Open voice intelligence starts with either transforming legacy call recording and implementing unified call recording that transforms any and every conversation into data. From there the Voice Intelligence Cloud does the work – unifying conversational data sets and unlocking intelligence once lost at the end of every conversation – or in data silos and applications.

Traditionally, call recording was deployed as a necessary means to monitor agent performance, enable dispute resolution or enforce verbal agreements. Call recording was expensive, cumbersome and application-centric, which meant it was primarily adopted by enterprise contact centers and other places where only the most crucial of conversations occurred.

Application-centric call recording limits the capture of the broadest possible set of business conversations because it’s tied to a narrow set of devices/endpoints and specific application needs.

Often, less than 10% of crucial conversations are captured. The downstream impact is that essential data is lost, limiting broader data correlation and trapping data.

Modern call recording is cloud-based and deployed as SaaS. 

The benefits of this for businesses include rapid deployment (deployed in minutes or hours, not months), significant cost reductions and the ability to capture, store and unify all business conversations, turning this into highly valuable data and insights for businesses.

This marks the start of open voice intelligence. Powered by API’s, data and insights are portable, easily federated to other business data, tools, systems and software.

Starting with Voice data.

Once companies capture all their crucial conversations and voice data, the requirement becomes to make the data accessible and portable in real-time.

For all this to work, you need to orchestrate and leverage APIs, to deliver scale in an automated manner. API’s federate the correct data and insights to the right system, with little to no human intervention, allowing automation and scale.

Automate and accelerate intelligence, accurately.

The Dubber platform is architectured around an open API, authorising companies to control, automate and self-serve, tailoring functionality and data outputs to fit and connect to specific platforms or software. Outcomes include:

• Revenue Intelligence: Port crucial conversational data with new prospects or existing customers, integrated into your CRM or sales revenue tools.
• Customer Intelligence: Good customer service and speedy dispute resolution is predicated on timeliness. Connecting the Dubber API to workflow tools based on spoken keyword triggers or phrases such as ‘I want to speak to your manager’. Solve disputes efficiently and focus on delivering outstanding customer service and experiences.
• People Intelligence: Knowing how your people are feeling and operating is critical to business success. Remote and hybrid workforce arrangements have only exacerbated the challenge of knowing. Capture conversations with sentiment and tone insights, all of which can be integrated into your people management tools to enable more tailored training or support needs.

One of the most popular ways Dubber customers are leveraging the API today is for:

• Business Intelligence: Connecting call recordings and data such as call volumes, categories (based on tags), alongside sentiment rating, tone and or keywords and phrases into data visualisation tools such as IBM Cognos, Tableau and Google Data Studio. Dubber customers are informing vital business decisions such as resourcing, increasing or decreasing marketing/promotional spend or making capital decisions based on products or services mentioned.

Ending not knowing in financial services

Two aspects of the 2020 pandemic lockdown transformed the way financial institutions handle compliance.

First, Bankers and others in the finance sector stopped interacting face-to-face with customers. An industry that relied on face-to-face interaction and in-person transactions had to find new ways of working.

Second, employers sent staff home to work. Within days employees equipped their home offices with suitable devices and fired up their broadband connections. Video conferencing tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex moved centre stage.

It took some doing. Before lockdown the finance sector had plenty of digital capability. Parts of the industry had been online for decades.

Yet most video interaction focused on internal use. If you could find video conferencing anywhere in a financial institution, chances are people were using it for internal meetings.

Despite no-one anticipating a worldwide pandemic, the sector pivoted. Those inward-looking cameras and microphones now face customers. Businesses moved further online. Like everyone else, compliance staff adapted to life where many people no longer work from an office.

Unsurprisingly this switch brought new compliance challenges.

How do you authenticate a client who wants to give transactional instructions in a Zoom call? How do you know what is being said when it is being said outside of your traditional call center and phone connections? What does quality assurance look like in this new world? Is it possible to reconstruct a transaction from end-to-end across multiple end-points? How will you prove your KYC obligations?

At the same time, customers started to assert their preferred means of communication more strongly. For some that’s Wechat. For others it’s Teams. And others use Whatsapp.

And, while customer confidence in transacting digitally grew exponentially, the primacy of voice remained unchanged. Today, voice remains the preferred means of communicating for any crucial transaction or conversation.

This is where unified voice recording shines. It captures and records any conversation that takes place over any network or channel. It works with telephony, messaging or video conferencing technology.

