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“By 2025, 75% of conversations at work will be recorded and analyzed, enabling the discovery of added organizational value or risk.”

Gartner’s prediction, one we quote often, comes from the Top 10 Strategic Predictions for 2021 and Beyond: Resetting Everything. The paper is one that clever CIOs use to help shape their company’s strategic plans, capturing trending societal, business, and technological changes to ensure successful business advantage going forward.

So what does this mean for business and government over the coming years?

Conversational Intelligence is a powerful tool, but one that needs strategic direction to have the most significant impact on business. 

Map timelines for successful business outcomes with these three key goals.

1. Meet compliance mandates and decrease risk

“In 2020, penalties have totalled $10.6 billion for non-compliance with Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know your Customer (KYC), data privacy and MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) regulations.” – Up Close and Personal; The Year of Personal Accountability, Fenergo

Hitting compliance mandates is the lowest-hanging fruit for strategic planning in Conversational Intelligence today. It is possible to satisfy compliance mandates and legislation in voice conversations within company, industry, affiliative, and regional requirements today with Conversational Intelligence.

With growing business data and information security overheads and reporting mandates across all sectors, business voice conversations also need capturing to ensure compliance. Unified Conversational Intelligence is the only solution.

To do this effectively, companies must ensure:

• The unified conversational intelligence solution records all relevant in-person and remote voice conversations – it needs to do so with appropriate controls in place and without ties to specific applications, rather as a service
• Recordings, transcriptions, and conversational data and metadata sets are stored in accordance with relevant data security requirements and timelines
• Conversational Intelligence data is quickly searchable, replayable and reportable
• A unified conversational data set is secured, protected and managed to the same standard as all datasets

Phase two of creating business outcomes – whether for compliance, revenue, people or customer intelligence – is to present multi-dimensional insights such as instant notification of breaches or risky activities, flagging keywords (e.g. ‘offshore’, ‘cancel’, ‘unhappy’) or behaviours (e.g. angry customer).

2. Conversational Intelligence value streams aligned to business strategy are identified and actioned

“It’s the opportunity to take your existing product line and market it better, develop it better, use it to improve customer service, or to get a 360-degree understanding of your customer. Data Strategy is driven by your organization’s overall Business Strategy and business model.” – Data Management vs. Data Strategy: A Framework for Business Success, Donna Burbank, Managing Director at Global Data Strategy

The problem facing leaders is that the applications of Conversational Intelligence in business are near-endless. Aligning your Conversational Intelligence focus with key areas already outlined in your strategic plan (or digital transformation strategy) is where you gain the most value from this technology. The same goes for any data-generating activities.

Here are two areas of business improvement identified in a strategic plan and how Conversational Intelligence can help.

Increase productivity in sales revenue

Conversational Intelligence can sit in on sales with every call, every meeting, every ‘coffee catch up.’ From these conversations, it’s easy to identify the tactics, scripts, keywords and emotional indicators that help close sales with customers – and re-train employees to follow successful strategies.

Improve customer experience

If your goal is to increase customer lifetime value via loyalty born of great CX, you need insights on your customer interactions. Rather than ‘How’d we do’ emails, you can automatically analyse all customer interactions (for both customer and employee) to identify where improvements can be made. This could identify key pain points in business for customers and how to solve them, when employees need to be coached due to their manner, or which topics are taking up considerable amounts of time and how to rectify that.

3. From data insights to Intelligent Automation

“While there is investment in IA broadly, only 10 percent of respondents are integrating solutions across its various dimensions: automation, artificial intelligence and smart analytics. While initial fragmentation of efforts is not to be unexpected, organizations need to move quickly to understand how, when and where to integrate efforts across technologies to fully optimize their potential.” – Easing pressure points: The state of intelligent automation, KPMG

Automation should be deployed throughout the business for operational efficiencies – and Conversational Intelligence is a tool that can be used to identify where automation opportunities lie.

