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Five key trends that will impact Resellers in 2021

Five key trends that will impact Resellers 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.

 

Reducing the cost and complexity of compliance with Legal Hold

Reducing the cost and complexity of compliance with Legal Hold

If you’ve ever dealt with a legal hold request, you’ll know how difficult this mandated preservation of information can be to manage. But there is a solution that can reduce the cost and complexity of complying with a legal hold request.

What is a legal hold request?

A legal hold (or litigation hold) request is when legal counsel asks an organisation to preserve information that could be relevant to litigation, an audit, or investigation: including electronic records such as emails, instant messages, and voice recordings.

A company may have multiple active litigation cases – each with its own legal hold requirements. Legal holds cover anyone who might possess relevant information, called custodians. The list of custodians may change throughout the process so companies need an agile solution that can quickly and easily place new information under legal hold.

For companies with information in multiple locations such as employee devices, on-premise servers, and data centres: beware. This distribution of data could cause your risk and compliance teams a headache. Having one centralised location for records makes identifying information and placing it under legal hold much easier.

Dubber’s Legal Hold feature

Businesses can prepare for external events that might impact their business. These might include a simple late payment issue with a customer, litigation, regulatory audit, or even government investigation.

To rest assured that any voice recordings and their associated data can be held for investigation quickly, easily, and effectively, all CALL DUB and DUB AI licences now include our new Legal Hold functionality as standard. This vital compliance feature is included at no extra cost to provide reassurance that recordings can be preserved should the need arise.

How does it work?

Dubber’s Legal Hold functionality allows users to tag single or multiple recordings as held. Selecting multiple recordings at once assists organisations in complying with a legal hold request and preserving large quantities of information at short notice.

Once a recording is tagged as held it can be played, downloaded, and shared as with any other recording – but cannot be deleted under any circumstances. Held recordings are protected from erasure even when the retention period for the recording expires, if the user associated with the recording is deleted, or the overall storage period expires.

Dubber users can already store and manage all of their recorded voice data securely and efficiently in one single, consolidated archive within the cloud platform. With unified record keeping and automated retention periodscompliance procedures are streamlined and these now include legal hold requests.

Legal Hold allows users to target specific recordings for analysis without the need for technical assistance or expertise. Recordings can be tagged as held in bulk by filtering recordings by customer, keyword, or user. Only users with admin permissions can tag recordings as held, standard users are unable to use the feature or use filters to locate held recordings.

The Year of Ending Not Knowing

The Year of Ending Not Knowing

End the productivity and visibility trap

Unified Call Recording can capture customer calls and automatically log them within a CRM such as Salesforce. But to earn some serious points with your sales team, give them the gift of voice AI. This can act as a personal assistant to your sales reps: transcribing their calls so they never have to take notes ever again.

Recordings and transcripts can be used to inform lead prioritisation, the coaching of team members, and much more.

According to research by Salesforce, 67% of sales people say that enforcement of activity logging is stricter than in 2019, and 63% of reps log more details about customer interactions than they did in 2019. The reality is most sales leaders bemoan the fact that Salesforce isn’t up to date or current. What if you could automate this logging for your sales team and get them back to selling?

For most sales teams this can equate to another day of selling every week. Another day!

End not knowing

Ever wondered what was said? How the customer was really reacting?

Rather than hearsay, how about letting AI tell you.

With sentiment analysis, positive and negative conversations can be identified to coach new and existing team members, create alerts for negative calls, and track campaigns, competitors, or trends in customer enquiries.

Sales teams need to understand the needs of their customers and build trust through listening. But are they being supported by business tools, or being let down by them?

“Sales leaders today are plagued by not knowing and no one likes surprises – particularly at the end of the month or quarter. Customer experience is equally impacted as salespeople transfer what was heard into manual notes and back into CRM platforms. Unified Call Recording accelerates sales momentum – giving back valuable selling time to reps and, critically, ending not knowing. Implementing Unified Call Recording should be a priority for every sales leader.”Russell Evans, CRO, Dubber

Bring it all together

Unified Call Recording enables it all to come together. Every conversation captured from any end-point. No salesperson works on any one device or platform. We jump between Webex, Teams, mobile, and more. So record and capture every conversation and, with them all in one place, seamlessly integrate with Salesforce and your preferred data visualisation dashboard for real-time record keeping and insights. Set alerts on keywords and more.

 

Disputes? Resolved.

Disputes? Resolved.