Because it lives in the cloud and captures voice at the network level, financial services professionals can use unified call recording anywhere.

Unified voice captures working from home calls in the same way it captures calls made at the office. Best of all, it pulls together data from multiple conversations made through multiple channels.

Once captured the information sits in a single central repository that is accessible from anywhere. There’s a clear trail for managers and compliance professionals to follow.

While technology connected us, it didn’t end not knowing. Our ability to listen and collect data was further limited, amplifying an existing problem: not knowing.

Not knowing what someone said and when they said it. Not knowing if the people concerned fulfilled all their obligations.

As we continue to connect in new ways, we also need to learn to listen in new ways. And Unified Call Recording fueling Voice Intelligence is a critical part of the answer.

James Slaney is the co-founder of Dubber. Here he gives us an overview of how voice data can provide solutions to business problems.

There’s one piece missing from every organisation’s compliance and performance puzzle. Voice. And AI powered Unified Call Recording is the answer.

Today the majority of our business interactions are voice-based. And more than ever, those calls are happening outside of the call centre.

When those calls and conversations end, critical content and value is lost forever. Imagine losing the majority of your data every day.

Traditional approaches to call recording don’t work when calls are happening across devices and communication platforms like Microsoft Teams. Hardware costs, lack of scalability, insurmountable technical barriers, and compliance difficulties mean a new approach is needed.

Businesses are left not knowing.

With customers consistently choosing to contact brands over the phone, critical content and value is being lost every day. Businesses who aren’t capturing their voice data are left asking what their customers are saying, whether they’re satisfied, what the details of their orders were, and whether their records are up to date.

That’s why we created Dubber, the world’s #1 Unified Call Recording solution powered by the cloud and AI. It’s the only fully scalable and compliant solution that can be switched on with a click.

A data-driven approach to customer and employee experience is critical to the growth and development of an organisation, particularly In today’s hyper-competitive economy.

Unified Call Recording automatically captures every call and transforms conversations into tangible data through AI. Voice data can be used to power transcripts, real-time search, alerts, and sentiment analysis.

Only 36% of executives have real-time, highly integrated capabilities across all customer channels within their enterprise.

Data doesn’t stop with Dubber. The future of customer service will see one unified record of interactions across every channel, no longer requiring a customer to relay their entire history to each new representative they speak to. Why wait for the future? What if every customer call was automatically transcribed and logged within your company’s CRM application?

Using an open API, businesses can populate CRM tools with a unified record of customer interactions. Imagine every Salesforce record up-to-date with the most recent customer conversation: including the recording, transcript, and even customer sentiment.

The integration of business data is the foundation for superior data-driven customer experiences and compliance.

Together we can unlock the potential of voice data to power better business outcomes, enterprise transformation and business continuity.

Accurate records of voice conversations – and their related data – are crucial to fuelling financial services compliance. Best practice extends beyond direct regulatory mandates to how data is stored and captured.

Current call recording solutions on applications and devices fail to address the full spectrum of compliance requirements faced by financial services organisations. Their approach to data retention and security increases risks rather than meeting the challenges set out by regulators.

The solution is Unified Call Recording which takes place inside service provider networks and popular solutions such as WebEx Calling and Microsoft Teams. And, as a bonus, enterprises can eliminate the costs of legacy platforms.

Risk and compliance managers who want to take a more proactive approach to meeting regulations and engendering trust in their customers will be looking for more than basic record keeping solutions. Providers need to be offering AI, transcription, real-time search, automated alerts and APIs as standard. Here are six critical features that should be considered in any compliant call recording solution.

Six critical features every financial services organisation should look for

Retention periods

Regulations such as the GDPR state that organisations must not keep data for longer than is necessary for the purpose the data was obtained for. It is best practice to not keep personal data for longer than is necessary and businesses need to be able to justify how long they store personal data. Financial services institutions require the ability to set retention periods in order to define the length of time that recorded calls are stored for, and to automate their deletion once this time period has been reached.

Unlimited secure storage

Is your data being stored with market-leading AES-256 encryption? Industry leading security practices are crucial. Most legacy call recording solutions require on premise storage at an incremental cost to the service and the more you store, the more it costs. By using Universal Call Recording and storing data in a Voice Intelligence Cloud, enterprises benefit from infinite storage at no additional cost – all provisioned with a click. And, by deploying the platform across dedicated regional data centres with geographic redundancy, organisations can be assured of data sovereignty.