For instance:

• Repeated keywords across a wide customer base can identify areas for switching over to web-based self-service to free up operator time
• Action items mentioned in video meetings automatically create and assign tasks in project management systems
• Competitor and product mentions can trigger on-the-fly competitive product analysis reports to display on screen for employees to speak to during the conversation

Creating intelligent automation throughout the business based on data requires significant thought and ongoing investment, but simply can’t be ignored – it’s time to action.

Let’s talk

Conversational Intelligence is available now with Dubber – a cloud-native, compliant, fully scalable solution available across all your usual communication channels. We go beyond basic voice recording and transcriptions to an enriched dataset of words, speakers, emotions, languages, and themes. With these meaning-enriched datasets, you can create and trigger real-time automated actions and workflows. Start planning your roadmap to doing more with your business data with Conversational Intelligence & Dubber.

Let’s chat.

How unified call recording and voice AI can help you comply with certainty

From October 5 new regulations will cover how financial service companies handle complaints.
Regulatory Guide 271 lays out what companies need to do. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) is in charge of the reforms. It’s guide is an updated set of obligations for internal dispute resolution (IDR) and replaces the existing RG 165.
In this paper we’ll further explore what the regulations mean for financial services firms and how new unified call recording and voice AI technologies can help you comply quickly and cost-effectively.

There’s a new Chief Technology Officer at Dubber! Introducing Steve Willson.

Fresh from his time as CTO of Great Southern Bank, Australia’s largest customer-owned bank, Steve Willson has joined Dubber to guide our industry-leading technology and key technical relationships.

With a long list of executive tech roles at some of Australia’s largest financial institutions, plus time in London fintechs, Willson strengthens Dubber’s position as a key player in conversational intelligence for every government and business.

The value in Dubber

Willson speaks about why he chose Dubber as his next move.

“I was attracted to the massive potential of Dubber’s technology to create value for clients globally. Recording is really just the tip of the iceberg; the greater opportunity is to leverage the data to help clients improve their businesses and customer experience.”

“As I see it, there are four key value levers businesses need to focus on moving forward from a technology perspective, and that Dubber already does across voice conversations: 

• Radical improvements in productivity eliminating what I call busy work, which is preventing employees/business owners/agents from focusing on value-creating activities.
• Greater control, visibility and transparency – whether that be capturing knowledge, decisions or evidencing compliance.
• Differentiated products and experiences for your customers.
• Unification of conversational data so that it can be leveraged to provide insights and inform decisions”

The impact of Covid on technology as an accelerant

While Covid has caused significant hurdles for business and government worldwide, it has also rapidly accelerated digital transformation.

“At a macro level, I think that COVID has accelerated digital disruption rather than changed it, it has necessitated increased take-up of digital products and services and customers’ expectations of digital experiences are higher than ever. 

Similarly, employees now expect (and need) advanced technology that makes it easy to work from anywhere.”

“This has created a push to many large (and usually slow) organisations to do things differently, such as responding to technical challenges in days, not weeks or months. It has also provided the means for businesses to break through cultural barriers that have prevented greater take up of these technologies in the past.”

“In the new normal – if we can call it that – ‘work’ is being done anywhere. This makes sharing, collaboration, productivity and clarity of conversations more than ever, with an office-home-remote hybrid work model likely for most businesses.”

“Dubber is – I think – a critical technology in underpinning our new way of working.”

End not knowing

“AI, NLP, machine learning and a raft of technologies are central to ending not knowing in every business and government. As data grows exponentially it’s not plausible or possible for humans to see the signals in the noise. Applying AI to unified data sets is going to be a crucial building block for the success of any enterprise activity – whether it’s knowing your customers and employees, complying, or improving the accuracy of supply chains.”

“The way Dubber is doing this is impressive, from disrupting the high-cost, siloed world or legacy call recording to harnessing its own AI advances alongside those of leaders like IBM, Amazon and others.”

“I’m passionate about the tech sector and have supported many fintech partnerships in my enterprise executive roles, so I’m excited about the opportunity to play a more active role in the Aussie and global tech community with Dubber. Joining what is the clear leader not just here, but also globally, is incredibly exciting.”

We’re excited to have Steve onboard.