The most important conversations happen over the phone: the deal you want to close, the urgent task that requires attention, and the complaint you want resolved. Unfortunately, unlike emails, there isn’t a paper trail that shows exactly what was said. Until now.

Get concrete evidence of what was said

Companies who do the majority of their business over the phone (did you know that 60% of customers prefer to call small businesses on the phone?) may struggle to find accurate proof of what was said between them and their customers. By relying on note-taking during a call, human error is inevitable. Without concrete evidence of the conversation, orders can be incorrectly fulfilled and customers can misremember what was discussed over the phone.

The solution to these challenges is a secure and scalable call recording solution that supports a businesses communications system – whether that’s fixed lines, hosted IP telephony, mobile devices, or solutions such as Microsoft Teams. With accurate proof of what was said, businesses can ensure better quality control in their order fulfillment and be better placed to resolve disputes. With AI transcription, it becomes even easier to find evidence of a conversation.

The ability to replay calls or refer to transcripts is only useful when they can be instantly retrieved. Keeping a customer waiting while you perform slow and painful SQL search just isn’t going to cut it in a world where everyone expects instant results. Businesses need to make sure they have real-time access to recordings for quick and efficient customer service.

Learn from unhappy customers

Recorded calls are also invaluable for staff training. Having real-life examples of what kind of calls to expect on the job prepares new employees for life in their role. Recorded calls can also be a great tool for the constant improvement of existing staff – especially with AI-powered sentiment analysis. Calls rated with positive sentiment can demonstrate best practice and can also highlight which employees should be rewarded for their excellent service, while those with negative sentiment can provide examples of unhappy customers and used to work out how to improve in the future.

Not only can recorded calls and their transcripts be useful for staff to refer to, they can also be a really useful tool for accurately sharing information. The ability to pass along a recording to a colleague in order to fulfil an order or solve a problem is invaluable, and recordings and transcripts can also be shared with customers for their information and reassurance.

But what about data protection?

Calls shouldn’t be made available to just anyone, and there must be security measures in place to ensure that files cannot be downloaded and shared with anyone outside the relevant parties. The most secure method of sharing recordings is with expiring links that can only be accessed by the intended recipient. These should prevent playback after a set time period, or a certain number of replays. Call recording solutions should always have access permissions to ensure that calls can only be played by appropriate employees, or supervisors only.

Case study: Dose Moving and Storage

Dose Moving and Storage is a family owned business that provides moving and storage solutions. We spoke to founder Marilee Dose about the company’s experience using Dubber.

Dubber: What was the challenge that brought you to choosing Dubber?

Marilee Dose: We wanted a record of all of our conversations with customers for improved dispute resolution, quality control, and training.

D: How did Dubber help you solve this problem?

MD: Recording our calls not only gives us concrete proof of what was said to customers, we can also securely share recordings with them so they can refresh their memory. This has been invaluable when disputes with customers arise. The ability to replay conversations has been instrumental in improving quality control within the business and we have also used recorded calls to enhance our staff training.

D: What was the process of going live with Dubber like?

MD: Dubber is very user friendly and reliable. We found the portal easy to use and we had the peace of mind that every call was automatically recorded and could be retrieved instantly.

If you’d like to learn more about how businesses are improving dispute resolution with Dubber, speak to a member of the team today.

Unlock Sales Productivity

Unlock Sales Productivity

How would your sales performance improve if you gave every salesperson back five, ten or more hours every week?

One of the first places to start is reducing admin, manual and inaccurate record keeping, and searching for what was said. While effectively documenting sales activities can be vital to ensuring customer needs are addressed and performance is monitored and improved it doesn’t need to be done by hand.

End not knowing

What if you knew what was actually said? In customer-facing roles, such as those in sales or customer service departments, time can often be wasted trying to ascertain or prove what was said during a previous conversation. In order to end not knowing, sales teams need a call recording solution that captures 100% of calls for evidence of conversations. And that’s just the beginning. If a solution has added voice AI that can transcribe speech to text, a full transcript can accompany a recording for an accurate record of exactly what was said.

Things get even more interesting when you introduce an open API to the picture. This allows developers to facilitate integrations with existing business tools and applications, including CRM systems. Call recordings and their transcripts can be stored within a customer account for detailed and accurate records of every interaction the business has had with a contact.

