Blog Post

Quick Read

• Three new compliance solutions designed to economically enable conversation recording across many end-points — giving compliance teams the tools they need to manage, store, review and monitor conversations.
• Turn on end-points across multiple services and solutions – aggregate data in one place – the Dubber Voice Intelligence Cloud
• AI does the heavy compliance work, generating insights, alerts and powering workflows
• Dubber compliance solutions being implemented today by leading Financial Services institutions globally

Compliance, risk, audit and leaders in regulated industries need a better answer to global mandates to know the customer and record conversations. We know because they told us as we were working on the new core Dubber solutions.

We were told about an industry where customers were charged for recording on any and every endpoint bundled with a range of features for every user – when only a few needed access to those features.

Regulated industry leaders told us they need a more economical and secure way to capture every conversation. The data has to be stored with certainty. And they need better access to data and insights.

It would be a small number of personnel accessing the data and that data had to be protected.

We heard about a need to break voice data silos. In the past compliance professionals had to jump between recordings captured in the call centre to recordings for, say, Zoom in a compliance app.

Every data silo introduces cost, complexity and compliance risk. These are three things Dubber set out to eliminate.

Compliant, Unified Call Recording

So, we set about creating the first unified call recording and voice intelligence solution purpose-built for compliance teams.

Compliance drives significant demand for capturing conversational content. It covers messaging, chat and video. And that content can come from any application or end-point. Delivering an immutable record of every crucial conversation is essential. It’s also what regulators around the world now demand.

With COVID, the pressure to capture conversations across a multitude of endpoints – from Cisco WebEx to Microsoft Teams and Zoom – has accelerated. Unified Call Recording makes what used to be a complex task easy.

Today we’re unveiling three new cornerstone compliance solutions that mean business and government can select flexible and affordable plans that best reflect their needs and compliance practices.

Changing the Economics of Conversational Compliance

Dubber Compliance offerings capture voice data economically, at scale. They recognise a smaller number of people who need to access the data and the need to isolate that data from other voice data sets.

Dubber allows data integration and portability so any data from any source can be unified on Dubber and connected to other compliance data sets, applications and business intelligence tools.

• Dubber UCR Compliance Edition for compliance leaders with a need to manage, monitor, store and review conversations. Dubber captures and stores recordings and data from multiple sources in real-time. Once there it can be searched, and reviewed, still in real-time, without the need for complex queries. Starting at $14.95 per month per end-point and up to ten compliance users.
• Dubber Premier Compliance Edition enables a compliance team of up to ten (with additional licenses available) to benefit from AI-enriched insights, alerts, search and sentiment analysis. Additional features include beautiful and insightful transcriptions; legal hold and discovery; and, smart keyword, team and customer search. Starting at $29.95 per month per end-point and up to ten compliance users.
• Dubber Voice Intelligence Cloud Compliance Edition is ideal for compliance teams who only seek to record calls with confidence, then storing and unifying data in a single easily accessible source of truth. All the features of Dubber Premier Compliance Edition. Plans start at $1,599.99 for250 endpoints and one user access – with additional plans for more end-points and users.

All Dubber solutions include critical features such as unlimited storage; access to the easy to use Dubber application for IOS, Android and Web; concierge set-up and training; data download and export 24×7 online global support — and, seamless, high-quality media capture across devices and all supported endpoints for audio, video, screen share, and chat.

Policy-Based Unified Call Recording

Critically, Dubber Compliance Solutions answer the need for policy-based recording.

Dubber makes it easy for organizations to set compliance and administrative policies such as when calls and online meetings should be automatically recorded and captured for subsequent processing and retention as required by relevant corporate or regulatory policy.

Public data from key regulators including the FCA in the United Kingdom and the CFTC and SEC in the United States show that fines levied for communication compliance monitoring topped $150,000,000 in 2019. Regulatory focus continues to increase: FINRA highlighted digital communications, including collaboration platforms, as a priority for its 2020 broker-dealer examinations.

Regulations and regulators requiring an accurate record of conversations to satisfy know-your-customer, data protection and privacy mandates include MiFID II, Frank Dodd, ASIC, APRA, PCI, SOX, FCA, FINRA and Reserve Banks globally.

More Flexible, More Available

Our new solutions make Unified Call Recording more flexible and available to businesses and teams of any size. We founded Dubber to eliminate the cost and complexity of capturing any conversation. For too many, the value of that conversation is lost the moment it ends. We’re making it simpler and easier than ever to end not knowing and comply.

Dubber makes key compliance activities simple and easy by automating key tasks:

• Collect and integrate recordings and data in the manner required to meet compliance obligations in appropriate regional boundaries.
• Real-time search for interactions based on communication-related metadata or interaction content. Common examples include:
• Analyze and interact with collected communications, including the ability to monitor interactions as they are being collected.
• Ensure security of collected communications and prevent tampering at all stages
• Retention policies support retain and delete actions; and, legal hold and discovery on historical and real-time data

• Metadata – Participants, time, direction, dialled number, origin number, Custom business data
• Content – Transcription, sentiment, phonetics, related interactions

As with all the solutions we’re announcing today, we’re just getting started.

12 new ways to drive compliance, customer and revenue intelligence

Quick read:

• We’re announcing today 12 new solutions for call recording and using voice intelligence to power compliance, revenue and customer insights.
• Three new core solutions are built to reflect the way you’ll use the conversations collected
• All enable any recording from any eligible endpoint – from Cisco Webex to Mobile and more – to be compliantly stored in one place, the Dubber Voice Intelligence Cloud
• Simple to provision add-ons enable you to do more with every recording – like automagically adding conversations and transcriptions to Salesforce or business intelligence tools

We’ve been busy behind the scenes developing a new generation of Dubber solutions based on customer and partner input.

