When you think about call recording, you’re probably thinking of server rooms full of equipment, call centers, RVAs announcing that this call may be monitored for training and coaching purposes…but all that is changing. Call recording no longer requires huge CapEx investment, nor the floor space to house servers. It can enable a business to do far more than just listen to a few random calls a month to rate a consultant’s performance.

Call recording with artificial intelligence opens up a world of new possibilities like reducing churn and increasing net promoter score. If you’re a marketing manager or customer experience manager, this blog is for you!

If churn or retention is part of your targets, you probably think you have enough data on your customers and know exactly why they’re leaving. You probably have access to some reports that tell you why a customer is calling, based on their IVR selection, right? But what about all the other information transacted when a customer is talking to one of your call center agents?

Chances are, unless a customer escalates an issue, or you listen to a few calls a month, you have no idea what happens on a call. Dubber’s Zoe can change all that.

Imagine receiving a report that gives you customer sentiment on every call that takes place. Or being able to identify phrases or keywords spoken during a call that may highlight customer pain points you had no idea existed. Zoe can do this and so much more!

Campaign Reporting

As a marketer, either you or one of your team will be likely be providing regular campaign reporting. And if this is the case, you’re probably relying on the call center to have accurately recorded how the customer heard about you, or if they are calling in relation to a particular campaign. Zoe’s advanced search functionality means you can pull every call where a campaign name or offer was discussed. No more wondering if your response rate is correct, you’ll know exactly how successful your campaign was without worrying if the call centre entered the right campaign details into your CRM or not.

End the guessing game

How many times have you had to estimate the impact of a price rise? With Zoe, you’ll know exactly how many people called and if they churned or changed product, so next time round it won’t be such a guessing game. Simply enter the date range and key words such as ‘price’ and search for negative sentiment to find every call. From here you can either listen to each call or review the transcript and sentiment.

Get the edge on your competitors

Understanding sentiment can give you the edge on the competition. Let’s say a customer has had a negative experience with a call center agent, we’ve all heard these one hundred times over at a BBQ. Chances are, no one knows this call took place aside from the agent and the 10 people the disgruntled customer told. Zoe can alert relevant persons in your organization to the call, allowing them to contact the customer and potentially turn a negative experience into a good one: stopping that customer from churning or leaving a negative review and telling anyone who’ll listen how bad their experience was.

Have you ever put the phone down and forgotten what the last point was? What was the last item you are meant to pick up on the way home? When is that report due? Playback by Dubber is the answer.

These days, many of us are working on the go. If you’re driving or running from one place to the next, grabbing a pen and paper isn’t really an option, so you’re left with having to call the person back, or try and remember the details of the call.

Have the conversation over and over – in a good way!

Playback allows you to save your calls, with the option to keep the call for up to 3 days after it took place. Once you’ve chosen to keep the call, you can listen to it as many times as you like via the Dubber app on your phone. Once you’ve decided to keep the call, a secure audio file is generated, which only you can access.

Claim it as your own

Playback is available to service providers to white label as their own for their customers. The Dubber App can also be customized with your own branding.

Connect via Dubber Connect

If you’re with Cox Business or AT&T, ask your account admin to enable Playback for you and start Playing-back straight away. Your boss and spouse will think your memory has improved immeasurably!

Playback is great for busy people on the go, people who hate taking notes and meeting minutes and those of us who are just a bit forgetful sometimes.

Contact us for more information on Playback today!

Contact centres would be nothing without their agents. As the first point of contact for customers, contact centre agents are the face, or voice, of the company. Organisations with contact centres need to ensure they nurture their agents and provide them with the tools they need to give the best customer care.

With contact centres such an important part of a business, it is important that organisations do what they can to improve employee morale. They must also make sure agents are not held back by technological limitations. When developing our call recording services we had contact centres in mind. We made sure that our Always On call recording and Zoe voice AI could help solve some common issues.

Improve the performance of contact centre agents with morale-boosting AI

In a contact centre, workers cannot just pick up their tasks when they return to work after an absence. Customers will continue to contact the organisation no matter how understaffed the contact centre may be, and it’s up to the remaining agents to manage the workload. At peak hours, this can be stressful for agents who are forced to handle more calls than usual.