Discover instantly

Rather than scouring manual notes or looking at inaccurate records in Salesforce, what if every conversation was captured as it was said? Sales teams would no longer waste time doing detective work to confirm agreements or resolve disputes – their time can now be spent generating revenue for the business. With absolute proof of what was said, sales reps can refer to a recording or transcript without delay. With a user-friendly interface, or integration with a CRM application, salespeople could even refer to a previous conversation with a customer while they are talking to them on the phone.

Coach and train based on real customer conversations

Recording sales conversations creates a bank of real-life examples of customer calls, which makes ideal training material for new employees. With the addition of sentiment analysis, calls rated with positive or negative scores can be easily identified to show successful customer interactions, and the kind of negative calls they might encounter.

Case study: DeSpir Logistics

DeSpir Logistics combines the best practices of logistics and technology to pioneer a new method of secure transportation logistics. We spoke to Sierra Villarreal, who covers security and compliance, to hear more about how Dubber saves the company time.

Dubber: What was the challenge that brought you to choosing Dubber?

Sierra Villarreal: We wanted a record of our calls in order to have a record of what was agreed upon during conversations with customers.

D: How did Dubber help you solve this problem?

SV: Dubber provided a great, affordable solution that meant we had a record of every agreement made over the phone. We can get to the facts on the first phone call; instead of wasting many hours following up on phone calls and emails trying to prove something was said on a phone call.

We also use calls to help with training new and existing employees on certain situations, calls, questions, etc. Most of all, we SAVE time!! We are no longer paying employees to spend hours investigating claims a customer made on a phone that wasn’t recorded. We can now use that time on sales. The company is saving money due to investigation hours reducing because of Dubber!!!

D: What was the process of going live with Dubber like?

SV: The Dubber portal is extremely user friendly. The easy to use solution makes it easy to retrieve a call in seconds, even while on a call with a customer, meaning we can reference a conversation to confirm details of agreements and resolve any disputes with customers with absolute proof of exactly what was said.

If you’d like to learn more about how businesses save time with Dubber, speak to a member of the team today.

Do more with every call on Cisco

Do more with every call on Cisco

Cisco customers across their Webex® Calling, UCM-C, HCS, and CUCM services can unlock the power of voice data with Unified Call Recording and voice AI from Dubber. Automatically capture any call, receive a complete transcript, and access insights – from keyword alerts to sentiment analysis. You can even automate workflows and export data to dashboards and applications like Salesforce and Tableau through Dubber’s open API.

Legacy call recording and analytics restricted basic call recording to specific applications and a limited range of devices – often requiring costly storage and with poor scaling potential. Dubber is fully native to Cisco Webex® Calling and can support UCM-C, HCS, and CUCM services too. As a cloud platform, Dubber’s Unified Call Recording doesn’t require any on-premise hardware or software: radically reducing costs and unlocking infinite scalability. Whether you’re considering moving to the cloud, or you want to future-proof your on-premise or hybrid solution, Dubber call recording is available to you. We create the ideal cloud environment, all in one solution.

Four things you can do when you turn calls into data

Unified Call Recording from Dubber is optimized for compliance with regulatory directives such as MiFID II, GDPR, Dodd-Frank, PCI DSS, and Cisco’s CASPRx. But the benefits don’t end there. Many businesses are choosing to record their calls to learn more about their customers and to identify opportunities to reduce churn, sharpen investment decisions, and inform business development.

Transforming calls into data through transcription opens up huge potential for analysis and allows voice data to be integrated with existing business systems:

  1. Faster time to conversations and activity: Quickly review transcriptions and use instant search to find conversations
  2. Instantly report on customer and employee experience: See sentiment ratings for every conversation, including individual emotions
  3. Unify voice data with big data: Export call data for analysis within data visualization tools. Integrate call data within Salesforce and other CRM tools to build detailed customer profiles
  4. Real-time alerting and notifications: Monitor when keywords are spoken during a call to track campaigns or potential issues. Create automated alerts for negative calls to help reduce churn and increase customer loyalty

How easy is it to connect?

Getting the benefits of Unified Call Recording and AI takes minutes and requires no on-premise equipment or storage. It’s as easy as using your existing Cisco solution.

If you’re considering call recording for your Webex® Calling, UCM-C, HCS, or CUCM solution, sign up today by ordering directly from Cisco – we’re listed on Cisco Commerce Web (CCW).

You can also talk to one of our team if you’d like more information. And, if you are a Cisco reseller, we’re here to help you.