What we heard was – “give us all the great Dubber functionality and ease of use in a way that reflects how we need to work with conversations and voice data”.

That lead us to three clear scenarios.

First, some businesses only need individuals reviewing recordings and data – and some want to link that to Salesforce. It’s simple – one workspace for each person, viewing their recordings and sharing as needed.

Second, others want recordings enforced and managed by team leaders – with some wanting to connect voice data to their business intelligence platforms. Here, you have one workspace for all recordings with team members able to see recordings and data based on permissions granted.

Third, others wanted all the Dubber functionality with rich AI-powered insights, sentiment analysis, and more. Many teams, all managed in one workspace with instant customer and employee sentiment and real-time search.

And all three wanted simple to provision, add-on functionality for everything from data storage to APIs and connectors to popular apps.

So, we’ve done just that.

The answer is Unified Call Recording

Today we’re launching 12 new products and solutions, more than tripling our industry-leading voice intelligence offerings for service and solution providers, business and government.

The new solutions are available today directly from Dubber on eligible networks and solutions. Over the coming months, we anticipate they’ll be available across our more than 140 active service and solution providers services globally.

Dubber’s existing solutions, CallDub and DubAI will continue to be offered across all current networks.

Unified Call Recording is critical to achieving the compliance, revenue, and customer insights demanded by business and government today. More than 80% of crucial conversations with customers and employees take place using voice. Not having access to accurate, compliant records in real-time puts leaders at a serious disadvantage. Dubber addresses that by unlocking the insights in every conversation.

“Dubber continues to transform the economics of call recording and voice data,” said Matthew Townend, Executive Director, Cavell – a leading industry analyst firm. “The benefits of voice intelligence as a service are clear – both to the service providers that will build differentiation through offering it and to businesses and governments that will deploy it to address critical business needs.”

Three New Cornerstone Solutions

At the heart of today’s announcement are three new cornerstone solutions. They give business and government flexible, affordable options so that users or teams can capture and use voice intelligence – from recordings to transcriptions to sentiment analysis.

• Dubber You delivers Unified Call Recording where individuals need to record, store and review crucial conversations. Dubber You automates the recording of calls, meetings and video without the need for hardware or software and comes with unlimited lifetime storage. Plans start at $14.95 per month per recording endpoint.
• Dubber Teams is ideal for managers and leaders needing central review and control over 100% accurate and enforced recordings and data for sales, service, and customer people insights. Plans start at $19.95 per month per recording endpoint.
• Dubber Premier unlocks all Dubber functionality delivering AI-enriched insights. Beautiful transcriptions, alerts and notifications and the ability to easily integrate Dubber with business intelligence and CRM applications. Plans start at $49.95 per month per recording endpoint.

All Dubber solutions include critical features such as unlimited storage; easy-to-use application for iOS, Android and Web; concierge set-up and training; data download and export and 24×7 online global support.

Turbocharge Dubber

Users can easily expand any package with a simple to deploy add-on including:

• UCR Service Add-on Pack – Easily add services with a click – review and manage recordings, transcriptions and data in one place. So, if you are on MS Teams and you also want to add recordings from Cisco Webex, that’s easy.
• Dubber API – Easily connect Dubber recordings and data to applications, storage and dashboards.
• Dubber Call Recording Archive – Redundant and secure storage of all call recordings and data with Dubber Storage. Back up your valuable voice data in the Dubber Voice Intelligence Cloud, including recordings and data from other sources.
• Dubber for Salesforce – Add your Dubber recordings, metadata, transcriptions and sentiment insights to Salesforce records.

A few of the things you’ll be able to do

Dubber solutions support continuous compliance and voice intelligence with critical features including:

• Collect and integrate recordings and data in the manner required to meet compliance obligations appropriate to regional regulations
• Real-time search of interactions based on communication-related metadata or conversational content. Common examples include:
• Analyze and interact with collected communications, including the ability to monitor interactions as they are being collected.
• Ensure security of collected communications and prevent tampering at all stages
• Retention policies support retain and delete actions; and, legal hold and discovery on historical and real-time data

• Metadata – Participants, time, direction, dialled number, origin number, custom business data
• Content – Transcription, sentiment, phonetics, related interactions

We also announced today a full suite of solutions designed specifically for the exciting needs of compliance, legal, security, risk and audit teams.

With Dubber’s unique reach and Unified Call Recording (UCR), specifically for compliance, companies can capture recordings immediately in one location from all their voice, video and text services, including the 140+ Service Provider networks connected to the Dubber platform globally. This reach and the new solutions for compliance, make Dubber the world-leading recording option for compliance.

We’re just getting started!

Get your houses in order!
That’s the message resonating loud and clear to the finance industry from the ASIC RG-271 dispute resolution standards.

If your organisation wants to meet the new compliance standards by October 5, now is the time to act on updating your systems for managing complaints. And although October 5 seems a while away, the D-day drums are already beating.

Why all the fuss about RG-271?

ASIC introduced the RG-271 to improve the way financial services organisations manage and resolve business disputes. Recognising the value of customer feedback as a source of early systemic warnings, the commission reduced the timeframes for responding to complaints. It outlined what information should be in a written Internal Dispute Resolution (IDR) response, to make it easier for consumers to decide whether they want to escalate their complaints.

Capturing and tracking conversations in time will help resolve IDR issues before they escalate. The regulatory guide wants organisations to make more progress by “increasing the capture, tracking, analysis and reporting of complaint data.”

Voice data is a critical element of any business’s overall data set. Voice data is generated from recordings of conversations and the meta-data associated with those conversations.

To effectively meet the new mandate, financial services organisations will need to start call recording and implement workflows to capture compliance mishaps. What this means is they will need to quickly identify when a customer is expressing signs of distress, anger or frustration and build up efficient ways to respond in time.

