TMCnews Featured Article

It is far too easy for call center agents to live in a bubble. Whether there are walls around their workstation or not, taking calls is usually a one-on-one activity between the rep and the customer on the other end, and this bubble that reps live can create bad habits and hide mistakes that should be corrected.

One way call center managers can tackle the problem of monitoring reps when listening to every call is not practical is through the use of screen capture software. With intelligent screen capture software, triggers can be set that activate the capture software. Managers then can virtually observe an agent’s performance during specified activities, honing in on key situations that the company is worried about.

Screen capture software also serves as a good training tool, helping team leaders and coaches point out problem areas or highlight good interactions performed by top performers at the company.

One such intelligent screen capture tool is CallCopy’s (News - Alert) cc: Screen software. The software offers full-motion video and synchronized audio that can be set to variable bit rates, depending on the organization’s storage and network resources. It supports the capture of multiple-monitor setups, can record office or at-home agents, and there is no observable change in performance when a session is being recorded—so agents won’t know they are being recorded.

CallCopy’s cc: Screen also can be setup to record after-call work when a phone conversation ends but the agent still has tasks to perform, and another useful feature is the software’s ability to black out sensitive information. This helps firms comply with regulatory requirements such as PCI (News - Alert).

Playback and manipulation of recordings is flexible, too; audio from agent headsets is synched to the screen recordings, and the recordings can be zoomed to focus on areas of interest. The video from the screen captures also is easily exportable to standards such as MPEG and AVI—or an encrypted format.

“You can create your own multimedia training material using recorded calls,” according to the CallCopy web site. “This ensures your trainees learn how to handle difficult callers as well as everyday scenarios, resulting in higher levels of quality delivered on a more consistent basis.”

With the software’s application programming interface (API), third-party software such a company’s chat software can trigger a recording. Applications that take advantage of the API hooks also can add additional information to the recordings such as customer ID or the webpage that brought the customer to the agent, according to the company.

In addition to event-based recording, the software also allows for time-based recording schedules.

When coupled with CallCopy’s quality management module, sessions can be viewed while performing employee evaluations, according to the company. The module, cc: Quality, helps managers create specific forms for evaluating and aggregating transactions.

Telephone technology helped create the situation where agents perform their jobs largely out of view. With products such as cc: Screen, companies such as CallCopy are using technology to return agents to a place where they once again work in plain sight.