Get the sales edge

Get the sales edge

With a dispersed workforce, collaboration can feel difficult to achieve. Remote workers can often feel separated from their colleagues and their visibility of business operations can feel restricted. In departments that have a lot of direct contact with customers, this can cause customer interactions to feel disjointed.

Collaboration is critical to sales

According to Salesforce’s State of Sales report, 77% of sales teams rate collaboration across departments as critical or very important to the sales process. Customers increasingly expect salespeople to be informed about any previous interactions with a business, even if this was with a different department. Having complete visibility of a customer’s journey with the company is invaluable when trying to understand their needs and how they can be met.

An interconnected way of working with colleagues and other departments within a business can lead to the discovery of new opportunities. It is becoming increasingly common for sales and customer service teams to securely share information with each other to work more effectively. When customer interactions are correctly documented within a CRM such as Salesforce, everyone with access to a customer account can assess how well that account is performing, and understand the status of the relationship with that customer.

End not knowing with a record of customer interactions

Of course, documenting customer interactions takes time and effort. What if you had a solution that captured every single customer call, even when they were handled by a remote worker on their mobile device, or over an IP connection? And, even better, those calls were fully transcribed by speech-to-text AI for an accurate record of exactly what was said?

Where traditional call recording solutions rely on expensive on-premise storage, and only capture a small fraction of calls made across a business. Unified Call Recording captures voice conversations directly from the service provider network, and from communication solutions such as Microsoft Teams. With work no longer confined to an office or contact centre, companies who are looking for complete visibility across their business are looking for agile communication solutions that match our new dispersed way of working.

Keeping customer data secure

It is important that collaboration does not compromise on data security. While sharing detailed records of customer conversations can benefit sales and customer service teams, it is vital that customer information is not shared with more parties than necessary. Businesses should look for a solution that allows for secure sharing of data. Audio files should not be downloaded, as this could open up risks for the data being shared with multiple parties. Instead, sharing should be undertaken with expiring links that only allow access for that user, with a restricted time period and a cap on the number of playbacks.

Organisations should also check that any solution allows for the creation of teams with specific access permissions. Depending on the requirements of the team, recordings may only be accessed by supervisors with administrator controls, or may be shared with other team members for greater visibility over customer interactions.

Case study: APAC-Central

APAC-Central, Inc. supplies materials, paving and construction services across Northwest Arkansas, the Arkansas River Valley, Oklahoma and Southwestern Missouri. We spoke to their IT systems analyst Dustin Bowden about how Dubber has facilitated collaboration across the business.

Dubber: What was the challenge that brought you to choosing Dubber?

Dustin Bowden: We wanted a call recording solution that was compatible with our new phone system to ensure our customers are billed correctly.

D: How did Dubber help you solve this problem?

DB: The Dubber solution gives us the ability to error check ourselves after taking an order. If a dispatcher gets a call and then can’t remember a detail when inputting the order, they can just check the recording rather than calling the customer back. The team like that they have the ability to share recordings as well as being able to set up teams. This means they can reference each other’s recordings when talking to a customer who has previously spoken to a different representative.

D: What was the process of going live with Dubber like?

DB: I have received great customer service. Paul has been very helpful with everything we needed to get up and going. The Dubber system is easy to use and our users like it better than what we used on our old phone system. It fits seamlessly with our phone systems: it just works, and works well.

 

How Dubber is unlocking the potential of voice data

How Dubber is unlocking the potential of voice data

Adrian Di Pietrantonio is the co-founder and EVP, global channels at Dubber. At the recent Cavell Cloud Comms Summit, Adrian spoke about Dubber’s vision of becoming the global leader in unified call recording and voice data as a service. Here he gives us an overview of Dubber’s mission and how we are answering business problems with our Unified Call Recording and voice AI cloud platform.

We started with a simple question – why is the value of every conversation lost the moment the call ends?

How many times do you have a call, meeting, or presentation, only to lose the value of the conversation instantly? Details are forgotten, there’s no agreement on the key points that were made, no evidence of agreements, and the conversation can’t be easily recorded for compliance, training and more.

How often do you wonder what sales, customer support or team members are saying to customers? Why can’t you get real-time visibility of customer satisfaction?

It became clear that service providers were making connections – but not realising the full potential of those connections.