Rather than this being a matter of opinion or interpretation, AI can tell you in real-time what is the sentiment being expressed by customers in every conversation. This can happen across any interaction point including call centres, mobile consulting calls, video conferencing meetings.

The red button issue – Financial organisations that don’t get their house in order in time could face penalties mounting to thousands of dollars.

Innovation leap in compliance technology brings good news

On the flip side, better IDR not only benefits consumers and small businesses, it equips the financial services boards with rich real time data on the customer experience and gives them a new lens into whether their customer’s needs are being met or not. Although the task can be daunting, regtech solutions such as Dubber accelerate dispute resolution and documentation and provide the foundation for proactive risk management and continuous compliance.

Breakthroughs in voice intelligence step up IDR management

Cloud-based Voice Intelligence is just one example of how technology is leading the way to answering the demands of a tightly regulated compliance environment. Voice intelligence done right makes it possible to create a continuous compliance loop that records, monitors conversations 24/7 and send alerts when organisations need to act on problematic conversations, before they escalate into a dispute.

Anticipating a growing need for smarter voice-driven compliance management, Dubber stepped up to offer a simple and affordable way to quickly meet the new mandates with confidence. One of the advantages of Dubber Voice AI; it can pick up when customers are dissatisfied through sentiment analysis and send an auto-alert to the compliance teams.

To help you ramp up your compliance in time for RG-271, Dubber can take you through the steps – no matter what the size of your organisation.

While the human brain can do wonderful things, it isn’t always the best tool for retaining information.

Don’t worry if this sounds familiar. Even bright, healthy adults are forgetful. We’re designed that way. And it’s a good thing.

Cognitive science professor Art Kohn says people are quick to forget. He talks about something he calls The Forgetting Curve. Kohn says one hour after learning new information the majority of people will have forgotten half of it.

A day later, the average person will be unable to recall 70 percent of the material. By the end of the week that figure will hit 90 percent. There will be people who do better and others who do worse. “In general the situation is appalling. Nearly everything you teach employees in company training sessions will be forgotten,” says Kohn.

This should not come as a surprise. A human brain is efficient precisely because it spends much of its time editing out unnecessary incoming information in order to focus. Along the way it will edit out important material along with the barrage of trivia coming our way every moment of the day.

Kohn talks specifically about corporate training. He worries that forward-looking businesses who spend vast sums preparing staff for new challenges may not get the value they hope for. The Forgetting Curve is a problem in other areas of business. People forget things all the time. They forget conversations, instructions, sales calls any one of dozens of interactions that take place during a working day.

With Dubber’s Unified Call Recording, there is no need to forget any interaction that takes place on a phone or video call. Unified Call Recording can capture every conversation and store it for later recall. The voice data is converted to text, date stamped and made searchable.

This means you can retrieve an accurate record of any conversation, presentation or training session. Even if our efficient, but flawed, human brain can do no better than recall it happened last Thursday morning or that it involved sending widgets to Brisbane.

Highlights from a recent Regtech and Dubber Webinar

How can managers navigate through growing compliance complexities when work happens everywhere? How do you regain control in a business communication world that is siloed into multiple voice chats, video channels, networks and devices? Will AI technology save the day, or are technology firms spreading more pixie dust?

COVID complicates compliance but isn’t the only driver of complexity

COVID complicated an already complex compliance world, adding a plethora of systems, communications tools and places over which compliance now needs to be managed. The volume, velocity and virality of customer conversations across Zoom videos, MS meetings, WhatsApp recordings, mobile conversations…, calls for new ways to track and monitor mounting mishaps and breaches.

Although some regulations were paused at the outset, they are back in force.

Underlying the complications of COVID are a range of broader changes challenging compliance teams: New communications preferences (think WeChat, Whatsapp and Signal) amongst customers and employees; the rise of video as a dominant communications medium; and the inevitability of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in the workplace.

Discussion on these drivers, and the challenges they pose to compliance leaders were at the centre of our recent Webinar with Regtech.

A return to mandatory conversation recording

While call and conversation recordings are mandatory for crucial conversations in most countries, they’re limited by legacy solutions, and the ability to compliantly capture them on leading communications platforms where video, calling and messaging converge.

In many environments, 80% of crucial customer conversations are voice, yet less than 10% of these conversations are captured. This percentage slides down as more conversations shift off legacy communications systems. For financial institutions, 50% of customer conversations now occur outside of the call centre. The status-quo is not about to change soon; 61% of financial service CFOs plan to make remote work permanent post-pandemic.

The financial pain is real

Last year alone, $10.4B of compliance fines and penalties were handed to financial institutions. Many of them were related to data privacy breaches. So how do you capture, retain and analyse crucial datasets when user end-points are dispersed across mobile, web and many other channels?

Not surprisingly, in the UK, the FCA mandate to record every voice conversation returned after recognising growing compliance gaps in a dispersed workforce that continues to operate across multiple communication channels.

But in a new reality where employees are hopping across MS Team meetings, Zoom videos, WhatsApp recordings and mobile voice calls, the compliance chasm is still there and growing.

The drive to continuous compliance

“The industry has come a long way from the days when the only option to access data was through spreadsheets. Now huge amounts of data are available on the cloud, and can be accessed almost instantly. This is a massive improvement.” – Regtech Webinar

The C-suite is still largely unaware of its ability to mine voice data outside the call center. There’s a clear opportunity for chief compliance officers to preserve core compliance data in a compliance cloud and be a primary data source for businesses. And critically, to aggregate voice conversations from across the business in one record system.

At the end of the day, the ability to monitor customer conversations, end not knowing, and run them at scale shifts you into a new mode of continuous compliance.