3 Actions Compliance Leaders Must Take

For many, the rapid acceleration of digital transformation has made already challenging regulatory complexity even more difficult. New ways of communicating and ever-increasing digital transactions generate even greater data sets requiring surveillance and compliance monitoring.

Against this backdrop, compliance and surveillance leaders face a more familiar set of challenges – unravelling regulations, reducing costs and driving productivity. The answer – in part – doesn’t lay in yet another set of tools or applications but rather in establishing more robust data sets on which artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing can surface new levels of intelligence.

Conversation data is not just necessary – in many cases, it’s a regulatory requirement.

The role of AI and Machine Learning

Instead of relying on human analysis of trends to try and spot aberrant behaviours, true AI solutions are needed to create proactive signals of risk – and accelerate time to data and insights.

33% of financial institutions are increasing their AI capability over the past year, and 57% deployed, piloting, or planning to deploy AI & Machine Learning solutions for AML over the next 12-18 months.

Underpinning this is a shift from surfacing insights based on what happened to using behavioural insights to understand what might happen next. As workforces have become dislocated from the workplace, managerial insight based on day-to-day interactions has become more difficult. Conversational intelligence can signal behavioral shifts enabling managers to engage, coach and guide employees to the right practices.

Today, knowing your employee is as important and knowing your customer.

Modernising GRC: 3 actions compliance leaders must take

1. Record every conversation, across all channels

It’s not enough to just record conversations on one application, when interactions between employees and customers are occurring across call centres, mobile, and chat.

What is required today is a single window into all conversations – a Unified Conversational Recording platform and, if you want it to scale without barriers, it needs to live in the cloud – all compliantly, with inbuilt data security.

For example, Don Anderson, chief information officer (CIO) at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, noted in 2019 that ignoring the cloud may even “introduce new security vulnerabilities as on-premises vendors discontinue support for their products.”

How you record is as important as what you record. Creating a comprehensive data set with rich conversational recordset to satisfy KYC and AML also has to be done in a way that satisfies GDRP and PCI.

2. Replay instantly when non-compliant calls come through

Can you capture non-compliance as it happens? With triggers on sentiment like an angry customer, or an alert that goes off when a representative mentions the word ‘cash’, you can quickly head off incidents before they escalate or wind up getting buried in an avalanche of data. This type of natural language processing is essential in modern compliance operations, where you are expected to be able to respond in real-time.

3. Reveal insights across the organisation

While every conversation has the potential to be powerful, or non-compliant – or hopefully just helpful and archivable – being able to glean not just individual Conversational Intelligence insights, but cumulative insights on this data will give key indicators on your organisational health.

For instance, you’ll be able to tell whether departments are sticking to their scripts. Whether staff are spending too long on certain topics that could be addressed by a knowledge base. If certain staff are bringing up topics again and again that seem out of the ordinary. There are infinite possibilities to mine the data for both proactive compliance and operational efficiency.

Beyond Compliance

Compliance and surveillance data sets are amongst the most trusted in any business – but they also can alleviate the pain felt across financial institutions.

KYC procedures are also straining relationships with customers; for instance, the time taken to bring a new client on board continues to increase. And employees are challenged to receive the same level of guidance, coaching and training that was once part of their daily interactions in the workplace.

Conversational data – recordings, insights and workflow automation provide a much needed answer for both. The big opportunity and key benefit is data quality, with multiple conversational sources contributing to a single, secure and compliant system of record.

“At a time when risk management leaders are being asked to process greater amounts of data in shorter amounts of time—often amid budget and staff constraints—cloud computing could unlock considerable benefits. It can help risk teams react rapidly to changes in the external environment and dive deeper into the analytics life cycle to better understand the drivers of risk, all without major capital expenditures.” – Mckinsey

Dubber’s Compliance Editions put compliance teams in front of the right content, data insights, and actions for conversations across the entire organisation. Take a look at how a Swiss Private Bank Identifies Rogue Operators & Compliance Breaches With Dubber, or talk to us about how we can help your compliance team become more effective with Dubber.