Voice data – held within every call – was clearly one of the great untapped sources of value for any service provider due to the ability to address three critical business pain points:

  • improving customer satisfaction
  • improving business performance
  • meeting compliance mandates

The need for a new approach

As we looked at existing approaches it was clear they were built for the pre-cloud era and restricted the ability of service providers to participate in the voice data race. We saw a multitude of challenges:

  • High-cost, inflexible infrastructure limited call recording to a small set of customers
  • The cost of applications and infrastructure frequently meant less than 1% of voice calls were captured
  • Call capture was confined to a single line or device – most frequently in the call centre – not reflecting how workers operate across devices and networks
  • Solutions required significant investment with no way to economically add end-points or start with a flexible, scalable plan that reflected real-life use cases
  • AI and the cloud were limited in their use. Data was trapped in the vendor application – limiting the ability to integrate with applications and Big Data

The Dubber answer

We created Dubber to unlock the potential of voice data for service providers, with the ability to capture every call on the network and infinitely scale.

Our innovative new model records directly from the service provider network and can be provisioned as a feature by the service provider. Offering affordable plans that are charged per user per month. Our solution captures conversations across SIP connections, mobile networks, Broadsoft, Cisco, Microsoft Teams and more: all with single-click provisioning. We call this new approach Unified Call Recording because all recordings are unified in one place – reflecting how businesses work today – via the Dubber app or web portal.

In order to answer data compliance mandates, such as GDPR, we needed a unified storage solution. So we created the Voice Intelligence Cloud. This needed to be, well, intelligent. Capturing calls and transcribing them is a commodity service today. We wanted our AI to bring value by delivering alerts, full and accurate transcriptions, customer sentiment analysis, and much much more.

Finally, we wanted the data captured from voice calls to be available for enterprises to connect to their systems of record. Through the Dubber API, we enable simple and easy connections to Big Data sets, applications like Salesforce, and dashboards in Google Data Studio, Tableau and other business intelligence tools.

Real world applications of Dubber

The Dubber solution is deployed across over 200 Service Provider networks globally today. Our Foundation Partners work with us to unlock significant revenue, retention, and differentiation by offering voice data as a service for diverse use cases:

The independent auto parts trader

Unified Call Recording enables the business to create a record of every call, and attach it to orders as evidence of the customer request. This solves two problems – giving distributors clarity on what was being asked for and providing the company with evidence of the order. They see customer satisfaction data in real-time and can view the performance of every customer contact.

The mid-sized betting company

Dubber provides chain-of-custody over customer orders and requests – eliminating costly dispute resolution processes on bets placed. Voice data also indicates trends based on sentiment, keywords, and operator – allowing business decisions to be driven by insights.

The large financial institution

Unified Call Recording is the only way for large banks to meet the compliance mandates set out for lenders. Real-time recording retrieval replaced slow and time-consuming SQL searches on legacy call recording – which often showed that the call wasn’t ever recorded. The Dubber solution ensures call recording across any device in any location and automatically sends custom notifications for specific keywords and call sentiment scores.

The question for service providers is: if data is the new oil – and voice data is its richest form – are you ready to create value from it?

 

Are your sales dependent on hearsay and intuition?

Are your sales dependent on hearsay and intuition?

Sales reps are using their intuition, rather than data insights, to prioritise leads. As data becomes the driving force behind business decisions, here’s how voice data and AI can help sales teams to succeed.

End not knowing

What is more important to a sales person than a conversation with a customer? The most valuable of these most commonly occur over the phone, when a back-and-forth over email is just not good enough. But as soon as the call ends, the information and insight held within the conversation vanishes. With 67% of salespeople saying that enforcement of activity logging is stricter than in 2019, accurately recording customer interactions is more important than ever.

A sales person could try to capture the substance of a conversation themselves, taking notes either during the call or trying to remember the key takeaways once the conversation has ended. This is a drain on their productivity, and isn’t all that efficient: they will be distracted if they try to take notes while they are talking, and might not remember every detail if they are writing after the conversation is over.

Recording calls is the only way to preserve the value in a conversation, but traditional approaches have been focused on fixed lines within an office environment and things have moved on – even more so in a post-COVID world. At a time where offices are hastily erected at kitchen counters around the world, calls are being taken over the web, on mobile devices, and IP connections. It’s impossible to capture these conversations without a solution that is built in the cloud with the agility to record every call, no matter where it happens.

As businesses adapt to operating in a world with face masks, social distancing, and an increased reliance on technology for communication, customer service and satisfaction is more important than ever before. Sales teams are differentiating themselves from the competition by using AI to improve internal processes and customer experiences, with 57% of high-performing sales organisations using the technology. A true understanding of a customer’s needs and their feelings about a brand or product can give a salesperson the edge, but this takes time. With huge volumes of call data, it’s impossible to drill down to insights at such scale. The solution is voice AI.