When building our call recording solution, we wanted to find ways for organisations to learn more about their customer interactions and the way their business works. We know that an agent’s morale can decrease when understaffing creates a bigger workload for them. This is why we wanted to create technology that can help organisations to reward contact centre agents who outperform at their job. The sentiment analysis of Zoe, our voice AI service, uses speech characteristics to identify the mood of a caller throughout a conversation. Zoe then assigns the call with a positive or negative score. Agents who consistently achieve positive scores can be rewarded for their hard work, and feel like their success can finally be measured and recognised.

Increase the efficiency of your contact centre agents with automated workflows

Contact centre agents often have to use a variety of different software during their working day. This may include CRM databases and workforce management tools. With these different applications, agents may have to familiarise themselves with numerous different interfaces; jumping from one window to another to perform different tasks.

At Dubber, we didn’t want to add yet another interface to deal with. That’s why we made sure that, via our open API, an organisation can integrate our service with other applications. Our API allows developers to integrate Dubber’s functionality into existing systems. This allows the call data and recordings we collect to be used in other applications. It also allows other applications to use our technology, such as our AI or search functionality, to automate processes. For example, a manager could receive a Slack notification after a certain word is spoken during a call.

With the contact centre representing an organisation at key moments on a customer’s journey — enquiring, placing orders, making complaints — it is important to look after your contact centre agents and get the most out of your data. Contact a member of the Dubber team to see how you can provide the best solution for your contact centre.

Technology has the power to make a small business big. Unfortunately, 30% of small business owners find it hard to adapt to new technology, according to a survey undertaken by AT&T.

Common obstacles for small business

Early adoption of technology can be make or break for a small business, but they need help and support in order to take steps towards digital transformation. Many small business owners feel that they are not in a financial position to adopt new technology. With the introduction of SaaS products, smaller businesses now have access to advanced technology for an affordable monthly subscription.

Of course, money is not the only resource that is scarce within the world of small business. Time is another valuable asset that companies of this size are often lacking. New technology must save time for an organisation and not require lengthy installation processes that disrupt current workflow.

Call recording and voice AI as a service

Dubber have democratised call recording and voice AI. We have made this technology available to businesses who previously were discouraged from adopting such services, due to the prohibitive cost of legacy solutions. We’ve also transformed the onboarding process: cutting the time and costs required to deploy our cloud call recording. We even created Dubber Connect to make provisioning customers even easier and reduce the disruption that can be caused by implementing new solutions.

With our limitless storage, there are no hidden costs. Customers can choose the storage plan most suited to their needs. If it turns out they want to increase their minutes allowance or storage length they can change to a different subscription at any time. This flexibility gives small businesses the reassurance that they aren’t committed to a solution that may in the future become too expensive.

Showing the value in voice to small business

Small businesses need to be shown that call recording is no longer solely for compliance. It’s not just for huge enterprises with vast contact centres. SMBs can benefit from capturing their communications too. To illustrate the ways in which businesses of all sizes can benefit from call recording, use cases are a great way to convince customers. Taking the time to enlighten your user base can result in an expanded market and increased revenue.

Digital transformation is something that many organisations are undertaking. With many aspects of business moving to the cloud, small companies shouldn’t be left behind.

We’ve updated our API to make it super easy to access and manage team information. With the updates, service providers and their customers no longer have to log in to the Dubber portal to create and manage teams and their members. Using the API, service providers will be able to administer customer accounts straight from their own portal, as well as enabling customers to manage their own accounts through third-party applications, including their CRM.

Each account will automatically get a team named ‘All’, which cannot be deleted. New teams and their members can be easily managed through the API and Dub points can also now be created and deleted via the API to add and remove call recording implementation easily.

With multiple interfaces a part of modern working, this API update means one fewer application open on your desktop. Account admins can manage their teams from an existing application that they are familiar with, allowing colleagues to share their calls more easily.

The techie bit

We have updated our developer page to include the updates to our API. This page includes samples of how to access the Dubber API can be accessed. All these samples provide the URL for the Sandbox environment, allowing for safe and easy testing of any new developments.