Make sure to join us and other industry leaders for the AML & KYC APAC Virtual Event on October 28, 2021, to learn about the latest AML & KYC developments and how to protect your organisation from criminals, mitigate risks, ensure compliance and accelerate your digital transformation.

September 29 is World Heart Day, a day dedicated to raising international awareness around the cause and prevention of Cardiovascular Diseases (CVD), a cause close to Dubber.

CVDs are the leading cause of death globally, resulting in an estimated 18.6 million deaths a year, and about 520 million people living with a CVD today. CVD affects the heart and blood vessels, resulting in coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, rheumatic heart disease or other conditions.

As CVDs come in many forms, so do its causes – smoking, high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol are key risk factors for heart disease. Other medical conditions and lifestyle choices can also increase the risk of heart disease including; diabetes, overweight and obesity, unhealthy diet, excessive alcohol use, or air pollution.

Save a Child’s Heart & Dubber

For two years, Dubber has been a proud sponsor of Israeli humanitarian organisation, Save a Child’s Heart.

Save a Child’s Heart (SACH) is an international organisation that provides life-saving surgery to children suffering from heart disease from countries where access to pediatric care is limited or nonexistent. So, every day is World Heart Day with SACH.

For 25 years they’ve saved the lives of nearly 6000 children from 63 countries around the world. From these countries, 50% of the children come from the Palestinian Authority and Gaza, Iraq, and Morocco. More than 40% of the children are from Africa, and the remainder are from Asia, North and South America, and Eastern Europe.

SACH medical professionals

The ultimate goal for Save a Child’s Heart is to enable equal opportunity for life-saving surgery for children with CVD. One of SACH’s programs is taking on medical professionals from developing countries and providing them post-graduate training in all facets of pediatric cardiac care in order to provide sufficient treatment in their own communities.

SACH trained professional and Ethiopia’s first pediatric cardiac surgeon, Dr Yayu Mekonnen addressed Dubber in celebration of the organisation’s 25th anniversary.

Inspired by an experience that shaped his career, Dr Yayu shared an anecdote of why he became a pediatric cardiac surgeon and why he loves what he does.

“When you provide this procedure at the right time, you change the course of this child’s life forever. They will be normal kids and are able to do whatever they want in life now.” – Dr Yayu Mekonnen

Use heart to connect ❤️

As the world struggles to fight COVID-19, it’s put pressure on us to be cautious of our own health, as well as the safety of those around us. With this new wave of vigilance, World Heart Day’s theme is around Using a heart to connect. 

At Dubber we can vouch for a more mobile and modernising way of connecting with people, especially through digital platforms and telehealth. Use heart to connect is about harnessing our knowledge and influence in order to spread accurate information about heart health to our communities and loved ones.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CTxF3x7DQrg/

Where Dubber leads in capturing every call, video, and chat – then turning it into a source of value; Notiv has been pioneering the use of AI to make every meeting more productive and efficient.

So what does this mean for Dubber?

First, we gain an exciting and proven product built to answer a compelling use case – making meetings better. Notiv will help Dubber convert a higher proportion of our addressable market within our existing networks and new communications services that want this functionality on their networks.

Enhanced productivity can benefit everybody – however they are communicating and whatever the use case. For example, a tradesperson on a mobile phone could instantly capture customer requests and share the actions. Likewise, C-level executives could use Notiv to note and capture actions in a planning meeting.

Second, we can drive significant adoption of Notiv through our industry-leading base of partners and customers. Notiv is a compelling new service, enabling them to drive incremental revenue and differentiation. Notiv will also be a magnet for new service providers, increasing the value of our industry-first Foundation Partner program.

Third, Notiv will provide Dubber with a world-class team with deep expertise in AI and data science. Together we will accelerate our overall product roadmap and capabilities and advance our AI, digital signal processing and natural language processing technologies. Notiv furthers our leadership in capturing and transforming conversations between one person and another – and large groups of people in a meeting.

We are continuing to unlock the potential of AI on every end-point and enabling our service and solution providers to make the critical shift from selling connections to extracting the value in every conversation on their networks.