How to boost conversion rates by up to 30%

What if every single conversation within a business could be harnessed to power data-driven decision making? Voice AI transforms recorded conversations into data that can be used by businesses to gain insights into everything from the efficiency of business processes, to product development, to the success of marketing campaigns, to customer satisfaction. Not only can companies combine this with other business data for 360º visibility, they can even use conversational content to power automation within the business.

By recording customer conversations and transcribing them from speech to text, voice AI can then be used to make day-to-day decisions more effectively. Using AI in sales has even been shown to boost conversion rates by up to 30% when interacting with sales leads1. With voice AI, call data can be integrated with a CRM to automatically populate accounts with records of every single voice conversation, including a full transcript. Sales reps can refer to call transcripts to recap customer needs and formulate tailored offerings based on their exact requirements. 69% of the highest performing salespeople had automated logging of customer notes.

Transcripts and recordings also act as evidence, meaning that crucial conversation with a customer will never be lost. Agreements can be referred to, and disputes can be resolved quickly and easily with an exact record of what was said.

The cure for churn

Sentiment analysis can also be used to gauge a customer’s feelings about a brand and even indicate those who might be about to churn. Voice AI analyses the words spoken by a customer to rate each part of a conversation, and the call as a whole, with positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. Using APIs, calls rated with a negative sentiment score can trigger an alert or even automate process, such as creating a task in a CRM such as Salesforce.

With the detailed records of previous interactions, salespeople can make hyper-personalised contact with leads and existing customers to help to nurture a relationship. Where once a customer might churn after a negative conversation, with automated alerts and task creation sales reps can proactively maintain relationships with contact that puts their needs first. Understanding customer needs was the number one reason for AI adoption, as stated by sales teams surveyed by Salesforce.

Not only are calls rated by sentiment, but voice AI can actually identify specific emotions based on what a caller said, allowing for an even more tailored approach to selling. Questions might indicate an analytical or tentative customer who might require more evidence of the benefits of a product or service, whereas someone making more active statements might be more confident in their opinions and be more ready to close the sale.

Case study: Dorsey & Dorsey

Dorsey & Dorsey Inc. is an insurance provider in Oklahoma. We spoke to their call centre manager Drew LeHew about how Dubber has improved sales performance at the company.

Dubber: What was the challenge that brought you to choosing Dubber?

Drew LeHew: We weren’t happy with our old call recording provider as calls had to be manually recorded, which resulted in us missing important conversations. We wanted to protect ourselves against liability and have recorded calls to use as part of staff training.

D: How did Dubber help you solve this problem?

DLH: The simplicity of the solution was the most important thing for us. We have complete peace of mind knowing that every call will be recorded automatically and will be easy to find when we need to. Recording our calls has allowed us to diffuse disputes very quickly and we’ve seen an improvement in the overall performance of our agents due to the enhanced training we can now offer using recorded conversations.

D: What was the process of going live with Dubber like?

DLH: The Dubber solution has given us a great system for monitoring calls and then using them as a training tool for our agents. Not only is every call recorded but we can easily retrieve important conversations and tag them for future use.

As a manager of a high call volume call center, Dubber call recording provides reassurance knowing all of our calls are recorded and easily accessible. Recording our calls with Dubber has allowed us to take our training to new heights as managers can listen to more calls and share them with their agents to find areas for improvement. I’d highly recommend the solution.

If you’d like to learn more about how Dubber Unified Call Recording and voice AI can improve sales performance, speak to a member of the team today.

1Hansen, I., Hilbert, M., Travis, T. and Zijadic, A. (2019) Predicts 2020: AI for CRM Sales Technology Must be Balanced With Analytics, Training and Change Management Considerations. Stamford, USA: Gartner.

Make a seamless transition to the cloud from MediaSense

Make a seamless transition to the cloud from MediaSense

If you’re a Cisco customer, chances are you’ve used MediaSense. This built-in call recorder came as part of Cisco products to capture your phone conversations.

MediaSense is nearing the end of its days. Cisco stopped selling the call recorder back in 2017 and this year will be formally ending its support for both 10.x and 11.x versions.

I’ve been relying on MediaSense, what should I do?