Access permissions

In order to protect data, financial institutions need to ensure that they can restrict access to personal information such as recorded calls, depending on the role the user has been allocated. Depending on the information security policy of the firm, not every user whose calls are recorded should have access to them, or may only be allowed to listen to their calls and nobody else’s. Administrator permissions should be available so that supervisors and management with appropriate authority can access recordings.

Instant retrieval

Audit and compliance investigations require real-time access to data. Legacy call recording platforms depend on SQL searches often taking many minutes to render results. Instead, require that your Voice Intelligence Cloud provides immediate and secure access to all recordings – with search delivering results in real-time. Users should be able to search for calls using data including the date, time, and call participants. By choosing a solution with added voice AI, recorded calls can even be retrieved by searching for words spoken during a conversation. All recordings should be available for instant retrieval, playback, and secure download, with appropriate permission settings.

Call metadata

Compliance with financial services regulations relies on transparency, so call recording solutions should include call metadata alongside each conversation for a detailed record of customer interactions. This provides full transparency in the case of a request for information from a regulator. Ensure your solution provides rich call metadata – including timestamps on conversations – to allow for quick and easy search and retrieval of information. This gives firms the upper hand in compliance and risk management. Voice AI that can detect keywords and send tailored alerts to management makes it quicker and easier to detect and deter suspicious trading activities to prevent penalties from regulators.

Legal hold

Legal hold is an important feature that allows users to tag single or multiple recordings as held. These recordings can be played, downloaded, and shared as any other recording; but cannot be deleted under any circumstances. Held recordings remain even after their retention period expires, if the user associated with that recording is deleted, or if the storage period expires. This ensures that recordings required for legal reasons will always remain available for review.

This week Russell Evans, Dubber’s global head of sales and channels looks at the most common challenge faced by resellers today – how to maximise revenue and reduce the prospect of churn in the booming demand for communications services.

Resellers of communications services – from mobile and SIP connections to UC, Teams, and more – have seen a Covid-driven boom in demand for services. The shift to the Cloud has been matched by an equal demand for data enriched AI to automate processes, gain extra functionality, and work more efficiently. Resellers that can demonstrate not simply the efficiency of the connection but also how to extract more value from every connection are winning more and seeing less churn.

So what does the new reseller playbook for resellers look like?

1. Sell more than the utility and connection: What if the content created in every conversation was a source of insights and alerts? Unified Call Recording – available on the products you are selling today does just that – it converts the conversation to data to create beautiful transcriptions, sentiment analysis, real-time search and more.
2. Create more value: That data becomes a source of immense value for your customers, ending not knowing what was said across the business. Sales leaders get an immediate read on every customer’s conversation. Customer service leaders can understand customer sentiment in real-time. Compliance managers get a secure and protected record of conversations and can instantly be alerted as to when to undertake investigations.
3. Differentiate your offering and increase your value: While others sell Apps and connections, you are now differentiated, exposing the value of every conversation across the business. You stand-out because you are talking to the business outcomes the solution is meant to drive. Your relationship with your customer is elevated, driven by your ability to create quantifiable business benefits. You will occupy the space of trusted advisor for your clients.
4. Unlock the power of voice data: Call recording helps businesses meet their compliance mandates, but it does so much more. Customers are crucial for any sustainable business. Voice data helps them gain greater visibility of transactions taking place within their business, and it provides the data for customer service employees to help with dispute resolution, leading to reduced churn and improved customer experiences.

1. Target the burning needs: Every Enterprise in regulated industries – and most undertaking crucial conversations in which orders are taken, material information exchanged and issues are resolved – have a requirement to both record calls and manage voice data in compliant ways. Unified Call Recording isn’t just a way of selling more to your existing customers, it’s a natural add-on to every new connection.

Fuel big data: Big Data only captures a small proportion of data generated by a company. While companies have seen the value of big data, they are missing out on a huge chunk of data that is left uncaptured from voice calls. Imagine the value of combining both online and voice data to gain a holistic customer picture. Businesses can use these insights to inform new product lines, aid in cross-selling, and gain a better understanding of the reasons behind their customer’s decisions. Exporting this data to visualisation tools such as Google Data Studio, makes it easier than ever to extract these insights. More and more businesses are realising this, and using this voice data intelligence to gain a competitive advantage.