Blog Post

A wealth of data is locked in the conversations your business is having with customers. Conversational intelligence is the key to unlocking that wealth so you can differentiate your business in the market, boost revenue and retain customers.

Chances are, you already listen to your customers.

You do if you use call recording for compliance or training purposes.

That means you are capturing valuable insights into business performance.

Listening to what customers say is the best way to understand what they want. Pay close attention and you will know what they think and how they might respond to offers. You will understand them better.

It’s important to hear both the words and the music in a conversation. That is, the tone, the hesitations and other non-word clues.

Do that and you’ll pick up crucial insights you won’t find in other forms of communication.

Until now this has been hard to do.

Face-to-face listening is hard to scale. Team members dealing with incoming calls tend to focus on specifics. That’s how they are trained and it is how they are rewarded.

Any intelligence gathering done the manual way is, at best, secondary.

Now, thanks to Dubber cloud-based call recording, you can listen and understand what your customers are saying. Cloud based recording means you can capture every spoken word. You can collect both the words and the music of business conversations at scale.

There’s something certain about an audio recording of a conversation. Other records, either a written note or a reported conversation are only hearsay. They can’t be substantiated. In a strict legal sense they are little more than rumour. There’s always a degree of uncertainty. With an audio recording, or a written transcript of an audio recording you are dealing with verifiable information.

What’s more, when you capture a conversation by making notes, you are not listening closely enough to what is being said. Your brain is in a translating, transcribing mode. It’s controlling your pen or your figures on a keyboard.

When everything is recorded in the background you can focus on listening.

Better still, the technology means you can automate the listening.

AI, sentiment analysis and other techniques can pay close attention to every moment of every conversation.

Say there’s a barely audible wince when your team member mentions price to the customer. Or a gasp when new product features are described. They are powerful signals that team members might overlook — the software doesn’t miss a beat.

It means for the first time you can know what customers actually think.

You can better understand customers and their needs.

This gives you the power to differentiate your business.

You’ll get better customer satisfaction.

AI tools can warn that a customer is thinking of going elsewhere. You’ll have time to move in early to avoid losing their business.

None of this requires dramatic change to your business process. It uses tools you have at your disposal.

Now is the time to act.

Gartner says by 2025 companies will record three quarters of business conversations.

Voice is the most common communications channel between a business and its customers. Around four out of five customer interactions are voice conversations.

Once you are recording all your calls, it’s a short step to mining them for customer intelligence.

The best way to do this is with cloud call recording. In the past companies installed on premise call recording systems. They linked them to centralised call centres.

That’s useful, but centralised call centres only capture half of all customer conversations. Many businesses have found accessing and mining calls from legacy systems difficult and slow.

These days the interactions that matter take place elsewhere. Remote work teams and mobile employees mean people can take calls anywhere.

That’s why capturing voice data at the network level is vital. A cloud call recording system with instant easy access to conversations like Dubber does this for you.

We’re cloud-native – proudly always have been. Back in 2011, at a time when cloud services were more conceptual than reality over here in Australia, Dubber realised the massive potential of making our product a cloud-native offering.

Partnering with AWS in their first Australian regional offering almost 10 years ago was a no brainer for us – and continues to be a valued and foundational partnership, as AWS goes from strength to strength as the world’s largest cloud services provider.

James Slaney, our Co-Founder and COO, sat down with Aley Hammer from AWS to talk about Dubber’s success on AWS to date.

Watch as James unwraps the power of Voice AI for businesses worldwide, how service providers are leveraging Dubber to create more value for customers on their networks, and how our centralised data services platform on AWS is available at the click of a button.

Thanks to AWS and the power of cloud, we can offer unlimited scale and always-on availability that modern enterprises have come to rely on.

For those with a different enterprise architecture mandate, we’re also ready for your data storage and processing requirements on Azure, GCP, data centres, internal enterprise or hybrid environments – so ask us if you had something a little different in mind.

Capture more than an mp3, video, or flat transcript – unlock the power of Conversational Intelligence with Dubber AI.

Conversational Intelligence: beyond basic recording and transcription to an enriched data-set of words, speakers, emotions, languages, and themes. With these meaning-enriched data sets, users can create and trigger real-time automated actions and workflows.

Download our Dubber AI whitepaper to find out:

• How to unlock comms channel data silos with Unified Conversational Recording
• How we embed Dubber AI into every conversation; to hit compliance mandates, plus fuel revenue, people, and customer intelligence
• What’s under the hood in Dubber AI & the Voice Intelligence Cloud
• Use cases & best practices for Dubber AI-enhanced conversational analysis & actions – improve customer experience, boost employee performance, heighten fraud detection, and more

Capture conversations, enrich with AI for the full picture, surface dataset insights in real-time, and create trigger-based actions on conversations as they happen.