The official deadline for the end of MediaSense is October 31st 2020. If you’ve been relying on it to record your calls, the time is now to look for a new solution. And we’re here to help. Dubber joined Cisco in 2019 to provide Unified Call Recording and voice AI services for their Webex Calling service and we now support their UCM-C, HCS, and CUCM services.

We offer pain-free migration for all of your MediaSense recordings to our cloud platform, and the chance to upgrade to the Dubber Voice Intelligence Cloud, with no need to invest in any new equipment. We record directly from the Cisco network so all calls are recorded, whether they happen on a fixed line, mobile device, or IP connection. Our services are available on a subscription model so there is no long-term commitment required.

How does Dubber compare to MediaSense?

Plus:

  • By upgrading to the Dubber Voice Intelligence Cloud every call is fully transcribed with sentiment analysis
  • Customer alerts based on call content
  • Compatible with Webex Calling, UCM-C, HCS, and CUCM services

The Dubber platform is efficient and cost effective: with an open API for easy provisioning and integration with other business tools such as Tableau. We have ready-to-use Google Data Studio templates, and will soon be launching a dedicated Salesforce app. Our secure and scalable cloud platform offers long-term, unlimited storage that can help with regulatory compliance – with no restrictions on the amount of minutes recorded or stored.

Once you record your calls with Dubber, you get access to our Voice Intelligence Cloud – fully transcribing every single call and enriching call transcripts with detailed information about caller sentiment and tone – even identifying seven different emotions. This data opens up the potential for businesses to gain valuable insights from their voice data, search for calls by keyword, and automate processes based on what was said during a phone call.

Try out Dubber call recording and voice AI for free

To ease the transition to the cloud, we are offering free recording migration to all MediaSense users as well as free call recording for the first 90 days. Make sure you don’t lose out on the critical function of recording your calls and contact Dubber to access the free offer.

We offer three plans to suit your call recording requirements, along with increased support services. You can stack as many licenses as you need, there are no minimums required. Each license comes with unlimited recording minutes, and unlimited storage – making it perfect for compliance with industry regulations.

Voice Data + Big Data = Big Impacts

Voice Data + Big Data = Big Impacts

Our conversations are rich with information; but this valuable voice data is lost as soon as the call ends, or is trapped within proprietary call recording solutions. Voice is the largest untapped data source for most businesses, but if it is siloed its true value is lost. This is why we have introduced Data Exporter. This easy-to-use feature unlocks the voice data of a business and allows companies to truly unify their data to create a single source of truth.

When businesses export voice data and combine this with other internal data sources, they have the potential to tap into valuable insights. This can help to: develop dashboards to visualise contact centre agent performance, monitor and report on customer experience, deliver compliance reporting, access conversational content for investigations and customer remediation, enrich CRM data, and automate workflows. This kind of data cannot be extracted from chatbots or email and so is a valuable source of business intelligence.

What can businesses do with exported voice data?

Whether you’re a huge enterprise with a team of data scientists at your disposal, or you’re a small business owner who’s more comfortable with an Excel spreadsheet, data is key to making business decisions. We give you complete ownership of the data you collect from your calls, allowing you to use it in the way that best suits your business needs.

When you export data from Dubber, you are able to view call information, including sentiment ratings, tone and emotion. This kind of data can give a real insight into customer satisfaction and provide businesses with a better understanding of how customer conversations unfold.

You can unify exported voice data with data from other areas of the business, allowing for greater visibility. This is key to making your data work for you: with no more siloing of information, you get a 360º view of business trends and can more easily spot patterns.

Businesses can use contact centre analytics tools to compare data such as call volume, IVR path, and user numbers to analyse business patterns. Data can be exported to visualisation tools such as Tableau – or to tools that users are familiar with, such as Excel.

Improve customer satisfaction

Improving customer satisfaction and net promoter score is a key driver for businesses. By continually monitoring customer satisfaction using sentiment data, businesses can work to ensure satisfaction throughout sales, service, and complaints processes. Companies can use the knowledge gained from this analysis to raise customer satisfaction levels and increase the customer retention. Using Dubber’s Voice Intelligence Cloud, businesses can display sentiment and tone analysis. When viewed alongside call themes they can see how sentiment and tone changed over time.

Improve dispute resolution

Good complaint handling reduces overall operational costs. Businesses can analyse their exported voice data to ask questions of their complaints process. This data can show if complaints have been dealt with fairly and correctly by the customer service team, and whether anything could have been done differently. Customer service teams can identify common barriers to dispute resolution, alongside the root cause of complaints. This gives businesses the opportunity to address underlying issues and ultimately reduce incoming call volumes.

