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.

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 periods, compliance 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.