And they’ll now be able to do that with Dubber Notiv on the same hyper-secure, scaleable and compliant infrastructure that Dubber has made available in over 150 service providers globally – and all the worlds leading UC solutions.

I’ve been using Notiv for the past few months, and it’s impressive. It’s magical seeing the meeting being transcribed in real-time – and then having the ability to highlight important parts of the meeting.

Notiv brings AI-driven notetaking and action items to every call and meeting

Adds advanced technology capabilities in real-time transcription, artificial intelligence, and advanced natural language processing

Adds revenue generating service to existing and expanded Dubber customer base

Delivers product capabilities that enrich Dubber Foundation and broader service provider offering

Accelerates Dubber’s AI program and expands Dubber core offerings

Circa A$6.6m acquisition by way of cash and equity

Melbourne, Australia – 20 September 2021 — Dubber Corporation Limited (ASX: DUB) (Dubber) announces today that it has acquired Brisbane, Australia based technology group Notiv (https://www.notiv.com). Notiv is a developer of innovative cloud-native AI-based products that turn meetings into transcribed notes, summaries, signals, actions, and more.

Steve McGovern, CEO, Dubber:
“One of our fundamental beliefs is that artificial intelligence has a part to play as a standard feature of every call and conversation. Notiv is a significant step towards achieving this in that it has clear and defined use cases for everyone from individuals to the largest of enterprises. With Notiv, Dubber will now have the ability to automatically take notes and create action items on every call. We are confident that our telecommunications carrier and service provider partners will see enormous potential for revenue-generating value-added services for their customers at scale.

We welcome the Notiv team to Dubber along with the AI and data science expertise they bring. We see the teams combining to form the core of our Dubber AI Labs for developing future AI capabilities.

The integration of the Notiv business is accretive for both parties in that Dubber can expose the fantastic capability of the Notiv offering to a global customer base and the Notiv team can develop a continuous stream of revenue-generating services for Dubber’s addressable market.

Dubber’s overall strategy is to grow organic Annualised Recurring Revenue (ARR) while augmenting that growth with strategic acquisitions where possible. Acquisitions must either add accretive and synergistic revenue or provide substantial product and technology capability, which will drive organic ARR growth. The Notiv acquisition reflects that strategy perfectly, and the speed at which the parties have executed the transaction now enables the Company to continue to pursue other identified opportunities.”

Notiv will be available to Dubber Foundation Partners, select service and solution providers and sold alongside other Dubber solutions for businesses and Government.

Chris Raethke, Co-Founder & CEO, Notiv:
“The Notiv team is exceptionally proud of the technology we have developed. The ability to roll out Notiv globally with the world’s leading service providers is an unmissable opportunity. The chance to join the Dubber growth journey at this time and expand Dubber’s AI and NLP capabilities is exciting for all of us. We are confident that the combination of Dubber and Notiv will deliver incredible value to customers, businesses and our fellow shareholders alike.”

James Slaney, COO, Dubber:
“Dubber has over 150 global service provider network partners as well as all of the world’s primary unified communications solutions – and is the only true native, cloud-first service of its kind.

Our strategy has always been to use this footprint to deliver layers of value and drive associated revenues. Notiv suits this strategy perfectly and accelerates our existing AI program in three ways.

First, we gain an exciting and proven product built to answer a compelling use case – making meetings better by automatically enabling voice data to replace or improve note taking. We believe that the ability to create notes, highlights and action items in every video and phone call provides invaluable use cases for every demographic, from individuals to large enterprises, thereby expanding Dubber’s already large addressable market. Enhanced productivity can benefit everybody in all methods of communication. For example, a tradesperson on a mobile phone call could instantly capture customer requests and share the actions. Likewise, C-level executives could use Notiv to note and capture actions in a planning meeting.

Second, we believe that the ability to deliver this capability directly from the network will be a compelling proposition for both existing and new service provider partners. As well as the opportunity for service providers to drive new services, incremental revenue and differentiation, we believe that Notiv is an ideal product to increase the value of our industry-first Foundation Partner program.