Understand first contact resolution

First contact resolution (FCR) provides an overview of customer resolution across various call types and shows the related sentiment and tone. FCR rates are determined by analysing spoken content within calls to find language relating to repeat contact such as ‘third time of calling’ or ‘last time I spoke with…’. When this is exported for analysis alongside CRM data and PBX records that show multiple interactions with the same users, businesses can determine the FCR rates for their calls.

Unresolved calls also provide an opportunity for deeper analysis around root cause and the frequency with which these escalate to negative call outcomes. Analysis of these calls can provide training insights.

Inform day-to-day business decisions

As well as using voice data to look at the big picture, businesses can also use it to inform everyday operations. Customer teams can export sentiment data to CRMs to inform a more personalised approach to customer interactions. Customers who are shown to be frequently exhibiting emotions such as fear or anger could receive a different approach to those who frequently show positive emotions on calls. Calls with negative sentiment can be used as a training tool for contact centre operators to learn how to alleviate negative emotions.

Particularly at this time when many businesses are operating with a remote workforce, management may want to use sentiment analysis to check on employees dealing with an increased number of calls with negative sentiment ratings.

Not a data scientist? No worries

Not everyone has the time or resources to undertake huge data science projects using expensive software. If you’re new to data science, we have you covered with our own set of templates for Google Data Studio. They will help you take your first steps into the world of analytics and business intelligence.

Available as standard for all Dubber AI plans

All businesses with Dubber AI plans will be able to use the Dubber API to export recording data up to a range of 31 days. Exports are presented as a csv spreadsheet where each row represents one recording, and include voice AI information. This allows data from recorded calls to be extracted in bulk. The new feature is included as standard through the API.

It’s time to Dub on Telstra

It’s time to Dub on Telstra

We’re very excited today to be announcing general availability of Dubber Unified Call Recording and voice data intelligence on Telstra’s TIPTLiberate and SIP services in Australia.

Telstra TIPT, Liberate and SIP have stood out as some of the most reliable and efficient ways to connect with customers. Now Government and Enterprise can double the value of those connections by putting the content in every call to work – improving customer experience, mitigating risks, and improving productivity.

For the first time, companies in Australia can easily purchase cloud based call recording across any connected device – including mobile, for their entire business, with no expensive hardware costs, software to install or costly storage to manage.

Legacy Enterprise call recording has traditionally been limited to call centre environments, doesn’t scale easily and only captures a small number of the calls made. These limits made it difficult for Enterprises in regulated industries to comply; critical activities such as customer sentiment reporting and knowing your customer couldn’t occur in a timely way; and integration with applications and Big Data were restricted. Covid-19 further exposed its weaknesses as businesses missed capturing and converting calls from mobile devices and a dispersed workforce.

Now, with Dubber’s infinitely scalable cloud platform and Voice Intelligence Cloud being integrated into Telstra’s TIPT and Liberate products, companies can turn on call recording on demand, for any user. Flexible plans mean they can scale-up or down easily, and it works for sole traders, SMBs and the largest of Government and Enterprises.

This opens up whole new opportunities for businesses to understand voice data and gain valuable insights into their business. Want to understand call sentiment for every branch location in a bank, or franchisee outlet? That can easily be done using Dubber’s in-built sentiment analysis tools. Want to have a transcript of important customer calls integrated into Salesforce? Easily done as a standard part of Dubber’s service. Running a medium sized financial planning firm and need to record landline and mobile customer advice calls for ASIC record keeping and compliance purposes? We’ve got you covered.

Once a company starts deploying “whole of business” call recording, they can also take advantage of valuable insights from their voice data using advanced artificial intelligence and speech analytics tools. Want to trigger notifications every time a competitor is mentioned in a voice call inside the business? How about triggering a direct mail campaign offer to a bank customer every time a customer mentions “credit card” on a voice call? All of this is possible and much more when businesses are able to use the information inside their company from voice data.

And there are great opportunities for Telstra channel partners too. We believe that Dubber cloud call recording services can drive significant new demand for TIPT, Liberate and SIP services. Liberate in particular, is the first mobile service in the country that will have network layer, integrated call recording available.

We call this the “democratisation” of call recording for businesses and individual users. It will completely change the call recording industry in the months and years ahead.