital network (ISDN) uses these copper wires to digitally transmit voice and data.

In Australia, the National Broadband Network (nbn™) is superseding older technology such as ISDN. The nbn™ is a nationwide project funded by the Federal Government. The project aims to provide every home and business with fast and reliable internet with the intention that any new telephone networks will now be IP (internet protocol) based. While this means that traditional devices that do not support IP services will not be compatible, there are many benefits to embracing this new technology. Similar initiatives are taking place around the world.

Will my business need to change phone system, and what are the options?

Businesses with ISDN phone systems will need to make some changes, but these needn’t be drastic. In fact, the shutdown can be seen as an opportunity to upgrade organisational communications and save money at the same time. A transition to next-generation communications has the potential to increase flexibility as well as introduce greater functionality.

Many existing phone systems are compatible with SIP (session initiation protocol) solutions, which also allow organisations to add lines as required without the need for additional infrastructure. SIP channels, sometimes called SIP trunking, are easy to set up: the only requirement is a reliable internet connection with the bandwidth to support voice services, creating a virtual telephone line. A hosted IP phone system is a commitment-free alternative to an on-premise phone system. These solutions use an internet connection to provide the usual functionality of a phone system, without the maintenance charges associated with an on-premise system.

VoIP (voice over internet protocol) systems are hosted in the cloud, and are easy to install and maintain as they don’t require physical hardware. These systems use the internet to carry voice data, without on-premise equipment. VoIP doesn’t even require physical phones: softphones can transform a computer into a phone using software.

Future proof your business

While moving your communications to an entirely new solution may sound daunting, the benefits well outweigh any short term (and mild) inconvenience. Modern voice technology like SIP and VoIP can offer huge savings, as well as greater flexibility, scalability, portability, and security. Soft clients on devices enable workers to take all the capabilities of the office with them, wherever they go. Where traditional phone lines required installation in new locations, with IP-based services telephone lines can be easily added and removed, and can be of a higher quality. This future-proofs businesses for any growth, as handsets and portable devices can be connected instantly.

VoIP systems enable mobility through single number reach, allowing users to be reached on one number across multiple devices. VoIP can also incorporate a range of communication methods, such as video conferencing, email, and instant messaging into one solution. This consolidation of communication is referred to as unified communications (UC). Unified communications can bring cost savings and facilitate increased productivity, with users able to work from any location with an internet connection.

VoIP also provides greater potential for business continuity, as it’s not tied to any on-premise hardware. Calls can be diverted easily between locations in case sites are unreachable. UC that is completely hosted in the cloud is referred to as unified communications as a service (UCaaS). A whole range of communication and collaboration applications and services can be deployed through the cloud, and consolidating these services can often simplify billing into a fixed package; making costs more predictable.

To find out more about the kinds of services we offer that can be integrated into a UCaaS solution, get in touch with a member of our team today.

Guest blog written by Mikka Hendra

The current global challenges put a spotlight on IT and IT services – like cloud, Unified Communications, Call Recording, anything and everything surrounding the dramatic movement of staff to home working environments.

While our team is so grateful to be healthy and still able to work, their new challenges have become convincing the kids not to use up the household WiFi downloads for TikTok and Tiger King and remembering they only dressed their upper half for Webex Calls!

Dubber continues to work around the clock to accelerate the global movement to #WorkingFromHome. However despite this global movement, our staff found themselves struggling with basic physical movement besides moving themselves to the fridge and back, while WFH.

The Management team saw an opportunity to optimise the way we worked in these new times and decided to create the Dubber Wellness Hub | Supporting physical distancing, social connection + positive WFH lifestyles.

The Hub was built and rolled out to our workforce as a social health and wellness Hub providing our team with a means for connection, mental health support and resources, general ISO tips, tricks and ideas during physical distancing for COVID-19.

This initiative saw the creation of the Dubber Wellness schedule which includes daily Webex chats by the “office e-water cooler”, online fortnightly health coach wellness coach tips with Jessica Duchesne, UberEats vouchers for a fortnightly team lunch via video, team meditation facilitated by “conscious comedian” Jeremy Carne and after checking on the corporate insurance policy, guided yoga and fitness classes by yours truly.

Along with wellness, we started a weekly themed ‘Bad Fashion Fridays’ competition, dressed in our fashion fails for the day’s video conference meetings. The team look forward to ending the week with some humour at their co-workers expense, before recapping on our Friday Happy Hour chat.

With a new focus on nurturing our teams mental and physical health from a distance, we feel our workforce is becoming closer and more productive than ever and encourage any workplaces still able to work, to rethink how your team connects during this time.

Advances in technology have facilitated a whole host of business developments, increasing efficiency and driving productivity across a variety of industries. But the benefits of such technological improvements are mostly confined to large enterprises who are able to invest in new solutions. Often small businesses face insurmountable barriers to adopting new technology, such as lack of resources, difficulty or reluctance to move away from legacy solutions, and worries about maintaining business continuity.

Future-proofing with the cloud

For service providers and value-added resellers (VARs), the small and medium business (SMB) market can be easy to neglect when faced with obstacles that prevent them from adopting new technology. However, the cloud is providing solutions that can help service providers and VARs to access this market and open up a whole new range of customers. The flexibility and accessibility of cloud solutions break down the obstacles that previously prevented small businesses from adopting new technology. Employees have grown accustomed to using the cloud in everyday life and they now expect to at work, so a move to the cloud is no longer such a daunting prospect.

Resources

Before the advent of the cloud, adopting new technology required not just a financial investment but allocation of other resources including time, trained staff, and physical space. Moving to a new solution meant investing in new hardware and software, along with installation. Deploying new technology often requires a lengthy installation process, along with specially trained staff, ongoing maintenance, and the physical space required to store any hardware such as servers.

Cloud software as a service (SaaS) solutions break down these barriers, allowing service providers and VARs to offer products and services on tailored monthly subscription plans that require no upfront investment from SMBs. Even traditional software companies like Microsoft now offer packages such as their Office product suite as SaaS. Where customers would once have bought a CD to install each new version on their computer, cloud versions can apply updates automatically and are transferable between devices. Cloud solutions require no hardware, meaning no need for specially trained staff, maintenance or storage space. Businesses can also start using the services immediately with no delays created by installation processes.

Legacy solutions

Although small businesses are known for their agility, when it comes to adopting new technology they may be unwilling to move to a different service if they have previously invested heavily in a legacy solution. Service providers and VARs could offer a compromise with a solution that enhances what they already have, without requiring a complete overhaul.

Business continuity

There are often worries about business continuity when considering adopting new technology. Cloud solutions often facilitate a smooth transition, with much shorter implementation periods and open APIs allowing integration with existing systems.

Dubber and the cloud

Dubber call recording and voice AI are great examples of how the cloud can help small businesses adopt new technology. Our services are all available on a monthly subscription, with no upfront investment, hardware, or trained staff required. We connect directly to the network to capture voice data, so businesses do not need to install any equipment on premise or worry about maintenance or storage space. We understand that businesses may not want to part with expensive legacy equipment and so we also work with businesses who want to keep their on-premise solutions, extracting the voice data for transcription and analytics. Our open API allows companies to integrate call data into their existing systems, ensuring business processes continue to run smoothly.