Finally, Notiv will provide Dubber with a world-class team with deep expertise in AI and data science. Together we will accelerate our overall product roadmap and capabilities and advance our AI, digital signal processing and natural language processing technologies. Notiv furthers our leadership in capturing and transforming conversations between one person and another – and large groups of people in a meeting.

We are continuing to unlock the potential of AI on every end-point and enabling our service and solution providers to make the critical shift from selling connectivity to extracting the value in every conversation on their networks. They’ll now be able to do that with Dubber Notiv on the same hyper-secure, scalable and compliant infrastructure that Dubber has already made available to over 150 service providers globally – including all the world’s leading UC solutions.”

Key Transaction Terms:
Dubber has acquired Notiv through the purchase of all of the issued share capital of holding company Pinch Labs, Inc., a US corporation that wholly owns and operates the Brisbane-based operations and technology

Aggregate consideration of approximately A$6.6 million

A$5.15 million paid in cash at completion and the balance, representing 24.8% of the consideration, is to be satisfied by way of the issue of 386,277 Dubber fully paid ordinary shares at a deemed issued price of A$3.75. The shares will be issued within Dubber’s existing Listing Rule 7.1 issue capacity

Key management and employees are to stay with the business, including Chris Raethke, Co-Founder & CEO and Dr Iain McCowan, Co-Founder and CTO

The agreement also includes provisions customary for a transaction of this nature, including warranties and representations, confidentiality and non-competition/solicitation

Strategic Rationale
Accretive fundamentals. Proven application and technology with customers with strong product-market fit and alignment to the Dubber solution set

Enriches Dubber’s service and solution provider offering – and current product offerings. Accelerates Dubber’s technology roadmap both in terms of providing Dubber with access to AI technologies and also adding a critical and differentiated product

Furthers differentiation and value of Dubber Foundation Partner Program – and its more than 150 service and solution provider customers worldwide

Broadens Dubber’s conversational intelligence offerings

Dubber to accelerate the adoption of Notiv globally. Provides Notiv with critical sales and marketing resources to scale go-to-market capabilities

Strong synergies in product approach mean technologies can be easily unified into common platforms with the potential to create efficiencies over time

Key shareholder support. All key management shareholders retained in the business with incentives to continue strong performance

Financial Impact
Scrip and cash consideration up-front. No further amounts payable

No incremental investment in staff or technology required to achieve scaling

Strong potential to enhance future revenue (or stated revenue), typical of an early-stage technology venture

This ASX announcement has been approved for release to ASX by Steve McGovern, CEO & Managing Director.

Fewer wasted trips for NT Recycling Solutions trucks with Dubber

“Our business is based on time, so mistakes are costly” 

NT Recycling Solutions saves $50,000 per year using Dubber’s call recording to resolve client disputes over services ordered and staff training to reduce errors in bookings.

Here’s the backstory

NT Recycling Solutions is a waste management and recycling business in the Australian Northern Territory city of Darwin. The business deals in general waste removal and operates a recycling facility to reduce the amount going to landfill.

The company has three staff who take inbound calls. Regular customers who don’t have a scheduled service call the company and book when they need their waste bins emptied. Causal customers can call to order bins and the company’s drivers make contact with the office when there are issues with jobs.

Being able to record calls helps quickly resolve customer disputes and staff booking errors. These were costing NTRS thousands of dollars and causing inefficiencies with drivers schedules.

The Solution

NTRS uses Telstra Calling for Office 365 (based on Microsoft Teams) for all its calls. It uses Dubber Unified Call Recording to record and capture calls. In tandem, NTRS uses Dubber’s CallN reporting for additional insights into call statistics. This can include knowing which team member takes the most calls and what time of day those calls come in.

Different departments within the business including customer service, sales, and administration can all easily review calls and reports on Dubber.

Dubber’s recent partnership with Microsoft together with Dubber’s rich functionality were central to giving NTRS the right solution.

NTRS was operating a traditional on premises phone system, using CallN for recording. When it moved to Telstra Calling for Office 365, Dubber was able to craft a unique solution that delivered Dubber’s backend recording while maintaining the familiar CallN interface at the front end.