Scroll down our developer page to find the new teams updates

For example, to create a new team member in an existing team, the API request would be:curl -i -k -H "Authorization: Bearer " \


-X POST "https://api.dubber.net/sandbox/v1/accounts//teams//members" \


-H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{ "user": "johntravolta-dubber-net", "listener": true}'

This would receive the following response:HTTP/1.1 201 CREATED


{


"id": 1234,


"user": "johntravolta-dubber-net",


"date_created": "Wed, 09 Oct 2013 22:39:19 +0000",


"date_updated": "Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:48:40 +0000",


"listener": true


}

At Dubber, we have built our products and services in the cloud: benefitting from the unlimited scalability and storage that this provides. We have chosen Amazon Web Services to enable us to provide high levels of security, reliability, and service. Our infographic shows how a move to the cloud can bring numerous advantages.

The world is changing. The way we communicate has been transformed and the world of work is adapting to new technology. We wanted to learn more about how people’s working lives have changed, and their frustrations with technology that hasn’t quite caught up, so we launched a targeted research campaign to learn more.

Our research surveyed over 2000 service sector employees to better understand the ways in which the world of work is changing and how communications service providers could provide products and tools that could help them reclaim their time.

An increasingly mobile workforce

Workers are no longer tied to their desks and jobs are becoming much less office-based. Our survey found that a third of the workers spend more than four hours away from their desk during their working day. With 18% away for eight hours or more, a significant number of service sector workers are completely mobile.

We wanted to find out just how productive employees are during this time away from their desk. Do they find they are catching up on missed work when they are back at the office? Are they continuing their jobs on the move? And, more importantly, do they have the tools they need to do their work effectively?

Cohesive communications

Dubber are always looking for ways to help people to manage their communications and make the most of every phone call. We were interested to find that over a quarter of all workers we surveyed make more than five business calls a week while mobile, and a tenth do the majority of their business calls on the move. With all these conversations taking place away from a desk, a keyboard, and a trusty notepad, it can be difficult to keep track of everything that takes place during a conversation.

James Slaney, Dubber co-founder, has commented on the research; noting that, “The ability to work anywhere is obviously advantageous and a necessary component of modern work life, but it remains challenging when information is poorly recorded and crucial details missed when workers have phone conversations. Phone calls are often reserved for the important stuff; for the decision that needs to be made, for the question that we want answering urgently. We pick up the phone when we just need to get things done.

When phone calls can be recorded and the information gathered on them digested in the same way we process emails, we will see a resurgence in the number of calls made in the workplace. Once only provided as an always-on service deployed for regulatory compliance or contact centres, now businesses can choose from a range of call recording options and capture their calls at the touch of a button.

Advances in cloud computing and digital transformation mean that phone calls will better retain their value to businesses and advances in speech intelligence technology will allow businesses to unlock their priceless data. For the multi-tasking, mobile working Brit, the ability to make better use of the information gathered through phone calls gives peace of mind so that miscommunication and misunderstandings will be a thing of the past.”

How service providers can help workers

Providing call recording and speech intelligence as a service allows service providers to supply their customers with solutions capable of meeting the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce, at a cost that is affordable to businesses of all sizes. Dubber’s monthly subscription model allows smaller organisations to access the benefits of call recording and pass these efficiencies on to each of their employees.

The benefits of call recording are now available on demand. Once only provided as an always-on service deployed for regulatory compliance or contact centres, now businesses can choose from a range of call recording plans and capture their calls at the touch of a button.

2018 is set to be a year of digital transformation, when organisations take their first steps into the cloud and begin to reap the benefits. Looking to the future of communication, phone calls will retain their value and advances in speech intelligence technology will allow businesses to unlock their priceless data.

How to record your calls

A move to the cloud means a move away from being tied down: to investment, to storage plans, to bulky equipment. Cloud call recording as a service allows organisations of any size to capture their conversations at an affordable cost. With no on-premise equipment required, Dubber’s call recording can not only be deployed rapidly, but can also be installed without the need for CapEx.

Always on

Always on records all calls, directly from the network. Perfect for regulatory compliance, or for large businesses that want to record calls for training purposes. Team hierarchies can be established, making calls accessible only to admins, supervisors, and the individual users who made the calls.

On demand

On-demand recording is a user-initiated service that only records selected calls. The user can decide to record a conversation before or during a call using a function on their desktop or handset. Recorded calls are stored in the same way as other team members and have a hierarchy of access permissions. Each individual user only has access to their own calls, while supervisor and admin permissions grant access to the calls of an entire team.

Playback

Specially designed for individuals, Playback gives users the gift of hindsight with the option to save a record of their calls for up to three days after the call has been made. They can then access them through their own private dashboard using a web, mobile, or deskphone app.