Here’s how Dubber AI does it.

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

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

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

Save a Child’s Heart & Dubber

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

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

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

SACH medical professionals

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

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

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

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

Use heart to connect ❤️

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

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

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

The unprecedented events of 2020 drove adoption of Microsoft Teams globally as businesses were forced to adapt rapidly to continue their operations with a dispersed workforce. Ensuring continuing compliance with industry regulations has been a challenge for enterprises using Microsoft Teams, until now.

The Importance of a Certified Compliance Call Recording for Microsoft Teams

An automated, policy-based recording solution certified by Microsoft that seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Teams is a critical piece of communication infrastructure. It is also essential for ensuring Microsoft Teams communications compliance.

Dubber is among the first Call Recording solutions to achieve compliance call recording certification for Microsoft Teams. And from what we can tell, the only certified call recording solution capable of delivering Unified Call Recording.

What makes Compliance Unified Call Recording different?

Legacy call recording solutions capture call recordings from a small range of end-points; they are often specific to an application; and typically require hardware, software and professional services. Dubber is truly network native and cloud based. This means compliance call recording is provisioned with a click, any number of endpoints can be captured, and any recordings can be stored in the infinitely scalable Voice Intelligence Cloud.

Just like Dubber is native to Microsoft Teams, it will work as well for mobile, desk-phones and more. And it’s open API and out-of-the-box integrations with popular software like Salesforce mean you’re not tied to seeing your voice data, beautiful transcriptions and AI-enriched insights in Dubber.

Enabling Continuous Compliance for Microsoft Teams Customers

Businesses in regulated industries such as banking, government, insurance and financial services sectors can now meet their legal and regulatory obligations for Microsoft Teams users in call centre, branch, and work-from-home environments simply, easily, and with confidence.

By recording calls with Dubber, financial services firms can use Microsoft Teams with confidence knowing that they can automatically record, store and encrypt all call data as required by HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, KYC, Dodd-Frank, MiFID II, and more.

Dubber’s cloud based compliance call recording solution frees financial institutions from the restrictions of application-specific and infrastructure-based call recording normally confined to call center environments. Dubber offers a cloud-native solution that records directly from the network to complement remote working.

Discover the gold standard in compliance call recording for Microsoft Teams today.

Not all information is equal. Some can be stored and used. Other information can’t.

The question is how to separate what can and can’t be recorded and stored when your aim is to capture crucial conversations while also ensuring PCI DSS compliance.

Fortunately there are solutions, but not all are created equal.

The dangers of redaction

There is an old saying: prevention is better than cure. As far as PCI solutions for call recording go, there are preventative measures and there are cures. PCI redaction solutions are cures. Customers give all of their payment information to contact centre agents while the call is being recorded. Not only is the information taken by the agent, but it’s now been processed and recorded. Redaction solutions rely on AI to detect the correct information to delete and no solution is 100% effective.

PCI compliant call recording options

Now for the preventative measures: pause and resume and payment gateways. These solutions stop identifiable information from ever being recorded, so there’s no need for an AI bot to go through recordings and transcripts with a black pen.

PCI compliant payment gateways

Payment gateways are the ultimate gold standard in PCI compliance solutions. Not even the contact centre agent has any knowledge of the customer’s details as these are entered by the customer through their keypad. Any dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) tones are masked and the agent sees asterisks appear on their screen instead of characters.

Pause and resume for PCI compliance

Payment gateways aren’t for everybody. Depending on the PCI requirements of your business and your budget, a pause and resume solution may be more suitable. Choose from manual or automatic options, depending on your needs.

Manual solutions put the pause and resume of recording in the hands of contact centre agents – allowing them to stop recordings when sensitive information is about to be shared. Of course, this method opens up the potential for human error.

PCI DSS guidelines recommend that merchants using this method check their recordings weekly for identifiable information.

Automatic pause and resume is triggered by window or URL changes, or through custom triggers using an API. Desktop clients don’t require any custom developments and can be easily integrated, while API solutions are more robust, with a lower risk of end-user interference.

Chat to a Dubber compliance expert today to understand how to address PCI compliance when recording calls and storing conversational data.

It’s official, the UK is no longer part of the European Union and the transition period is rapidly coming to a close. What does this mean for data protection? Do businesses still need to comply with the GDPR after December 31st 2020?