AI, compliance risks and red flags

There’s a lot of talk about driving Artificial Intelligence (AI) compliance models, and some industry kickback. But the future of AI-driven compliance is bright, and from a functionality stance, the timing couldn’t be better.

“The industry is responding positively to the different aspects of AI and what it can deliver from a compliance perspective. The future of compliance lies in the ability to harness artificial intelligence for many compliance tasks.”

The question is, how do we get to the point where we can predict mishaps and conversations that can go rogue, rather than constantly looking in the rear view mirror? This is one of the areas where innovation, AI and analytics are most likely to deliver significant compliance benefits.

If you can predict problems more effectively, you can fix them faster and more easily. You can deliver more tangible benefits and reduce the likelihood of remediation projects.

Unified vs. siloed voice communications

Global compliance leaders can no longer afford to maintain the status quo. They need to continuously monitor voice and chat platforms no matter where their teams and customers are globally positioned. Country-specific data sovereignty requirements also need to be met. So to PCI, and myriads of other regulations.

A shift to continuous compliance intelligence

“At the end of the day, call recording is just an activity. What matters is creating a compliance record system driven by voice data. It’s about integrating that data with other data sources and applications. And then from that compliant data set, fuelling AI-enriched alerts, notifications, workflows, dashboards, and more.”

“Compliance leaders need to look beyond a single application to do this and target a data-first strategy that powers any application they desire.” Andy Lark, Chief Customer Officer, Dubber.

Leaders in the future will need to track and instantly retrieve datasets from cloud-based platforms, with storage capacities up to five, or even seven years. With the tsunami of data from myriads of voice and video conversations, it could pay to spend time on data-driven strategies to flag alerts, gain insights into potential risk, and expedite proactive compliance.

One of the key principles that guide us as a SaaS company is Dubber should get automagically better every day. So, over the past quarter, we’ve been busy behind the scenes making Dubber native to the world’s most popular calling and video solutions and adding cool new features.

Here are a few of the new places Dubber can be turned on with a click.

We recently announced the expansion of our AT&T relationship by offering compliant Unified Call Recording across 3 major AT&T networks: AT&T IP Tool Free, AT&T Hosted Voice Service and Cisco Webex calling with AT&T Business. This is only the start, as Dubber’s multi-network integration across AT&T and their partner platforms means users can now switch on Dubber with a click across AT&T’s Business portfolio, substantially broadening access to the customer voice insights across the entire enterprise.

Like you, we’ve found ourselves working from everywhere and relying on the best UC solutions to stay connected. Now, whatever you’re on, you’ll be able to record, get alerts and insights and do more. And you’ll be able to do it knowing you are complying with global data privacy and financial regulations – unlimited by storage constraints – with AI-enriched insights – and easy access through the Dubber App and Web console.

One of the great things about Unified Call Recording is all your recordings, data, transcripts and insights are in one place. So, if you are recording your own or your team’s calls and videos across mobile, Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, and Zoom – they will all be conveniently in your inbox. And unlike other solutions requiring hardware, professional services, unique SIM cards, and call forwarding, we’ve integrated Dubber with these platforms, so Unified Call Recording can simply be available at a switch.

Here are a few of the integration highlights

• Dubber on Zoom: The recent Dubber – Zoom integration made it possible for Zoom users to access enhanced recording and voice analytics of millions of Zoom meetings and Zoom phone conversations
• Microsoft Teams Compliance Certification: Dubber just became one of the first unified call recording solutions to receive the Microsoft Teams compliance recording certification. Finally, businesses in regulated industries such as banking, government, insurance and financial services can easily meet legal and regulatory obligations for their Microsoft Teams users in call centres, offices, and work-from-anywhere environments
• Salesforce – Dubber integration: The recent addition of Dubber to the Salesforce AppExchange solves multiple issues. Salesforce users can now compliantly capture customer interactions, reduce administration, proactively manage accounts, and continuously improve deals by accessing insights and sentiment analysis. The newfound visibility also means salespeople can quickly search for information in their conversations, opportunities can be filtered by keywords, and managers can help teams win more deals

Cool new features

Dubber just got better with a slew of features to level up the customer experience and end not knowing. These new features don’t just add clarity, they ensure compliance is better managed and disputes are more easily solved.

• Enhanced AI Speaker Detection: Dubber now has an enhanced capability to detect speakers in a recording. As a result, Dubber transcriptions are more beautiful and more conversational, improving overall readability and insights
• AI Question Detection: Another boost to transcription readability was made by adding question marks
• Legal Hold: Now compliance-focused teams can protect recordings from deletion by user, by retention period, or accidental, ensuring that every recording can be retrieved at any time
• Transcription crosstalk elimination: Transcription quality often reduces when it comes to deciphering crosstalk. Recognising the gap Dubber built-in dual-channel transcriptions. The new capability eliminates transcription errors caused by cross talk and improves transcriptions when a caller is in a noisy environment
• IdP SSO: Security is a crucial pillar of the Dubber Platform, which is why we’ve enabled enterprises the overarching ability to control security and identity information. New Dubber customers can configure idP SSO during the account creation process while existing customers can add this functionality by requesting it through their account manager or support contact

We’re not stopping here. Dubber will continue to power on to deliver Unified Call Recording and voice intelligence solutions and end not knowing.

Let’s chat if you’d like a demo of our new integrations and features!

How is Voice AI meeting a growing need for faster, more accurate compliance management?

And why does Voice AI work hand-in-hand with proactive compliance?

At a recent IBM – Dubber webinar and round table, compliance industry leaders across the country talked about major compliance mandates affecting their performance. They were troubled by the new Work-from-Anywhere reality and how it’s off-setting rising regulatory demands on financial services and other industries.