The Benefits

Speedy dispute resolution

General Manager, Dean Caton says NTRS mainly uses Dubber to verify orders placed by customers. “A customer will ring the office and say I asked for this service: ‘I need your driver to come back right now and do this for us’.”

This can be disruptive and expensive. By the time the call comes in the driver might be 40 minutes away. Revisiting pick-ups was costing NTRS more than $1000 a week.

When this happens, the staff member can check the call recording and listen to the request. Caton says at this point the customer might change their story — if they still want the driver to return, they will have to pay for it.

This was a huge problem in the past, but Caton says now that customers know their calls are recorded, they are less likely to make these claims.

Staff training and reduction of costly errors

Another Dubber benefit for NTRS is staff training and reducing booking errors.

The business depends on efficient scheduling, so mistakes and booking errors are costly.

“All our business is based on time, so if we’re going back to sites we’ve already been to, that costs us a lot of time and we don’t get the productivity out of our drivers”.

Caton says it is useful for training, especially when a new team member joins to be able to go through a recording if, say, they made a booking error.

“We can say that you should have asked this question. A number of our customers have different types of bins at their site. If they ring and say they want their bin emptied, we want our customer service person to ask the right question to find out which bin needs to be collected.”

Not all trucks can collect all bins, so getting this right is another cost saving because they don’t have to divert trucks from other locations to service the job correctly.

Soma improved customer experience using Dubber call recording and voice AI to track conversations across a dispersed workforce.

Here’s the backstory

Australian managed IT services provider soma technology group uses Dubber to record all incoming and outgoing client calls, internal calls and meetings.

The business’s headquarters is on the Gold Coast in Queensland and there are offices in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, with a large number of staff working remotely.

Soma provides technical phone support to small to medium-sized organisations. It also runs a consulting practice that handles audits, implementations and other IT functions.

COO Aaron Prout says: “As a managed service provider we are a customer service business. It’s important our clients receive the support they need. It’s also very important that everything we do is traceable with checks and balances through all our systems”

Soma’s previous phone and recording solution was difficult to use and therefore staff were avoiding it and using their mobiles instead. And it was impossible to record calls made by the remote workforce. This meant that a large number of customer service calls weren’t being recorded for evidence or monitored for quality assurance.

The Dubber solution

Soma chose Dubber’s call recording and voice AI solution combined with Telstra Calling for Office 365, based on Microsoft Teams, as its voice system. “We wouldn’t have moved to Teams Calling if it wasn’t for Dubber”.

“The Dubber and Microsoft Teams solution is much better than the previous one. Now everyone is using it across the whole company”

Before, when they wanted to review a conversation they would have to go through all the MP3 files and listen to the entire call – and there was no search function.

With Dubber, they can search for calls easily using the google-like search function and  quickly skip through the call to the relevant section. “It’s a lot faster to find what we’re looking for”.

What are the results?

Effective staff training for customer service performance

When soma gets negative customer feedback, either from a survey or through direct communication, managers listen to the conversation. This gives them an opportunity to guide staff on how they can improve.

“Dubber ticks a lot of boxes for us. We use it in a variety of areas. We use it for team education, we can go back and look at some of the calls our staff make. We make sure they’re following our phone support processes, that they are using the right communication style and that they have an understanding of the products they are selling. It’s all about giving good customer service”.

Better customer satisfaction

Soma uses Dubber to improve client satisfaction. If there is any negative feedback in post-customer service call surveys, they can listen to the conversation and quickly identify the issue.

Now with Dubber, the weekly satisfaction survey results never go below 4.5 out of 5 “This is 100 percent because of call recording”.

Dubber also helps fill in the gaps when a client doesn’t complete a survey. Not every unhappy customer provides feedback. soma uses the AI sentiment analysis tool to quickly highlight and identify those customers.

“Dubber’s AI sentiment analysis means we can learn if the clients are getting frustrated and if someone needs to dive in and take a closer look at that. It may be that we need to get in contact with them and have a conversation before the relationship goes south. We didn’t have the ability to do this before Dubber.”