Zoe

Zoe transforms everyday phone calls into valuable data assets for both businesses and individuals. A comprehensive suite of speech intelligence modules, Zoe lets users unlock the insights held within the data of voice calls through its key features: Smart Search, Keywords (coming soon), and Sentiment (coming soon). Businesses can examine their customer communications to increase their understanding of their interactions and discover areas of potential improvement.

Launching at RoutIT Vision this month, HIP Recorder is the latest offering from Netherlands wholesale infrastructure and cloud services provider RoutIT – and it’s powered by Dubber. At an event that was buzzing with interest in the new developments in call recording for individuals and speech intelligence, HIP Recorder is an exciting new product.

This partnership with RoutIT will make Dubber’s cloud call recording as a service available to all RoutIT customers – the HIP Recorder is an affordable option that allows users to retrieve recordings of their calls for up to three days after the call has been made.

RoutIT was founded in 2000 and strives to develop and deliver the most innovative internet, cloud, connectivity and communication solutions. RoutIT works closely with its customers with a personalised approach to providing communication solutions. This new product matches the tailored ideology of RoutIT by providing a unique offering that allows individual users to gain access to the benefits of call recording.

HIP Recorder users can also benefit from the speech intelligence of Zoe – giving them the potential to transform everyday phone calls into valuable data assets. Zoe goes above and beyond traditional call recording to unlock the information held within voice calls – allowing users to search their call archive and automate processes triggered by keywords spoken on calls.

Dubber will be at RoutIT Vision on September 26th and 27th 2017 demonstrating the benefits of call recording for individuals and the endless potential of Zoe. Come and say hello if you are attending!

Unstructured data enables organisations to gain insight into their working practices. The term unstructured data describes information that does not have a set format, unlike its structured counterpart that is made of set data fields such as inventories and orders. Examples of unstructured data include images, and video and audio recordings.

Big Data and its analysis has proven just how vital information is to businesses. Insight into both consumers and the working practices of the organisations themselves can be a valuable asset. With global data estimated to reach over 160 zettabytes (that’s 160 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes) by 2025, learning how to harness this information can set businesses apart from their competitors. These huge amounts of data allow analysts to understand a company’s true potential and more accurately predict growth and risks.

Unstructured data is often linked to structured data to make it easier to process. For example, a headshot of a staff member would be associated with structured data relating to the length of their employment and salary. This allows data to be visualised in a way that can be utilised to gain insights that were previously unimaginable. Data analysis can predict sales results, allow for more accurately targeted marketing campaigns and open up business and product development opportunities.

80% of data is unstructured, and is growing at a far higher rate than that of structured data (see graph below). Unstructured data often requires special tools to sort, search, visualise, and analyse. Unstructured data frequently holds much more information than structured data, and the information is often much more valuable. Due to the difficulties that can arise when accessing unstructured data, an organisation’s systems may need a way to read the data before it can be processed, and extra storage may be required for this more complex data. Companies with on-premise storage may be restricted by the amount of data they can store, and will be forced to make difficult decisions about the information they choose to keep.

Source: IDC

The power of the cloud

Data analysis can be overwhelming and it can be difficult for organisations to understand how to make the most of their data – especially large amounts of unstructured data. With a data management strategy, businesses can ensure they keep up with their competitors and capitalise on the wealth of information held in their data stores.

The analysis of unstructured data can be extremely time-consuming, with specialist data scientists often employed to cleanse and prepare the data before analysis. Employing expensive data scientists is an unlikely step for all but the largest enterprises to take but, with developments in artificial intelligence (AI), unstructured data can now be automatically analysed. These technological advancements allow even small businesses to profit from their valuable stores of data.

Investing in expensive hardware for data storage and processing isn’t practical for the majority of businesses, however, utilising the infrastructure of the cloud can allow organisations to store and process their data without restrictions or the need for CapEx. With dramatically reduced costs, and the scalability to accommodate large amounts of data, companies have the opportunity to experiment with analysis to grow their knowledge and skills.

Introducing Zoe

Automated analysis is now possible with AI becoming an everyday reality. Software can process huge amounts of unstructured data including images, audio and video, and not only report findings but learn as it analyses. AI is an important component in Big Data analysis, with its capabilities expanding to now include emotion recognition.