During the webinar, fintech expert and Chief Customer Officer of Dubber, Andy Lark, together with Anthone Withers, Head of Public Cloud at IBM discussed the rising role of voice intelligence in stepping up compliance and removing legacy obstacles. They focused on how voice intelligence technology is meeting a growing demand for proactive compliance reporting.

See key takeaways on how to meet rising regulatory demands in 2021

Research shows a growing need to manage voice data in compliance

A history of compliance failures, cross-border mandates, and the growing list of guidelines since the Hayne Royal Commission and GFC are turning compliance and risk management into an increasingly complex task.

The Hayne Royal Commission claimed compliance was highly challenged by the common malpractice of using voice conversations to sell inappropriate products to customers. Deloitte in response, advised the industry to invest in compliance programs that embed data into their DNA. With the shift to data-driven compliance, voice data was inadequately addressed or was missing altogether.

A once impossible task now possible

“Voice has largely been captured in silos and locked into those silos. A voice intelligence platform now enables any conversation to be captured from any eligible end-point, then stored and analysed in a single compliant cloud instance.” Andy Lark, Dubber.

When coupled with IBM Watson, voice data is transformed into intelligent compliance insights. The combination shifts financial services and other regulated industries from a rear-view perspective to always knowing in real time.

When Covid hit and created a new ‘work-from-anywhere’ reality, compliance teams needed to capture and track conversations over a huge set of new endpoints and apps including mobile, Zoom, MS Teams, Cisco Webex and more. Suddenly, the impossible task of managing voice data at scale called for voice intelligence tools powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The power of combining voice data with Watson IBM

Unleashing IBM Watson with Dubber Voice AI on conversation datasets ushered in a new way to analyse conversational data while managing it in a secure environment.

The IBM Watson – Dubber partnership made it finally possible for managers to gain insights into customer conversations and leverage predictive analytics. Managers could now use triggers on keywords and alerts to search and generate reports in real time.

A brave new remote world jeopardizes compliance mandates

“We’ve seen a surge in the use of Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and more. The meeting online tsunami has created the need for compliant call recording, with all recordings – mobile, web and traditional handsets, unified in one place.” Andy Lark, Dubber

This switch to off-premise communications gave rise to a new remote worker and a growing reliance on mobile devices and applications. With that, new compliance issues arose. For instance, when remote financial workers recorded a business meeting on a popular application, unknowingly they broke many industry compliance mandates.

In effect, the data was not stored in a sovereign way, a privacy notification was not issued and workers were not redacting key data. Personal call recording simply did not meet compliance standards.

Time to knowing

“The new challenge is the time it takes to know if your compliance standing has been compromised.” Andy Lark, Dubber.

Traditional approaches to call recording resulted in useful dashboards for managing a call centre but today do little to meet the needs of compliance teams required to search terabytes of data in real time across multiple end-points – Or more importantly, being alerted on information misuse and policy breaches.

“Together with IBM we solved this at scale by enabling vast conversational data sets to be created and turning them into compelling insights” – Andy Lark, Dubber

Let’s look at a typical bank breach use case: Let’s say there is a serious customer complaint flagged across five years. The average time to assemble data could take up to eight hours of needle-in-a-haystack work. But with Watson IBM and Dubber, the task is reduced to 10 seconds. Anthone Withers pivoted to other important advantages: “You have proof, you have a transcript highlighting keywords that shouldn’t be in the conversation and you have sentiment analytics. Better still, all these insights that expose risk can be pulled into dashboards and reports in real time.”

In summary

Digital acceleration and remote work added multiple communication end-points that began to severely compromise compliance and fraud detection, just as regulatory demands were growing. What’s become clear is; compliance solutions that integrate voice intelligence can produce more cost-efficient and more productive compliance practices, and finally, deliver proactive compliance.

A business needs to listen to and understand two key groups. Sure, customers are vital, they are, after all, where the revenue comes from. But the front-line employees who determine how customers view your business are also important.

You can build loyalty with both groups and get to know them better by listening to what they say. The big question is how do you listen?

Start by putting humans first

Bots and automation have a place, yet for most of your customers, talking to a real person on the phone remains as important as ever. Want proof? More than seven in ten Americans would rather talk to a human than deal a chatbot or other automated process.

Chatbots and FAQs are best when it comes to dealing with minor queries. When a customer faces a bigger problem, they prefer to speak to a human. That means a phone call.

It’s not hard to see why. We know the three pillars of customer service are; a quick resolution, knowledgeable service agents, and a fast response. Customers feel valued when they speak to a knowledgeable agent who can respond in detail and at length. They want someone to listen to them.

The price of not listening can be high: Three out of four stop using an organisation’s services after a poor customer service experience.

So investing in customer service with a human voice makes good business sense.

Know your customer

Listening to customers makes them feel valued. It also gives you an opportunity to learn more about their needs and wants than you could ever get from an automated system.

By getting to know customers better, you can give them what they want. You can tailor your services, make appropriate offers. This pays off with more customer loyalty and that fuels more revenue.

Most businesses still have a long way to go when it comes to understanding customers. Almost a third of customers say they are frustrated that businesses don’t understand them or their needs.

One of the best ways to improve is by learning from mistakes.

Advances in voice AI and sentiment analysis provide the tools needed to filter negative calls to quickly identify customer complaints, or instances where customer service was lacking.

Understanding what your customers don’t like can be just as important as figuring out what they do. Analysing negative calls can identify areas for improvement – whether across products, services or experiences – and create opportunities for wins. Using data-driven decision making, businesses can increase sales, grow loyalty, and even improve their employee experience by reducing the number of negative customer calls they receive.

Do it right, do it once

One top customer frustration is having to repeat themselves when switching between channels or agents.

When a customer has to run through their problem a second time or repeat their personal details they see their call is not being resolved quickly. It also makes it look as if the person taking their call is not knowledgeable. That fails two of the pillars of customer service.