For those businesses who operate within the European Economic Area (EEA) and record their phone calls, they must check that their protection of voice data is sufficient for a post-Brexit world. If data is processed in the UK, they must ensure that they have contractual provisions in place to reflect any flow of data between the EEA and the UK. Any preparations need to consider the progress of negotiations that are continuing during this current transition period. GDPR may well remain part of UK law.

What legislation currently applies?

Parliament has passed The Data Protection, Privacy and Electronic Communications (Amendments etc) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, which is basically the GDPR but applicable to a UK-only context. This will apply from the end of the transition period. If you’re a business based outside of the UK and offer goods or services to or monitor individuals in the UK this is applicable to you. If you’re a UK business and you’re already compliant with GDPR, and you don’t have any customers or contacts in the EEA, then you’re already sorted…or are you?

Any data protection plans are contingent on an adequacy decision from the European Commission, where the European Commission decides whether the UK offers an adequate level of data protection. With a rewrite of UK data protection laws potentially on the horizon, an adequacy decision could be significantly delayed. If no adequacy decision is made, businesses may need to amend their current contracts in order to continue data transfers. The extra cost of this undertaking could be bad news for small businesses.

What happens after the transition period?

From January 1st 2021, the UK will be deemed a “third country” under the GDPR, which means personal data from the EEA will only be able to be transferred if:

• The European Commission issues an adequacy decision
• Appropriate safeguards are in place
• There is an agreement of approved codes of conduct
• There is certification under an approved certification mechanism together with binding and enforceable commitments on the receiver outside the EEA

If you’re a UK business that receives personal data from contacts in the EEA, you will need to take extra steps to ensure that this data transfer can still go ahead. If you’re a UK business with some form of presence or customers in the EEA, you’ll have to comply with both the UK and EU legislation and may even have to appoint a European Representative. You will need to implement an appropriate mechanism to transfer personal data from the EEA to the UK and any onward transfers to another third country. Several of these mechanisms are already laid out in the GDPR, including standard contractual clauses adopted by the European Commission (SCCs).

Organisations should be able to continue transferring data from the UK to the EEA, but data protection documentation and contracts will require updating.

Businesses that transfer data from the UK to countries outside the EEA should be able to continue with existing processes for now, but any reforms of UK data protection laws could change that. The really tricky part is transferring to and from the US. This is due to the EU/US ‘Privacy Shield’ agreement being declared invalid by the EU Courts. This means yet more contract updates and appropriate safeguards.

What is Dubber doing to prepare for Brexit?

Dubber already complies with GDPR and will ensure that we continue to do so after the transition period, whether or not the UK is considered an adequate third country.

Let us know if you have any questions about voice data and Brexit.

As business becomes more and more international, the languages used to communicate only become more numerous. This globalised way of operating requires a multilingual approach.

With national economies fluctuating constantly, the dominant languages of business may change – and global companies will need to be prepared. As part of their international expansion, businesses should include language in their strategy.

In the same way that machine translation has improved accessibility online, machine transcription is facilitating global business. The intersection of machine learning and language translation is helping businesses across the world reach new audiences. Part of Dubber’s mission to bring voice AI to everybody is breaking down language barriers and allowing everyone to operate in their preferred language. Offering more languages for transcription helps us better serve businesses who operate globally.Good communication allows people located across the globe to exchange information and ideas and coordinate work and business operations. With remote work the new normal, business in the future may operate from different continents as standard. AI is facilitating this. Research in the US found that the introduction of machine translation increased exports by 10.9% and improved economic efficiency¹.

Speaking your language

Not only is it important that your voice transcription solution supports different languages but also regional variants. While Spanish speakers from around the world might speak the same language on paper, there are many regional differences. Companies who operate in Spanish speaking areas including Puerto Rico and Mexico use Dubber’s services, and are supported by the regional transcription variants that we provide.

In order to offer the broadest possible range of languages to our customer base we use multiple transcription services – adding Google Cloud Speech-to-Text to our arsenal this year. Google and IBM Watson also help us to identify caller sentiment, including tone and emotion.

One of the key advantages of AI transcription is speed: AI can transcribe hours of recordings quickly – work that would take human transcribers days or even years. This makes machine transcription much cheaper than employing a human transcriber, or using the time of your staff to review calls. With voice AI able to detect keywords and analyse the sentiment of a call, the expertise of your employees can be saved for reviewing the tiny sample of calls identified as requiring attention.