Visibility of remote workers conversations

Staff throughout the country field incoming calls. Now with Dubber, all calls can be recorded regardless of location. This was especially useful during the Covid-19 lockdown when all employees worked from home.

Before Dubber and Telstra Calling for Office 365, this level of universality wasn’t possible. Originally the business was only able to record calls at the head office.

Prout says: “Our systems are set up so the call flows mean any of our guys can work from wherever they are with access to Microsoft Teams and into our systems.

“We use Dubber for the call recording and it captures everything whether people are on a mobile, an office phone or on Teams. We use it for all our support.”

Traceability of crucial conversations

Soma also uses call recording to monitor discussions over new business proposals. It means everything is detailed and captured to prevent any disputes over what was agreed.

“It stops there being any arguments about what we said and it covers us from a legal standpoint as well”.

Thousands of dollars saved

Moving to Dubber and Telstra Calling for Office 365 has meant significant cost savings for soma – about $30,000 per year – by eliminating costly hardware and maintenance costs and reducing expensive license fees.

Like to Learn More?

Virtual oversight can help finance companies preparing for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s Regulatory Guide 271 which comes into effect on October 5.

RG 271 explains what finance companies must do to create an internal dispute resolution system that ticks all the regulatory boxes. It is part of a suite of regulatory changes happening in October. Elsewhere we look at Anti-Hawking regulations.

What are the requirements?

DLA Piper partner Sophie Devitt says the new rules aim to see that every customer of the financial services industry is able to get “fair, timely and effective dispute resolution”. This covers consumers and small businesses.

“Part of this means capturing any expression of dissatisfaction from customers where there is a reasonable expectation that a response or resolution is expected.”.

There’s no need to trawl the internet for evidence of dissatisfaction. Yet there is an expectation that should something show up on a company’s Twitter feed or Facebook page then the company will respond to the complaint.

Likewise, if a company representative hears a verbal complaint, that also has to be acknowledged and given a response.

The company needs to let the complainer know staff have registered their grievance and will get back with a formal response. The idea is that the incoming communications channel is the best outgoing channel, so a complaint voiced on, say Facebook will get a notification on Facebook.

Devitt says dealing with disputes can get challenging with the required timeframes and the manner in which the complaint arrives. A complaint has to be documented and acknowledged within 24 hours, and in most cases, a substantive response is needed in 30 days. This can be challenging when complaints are received by staff who are not sitting behind desks, say, an insurance assessor working in the field.

Demonstrate compliance

Devitt says the industry has had more than 12 months to prepare. Which means by now their plans are likely to be well advanced.

She says; “They need to think about how they can meet their obligations. It means putting the right structures in place, setting up internal processes and deciding on the frequency of reviewing the processes. There is a reporting requirement.”

“You have to demonstrate to the regulator through your reporting and data collection how you are going to comply. Producing the data is now a significant element of compliance.’

Speed and clarity is the essence

The key is getting the complaint into the system as fast as possible, wherever it comes from. And then making sure the key people are alerted immediately.

Data collection is essential. Companies need to classify complaints for later analysis to help identify problem areas, it could be the customer service department or the nature of transactions.

‘Expression of dissatisfaction’ is a broad term. Devitt says lawyers are working with clients on how to do this; a good starting place would be to look at customer expectations and whether they are being met. This can also mean work for companies on setting those expectations.

Call recording, AI – a digital backstop

All of this puts obligations on teams to monitor every customer interaction across every channel. Virtual oversight is using unified call recording and AI technology to provide an extra layer of support to teams looking for potential complaints.

There’s always a possibility companies will miss ‘expressions of dissatisfaction, especially during conversations. For companies using modern call recording technologies, AI has the potential to scan calls looking for, say, a tone of voice or keywords. It can then point out potential problems.

Unified call recording and AI technologies can also automatically alert the right people when a customer is unhappy. It can feed that data into existing IDR processes and workflows to ensure fast responses. Conversational data can also be integrated into reporting data sets – vital to meet ASIC’s expectations on data.

Sophie Devitt is a partner with DLA Piper. She works from the global law firm’s Brisbane office and specializes in insurance regulatory law, which has wider application across the entire finance sector.