If you can’t provide a smoother, unified experience, your business will fall behind those who do. This is important if you offer omni-channel service. If you can’t offer it across a single service channel, you’re in trouble.

Pull it all together

Creating a unified customer experience needs a central repository of data from all previous conversations. The smartest way to achieve this is by using cloud native unified call recording that integrates voice data with existing business applications. Voice AI can turn those recorded conversations into a transcript.

When you pull data from previous conversations into a CRM system, data that includes a full transcript, your customer service agents can refer back to earlier conversations. This means customers don’t need to repeat themselves.

In the future consumers want more, not less, human interaction. Your business wants better customer interactions. Technology means you can do both at the same time. Better interactions mean you can make better personalised offers. You can adapt future conversations to the customer’s individual style and remember previous conversations so customers are not asked to repeat themselves.

Engage your staff

Your customer service employees define your customers’ relationship with your business. The more engaged they are, the better your business will perform. They’ll collaborate better and have higher productivity. Engaged workers are more likely to stay and less likely to take time off work. They will be enthusiastic about their work and about your business.

Keeping customer service workers engaged means a better customer experience. It also means cost savings: for a 100-employee organization, a 10 percent improvement in employee retention reduces costs by $50,000. If you can cut your staff turnover from 20 percent to 18 percent, that means two fewer employees to hire and onboard.

Staying engaged with remote working

Your customer service employees are more likely to stay engaged if you make their working life as easy as possible. That means giving them all the tools they need to do their job. This is especially true with remote workers who may miss human interaction.

Be wary of app fatigue. Using too many tools can disrupt workflows and drain productivity. Unified communications helps people stay focused. Most workers prefer the idea of having all communications in one place. Many workers believe a unified platform would help them achieve a better workflow, be more productive at work, and help work feel less chaotic.

Giving your workers a single, central repository of customer interactions will give them the insight they need to provide a better service.

Unified Call Recording and Voice AI

Unified call recording and voice AI will help you listen better to the voices that matter for your business. You’ll have a better understanding of your customers and their needs. At the same time, you’ll have valuable insights into keeping your employees engaged and focused.

Voice AI can bring things to your attention and even expose wants or needs that are not directly expressed. It can give you the information you need to deliver a better customer experience. You can reduce negative calls by learning from complaints. AI software can analyse and identify customer sentiment alerting you to problem areas. Positive calls can help you train staff and identify the best performers.

You can integrate AI voice and call recording into unified communications platforms and CRM to capture information at every customer touch point. This has the added benefit of easing app fatigue with your employees.

You can become a better listener by delegating some of the listening to Voice AI

Today we announced another major deployment of Dubber – this time at the heart of one of the world’s largest networks – AT&T.

Dubber will be launching compliant Unified Call Recording and Voice AI on 3 AT&T Networks: AT&T IP Toll-Free Network, AT&T Hosted Voice Service and Cisco Webex Calling with AT&T Business in the United States. What makes AT&T so special is that they are the first of the major service providers to deliver on the promise of Dubber Unified Call Recording.

It’s an unequivocal validation of our strategy to enable conversations to be captured across multiple end-points and unified in the Dubber Voice Intelligence cloud.

This reflects how modern businesses operate. We jump from calls on Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex to responding to customers on mobile devices and taking calls in service centres. What is crucial – for compliance, productivity, and visibility – is that all those calls can be integrated into one place and used to enrich systems of record like Salesforce.

That’s how, with AT&T, we can end not knowing for any business of any size. And that’s equally true for state and local government and education.

A Unified Approach.

Dubber is the only Unified Call recording and Voice AI solution running across multiple AT&T Voice business services – creating one place for all voice, video and text data to be harvested and leveraged instantly.

1. AT&T IP Toll-Free
2. AT&T Hosted Voice Services
3. Cisco Webex Calling with AT&T

Native + Cloud = Advantage

Business, state and local government have been trapped for years on legacy call recording solutions often requiring hardware, storage (that increases in costs the more you record) and only connected to specific applications.

Together with AT&T, we will enable customers to capture conversations from any eligible end-point – a simple feature add-on, and then AI-enrich and store their voice data in one place. They’ll be able to access all this safely and securely, meeting critical compliance and regulatory mandates.

Data is immediately available to analyze and to pull key insights from. Key insights that make material improvements to business operations, customer experience, and compliance mandates, all of which takes place in a vastly more dispersed work environment than ever before.

As a simple and easy to deploy feature upgrade, Dubber Unified Call Recording and Voice AI can be added to any of the listed AT&T services. Customers can easily connect voice data – including conversational content, sentiment analytics and call meta-data to big data sets, applications such as Salesforce, and more.

Central to the Dubber on AT&T offering is compliance. Not just that experienced by Financial Services enterprise and others in regulated industries, but also regulations such as PCI and HIPPA. Answering the broad range of compliance mandates faced by a business means Dubber on AT&T addresses every element of compliance – from how calls are recorded to what data is retained to how data is stored.

2020 was certainly different. And 2021 will be different again.

While 2021 will see the continuing acceleration of the dominant trends of 2020, it will be a different year again as enterprises and governments shift from a scramble to adapt to a new normal, to reshaping their futures based on new conditions.

Plato was right: necessity is indeed the mother of invention. During the COVID-19 crisis, one area that has seen tremendous growth is digitization, meaning everything from online customer service to remote working to supply-chain reinvention to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to improve operations. Healthcare, too, has changed substantially, with telehealth and biopharma coming into their own. – McKinsey

Here are our views on what these new conditions mean for governments and enterprises in the context of Voice Data as a Service and Unified Call Recording.