These new capabilities are exemplified by Zoe, Dubber’s suite of intelligence modules. Specialising in the analysis of voice data, Zoe’s ability to process this kind of unstructured data opens up another channel in the Big Data conversation: Big Voice. Accessing the data in consumer calls allows organisations to truly listen to their customers.

Zoe’s technology is under constant development. Its Smart Search feature is available now, allowing users to search their recorded calls using a variety of criteria from the date and location of the call to specific words that were used during a conversation. Due to be released at the end of 2017 are two more modules: Keywords and Sentiment. Keywords tags specific words and phrases and can be configured to trigger actions when these are spoken through Dubber’s open API. Sentiment identifies the emotions of the participants of a call to create a detailed understanding of their mood throughout a conversation.

Zoe’s analysis of voice opens up the wealth of insight that can be gained from this unstructured data, and allows businesses of all sizes to take advantage of the cloud and experiment with data analysis. Powered by the cloud, the processing potential is limitless.

Remote working is slowly challenging the norm of 9-5. Flexibility in working practice is replacing allocated desks and designated start and finish times, while performance is measured by results and is moving away from the culture of presenteeism. According to a report by Gallup, 43% of employed Americans said they have worked remotely at some point over the last year, with 20% working from home full-time. The report suggests that advances in technology mean that workers no longer need to be confined to set office hours and locations in order to do their job effectively. With this new approach to work now expected by millennials (see chart below), businesses need to be prepared to adapt to a flexible workforce.

Source: Forbes

The benefits of employing remote workers…

As employers begin to embrace different ways of working, they are finding they can reduce their property costs with fewer workers on the premises. Their employees also benefit from advantages that go beyond the simple convenience of flexibility in their work. Employees who work remotely are less stressed and much happier as they can decide how they prefer to work and have greater control of their work/life balance. They can choose the working environment that best suits them, whether that be a café with a plug socket or the comfort of their bed. Release from the daily commute increases employee wellbeing, gives them more time in their day, saves them money, and also reduces their carbon footprint. A survey by Microsoft found the top ten benefits reported by remote workers were as follows:

Source: Sage

…and the challenges

Allowing employees to work remotely presents a challenge to managers and executives, who want to maintain a balance between staff wellbeing and productivity. Compliance is also a key consideration, especially within industries such as finance. Recording communications is essential to comply with regulations so organisations need to employ a solution that can capture conversations made outside the office. Implementing a unified communications (UC) solution, which amalgamates all communications into one interface, alongside call recording will ensure all conversations are captured – even when users are mobile. Remote contact centre workers that take customer payment card details over the phone need to ensure they are compliant with PCI DSS. This set of regulations states that no payment card details can be stored, so a call recording solution must feature measures to prevent this.

With remote working comes the risk of employees feeling disconnected from their work and the rest of their team. Key to remedying this potential sense of distance is encouraging continuous and proactive communication and enabling effective sharing of information between team members. This shouldn’t be confined to work-related subjects. Without the opportunity to run into a colleague in the corridor, or to chat while making tea, remote workers can miss out on the day-to-day conversations that make a team feel connected. However, with advances in social media and other communication technology, workers can still have these catch-ups over instant messages and see each other’s faces in video conferences.

Increased engagement between colleagues is an encouraging finding from Gallup’s report (see chart below), which found that employees who worked remotely three or four days a week were actually the most likely to report that they have a best friend at work.

Source: Gallup

How Dubber can help

UC solutions are facilitating a new more flexible way of working, and increasing productivity and collaboration among the businesses that use them. Dubber is designed to be integrated with UC platforms and provides an array of solutions for call recording and communication capture, for use anywhere and on any device. By capturing communications straight from the network, when a UC solution is implemented with mobility, all user communications can be recorded even while they are mobile.

Dubber’s deployment through Amazon Web Services not only ensures a flexible solution that can be scaled alongside UC solutions to suit businesses of all sizes, but that the calls are also encrypted for added security. Dubber has also partnered with Mondago to provide an automated pause and resume function that can be integrated with their call recording solution to ensure payment card information is not included in recorded calls.

The implementation of UC can bring a culture of productivity and collaboration. UC solutions facilitate modern ways of working and a more flexible way of life. Dubber’s partnerships with UC providers such as BroadSoft allow organisations to quickly and easily deploy call recording alongside a UC solution and ensure all of their employees stay compliant, anytime, anywhere.