1. Endpoints have been dispersed, for good

The overnight shift to remote work meant the scattering of communication endpoints from one centralised location to home offices and makeshift desks all over the world. This opened the door to mobile and Internet Protocol (IP)-based communication becoming the main channel for business conversations.

Enterprise adoption of Unified Communications solutions as the dominant communication tool will accelerate in 2021 – driving the need to answer broader enterprise needs for compliant conversations on these platforms.

“As organisations raced to deploy communications platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex, they faced new pressures to ensure that communications across these channels were in compliance with industry regulations. This has shifted the requirement for call recording from being application-specific to the need for Unified Call Recording – due to the need to capture every endpoint.” – James Slaney, COO

2. Compliance optimisation

The pressure to maintain compliance with industry regulations isn’t going anywhere, in fact it accelerated this past year.

Compliance has remained a primary driver for call recording, however, we have seen a new emphasis on utilising the data to understand the customer and ensure employee wellbeing as part of a more proactive approach to compliance and business continuity.

2020 saw voice data emerge as a principal driver of optimising compliance programs to deliver a real-time view and reduce costs and complexity. This too will accelerate in 2021 as business leaders look to seamlessly integrate voice data with big data sets, applications such as Salesforce and more.

“Employers are feeling the distance between themselves and their employees and are keen to know more about the wellbeing of their staff, as well as wanting to be on the front foot when it comes to reducing risk and complying with industry regulations. This has led to organisations looking for ways to rapidly undertake audits – making keyword search and custom alerts more important than ever and relegating old world systems that don’t enable real-time search to the back seat.” – Russell Evans, CRO

3. The paradox of contactless customer experience

Satisfying customers through digital and contactless experiences means getting closer to customers, even while they are further away.

The lack of customer intimacy implicit in digital channels created more demand for voice communications. Leading organisations increased efforts to listen harder and automate customer experience (CX) reporting. Traditional approaches to net promoter scores that delivered CX insights quarterly or annually have begun to be replaced by AI-enriched voice and digital data that provides real-time insights. Analysing customer experience and employee experience identifies the true drivers of engagement and loyalty.

“Ending not knowing what was said, what the customer or employee experience was, or how the organisation is performing from a CX and EX standpoint is more important today than ever. 2021 will see traditional methods -– which present data months after it happened or worse, are based on hearsay – with real-time voice data analytics derived from Unified Call Recording. Enterprises will rapidly shift from time-lapsed CX to continuous CX, and reap significant cost savings as they do it.” – Andy Lark, CMO

4. Closing the business continuity chasm

2020 made the term “unprecedented events” seem like the understatement of the century. Business continuity planning was upended by the coronavirus pandemic. Organisations were forced to reassess their approach to every aspect of their operations and communications: from call centres to supply chains.

Business applications easily managed in data centres and wired to end-points had to be rapidly reassessed as workers dispersed, and legacy call centre approaches rethought. Cloud and network-centric approaches will accelerate in 2021 as enterprises look to reduce costs and fully virtualise approaches to voice interactions.

“We saw a shift in enterprise focus towards building out more UCaaS capability, which drove interest in the potential of voice communications as a valuable source of data. There was a growing desire to understand conversational data and turn it into actionable insights through the use of AI. Businesses began to understand that voice data can be used to improve operational performance, especially with the increase of digital and distanced transactions.” – James Slaney, COO

5. Mobile as the primary communication channel

The rise of mobile communications skyrocketed throughout 2020. Without an office and the accompanying communications systems, employees resorted to using their mobile as their primary communication channel. With the rise of 5G this adoption of mobile devices will only continue to increase.

While some regulators hit pause on compliance mandates for employees working from home, most – including the FCA in the UK – now require compliant call recording of conversations between bankers and customers.

This leaves businesses reevaluating their communications solutions and their compliance requirements. In order to ensure compliant and critical record keeping, businesses need to be able to capture calls directly from the network.

“Where call recording was once confined to the domain of the call centre, enterprises raced to understand how to capture conversations from mobile devices across wireless and IP connections. Unified Call Recording and Voice Data as a Service became a priority as organisations looked to capture calls from anywhere, enrich voice data with AI, and aggregate that data for broader enterprise use.” – Russell Evans, CRO

6. Work changed forever

Vaccine rollouts bring promise of a return to old freedoms, but in the meantime, communication and collaboration is likely to remain virtual. A Gartner survey of company leaders found that 82% plan to allow employees to work remotely at least part of the time after the pandemic, and 47% will allow employees to work from home full-time.

“The move to remote work has continued the shift to the cloud, with businesses moving away from application-specific and infrastructure-based call recording solutions. Organisations are demanding cloud-based and network-based offerings to complement the new way of working, and a landscape of business that looks like it has been permanently altered.” – Andy Lark, CMO

7. AI pixie dust is everywhere

Any tech solution offered in 2020 had AI attached to it in some form. It was also the year in which organisations saw through the hype and started to look to the real power of AI to automate workflows, enrich data and generate insights.

The application of AI to create intelligence and actions from conversational data will accelerate in 2021. At the most basic level we will see improvements in the ability to accurately transcribe voice data. At the same time advances in conversational outcome predictions will provide enterprises with the ability to significantly improve customer and employee experience.

“Anyone will have seen that in recent years vendors have begun sprinkling AI into every conversation, but what remains is the gap between the technology and understanding of where AI fits and how it can benefit businesses. Poorly managed voice data and AI only adds to the ‘info-besity’ many enterprises experience, further limiting their ability to get clarity from large data sets. Voice AI is more than just transcription, and decision-makers need to be sure they are getting the right data and insights to optimise their organisation.” – Russell Evans, CRO

8. The rise of voice data in the cloud

If data is the new oil, 2020 made it clear that voice data is the largest untapped source of rich insights available. Once isolated to individual applications and business functions, 2021 will see voice data break free of silos and discrete endpoints to become unified in the cloud.

We are seeing an increase in demand for data, as businesses are using this information to fuel continuous intelligence that can inform their everyday business decisions and actions. Gut feelings are no longer enough – the growing complexity of the world requires data-driven organisations.

“While Voice Data as a Service across mobile, UC, and SIP connections is a critical differentiator for service providers, the broader opportunity is in unifying that data in the Voice Intelligence Cloud and letting AI enrich it. This enables enterprises to turn compliant call recording into continuous compliance monitoring.” – James Slaney, COO

Here’s to ending not knowing in 2021!

2021 will be different

2020 was anything but the year any of us expected. Predictions made in January seemed to have little relevance by March and vapourised by July.

So where should Service Providers, UC solutions and their Resellers focus to maximise revenue and opportunities in 2021?

While some geographies, notably Australia and New Zealand are returning to a degree of certainty, for many others, uncertainty remains the norm. What is clear are the growth opportunities that have accelerated in response to new customer and business needs.

1. Dispersed workforces + Proliferation of end-points = Shift from connections to mining the value in conversations and content

Workforces will continue to disperse, increasing the demand for unified communications and security solutions that enable Government and business to work across many endpoints. Remote work practices will continue to reshape work itself, accelerating adoption of Cloud solutions. And 5g will only add fuel to the fire.

Action: Service and Solution providers – and their partners – are seeing continued strong demand for UCS and UCaaS platforms. And targeting those opportunities is the first step to underpinning growth. The second step is to develop solutions that answer broader needs for compliance, security and productivity.

Unified Call Recording is central to developing these solutions – moving Resellers from simply selling connections to delivering value from multiple and dispersed end-points in the Cloud. That value ultimately will come from ending not knowing and providing insights into every customer and employee interaction.

1. Big Data + Voice Data = Bigger Big Data that’s compliant

Voice interactions with customers and between employees either rank first or second as a form of communication. And yet they account for a fraction of the Big Data pool accessible by most businesses. The moment the conversation ends, the value within the content is lost.

2021 will see a rapid shift to capturing voice data – driven by the new economics of Unified Call Recording and the Voice Intelligence Cloud aggregating conversations as data from any end-point.

Action: To take advantage of this rapidly emerging multi-billion dollar market opportunity for Voice data as a Service (VdaaS), Service and Solution providers – and their partners – need to present UCR as an integral part of the UCS sale and a key ingredient for compliance, business continuity and improving customer experience.

Default call recording solutions associated with many VOIP products typically don’t meet Enterprise-grade data and security policies or satisfy regulatory requirements. Many only store recordings for a limited time, offer poor transcription, and do not offer any form of speech analytics or voice data AI. Dubber Unified Call Recording and voice data intelligence is compatible with most VOIP products, and can be added without the need for any further hardware.

1. Ecommerce Acceleration = Need for continuous intelligence

Ecommerce growth rates are now in high double digits with nearly every business under pressure to accelerate digital transformation with the aim of improving customer experience. But to improve customer experience, businesses need to shift to continuous customer intelligence.

Action: Service and Solution providers – and their partners – integrating Unified Call Recording and Voice Intelligence into their UC offerings are able to differentiate, offering businesses the pathway to continuous intelligence from every customer conversation. Rather than reporting on NPS or customer satisfaction at the end of a quarter, customer experience – along with sales, marketing and agent performance can be made available in real time. And through open APIs, that data can be used to fuel dashboards, via applications such as Salesforce.

1. AI + Voice Data = Better Decisions

By 2030, AI products will contribute more than $15.7 trillion to the global economy. The use of AI to analyse and predict human behaviour will become standard practice for businesses looking for trends across their business in customer experience and behaviour, churn reduction, cross-selling and marketing.

Up to 90% of a company’s data is defined as unstructured. Traditionally this type of data, particularly phone calls, has been difficult to capture and analyse. Dubber AI solves this by providing the ability to analyse voice data for sentiment analysis, keyword identification, and transcription – enabling companies to draw on this data to drive strategy and decision making.

Action: Shift to presenting AI-first solutions that automate the delivery of continuous intelligence from conversations. Critical use cases such as compliance and creating records of crucial conversations are an imperative for every regulated business. But the benefits don’t stop there.

By looking for AI beyond the conversion of voice to data, solution providers can show how that same data can be used to provide a productivity edge and improve data overall.

That same data is as valuable internally as it is externally to measure employee performance and sentiment across the distance of remote working. Businesses can also make use of voice data to provide transcripts of meetings to teams, saving on note taking, and creating further efficiencies.

1. Distance + Increasing Regulatory Scrutiny = Compliance Complexity

Demands by Regulators to Know your Customer (KYC) and a shifting data and privacy landscape is creating a growing demand for complete solutions to answer needs for rapid investigations, continuous compliance reporting and voice data management.

The UK’s exit from the EU will mean that the GDPR will have major implications for European businesses who process or store data in the UK. Businesses who operate within the European Economic Area (EEA) and record their phone calls must check that their protection of voice data is sufficient for a post-Brexit world.

Action: With the increase in UC communications, and the resulting level of data being stored in the cloud, Resellers will need to understand the data laws impacting the collection and storage of conversational data. And solutions that lower the cost and burden of compliance reporting through real-time search, alerts and notifications are vital.

If 2020 wasn’t what we were expecting, 2021 is shaping-up to deliver as many surprises. Service and Solution Providers, and their partners, can ready themselves to turn change and uncertainty into opportunity by focusing on the shifts and creating the solutions to answer the needs they surface.

Voice data is central to creating these solutions as businesses increasingly turn to it to drive their decision making, predict customer behaviours and guide business direction.