case study

Demand for Microsoft Calling and Teams solutions has never been higher. With the race on to meet demand, Microsoft Operator Connect partners need to move quickly to differentiate and meet the broader needs of customers.

“As the traditional service provider model transforms it is vital for providers to find new revenue streams, services, and solutions to offer to end customers.” Cavell Group

Four immediate opportunities exist for every Microsoft Operator Connect partner.

1. Differentiate with value-added conversational recording and voice AI

McKinsey put it well, “Telcos’ success will hinge on their ability to leverage data and deploy advanced analytics, AI, and automation at scale to drive new sources of growth and change the broader economics of the business.”

Service providers have an immediate opportunity to differentiate themselves in every Microsoft Teams deal by offering instantly available, infinitely scalable conversational recording and AI based intelligence that lives in the cloud.

2. Increase revenue by expanding the conversation with customers – address key use cases and business drivers

Gartner predicts that by 2025, organisations will record and analyse 75 percent of work conversations, enabling the discovery of added organisational value or risk.

Organisations are seeking insights from conversations to meet compliance requirements, improve customer experience, boost productivity, and increase sales and service performance.

Service providers can harness a multi-billion dollar opportunity and address a wide range of customer requirements with one conversational recording solution without the need to continually invest in multiple niche solutions.

3. Increase retention and reduce churn by creating stickiness with the unification of data and services on a common platform

Keeping customers is valuable. Research by Frederick Reichheld, inventor of the Net Promoter Score, shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

So how can conversational data help?

The number of connected devices that people own has doubled since 2019, to 25 per household. People now communicate across a growing communications landscape: mobile, Microsoft Teams, SIP connections, WhatsApp, Messenger, and more. With internal conversations, plus connections with partners and customers, there is a challenge for enterprises to gain visibility into all conversations from a single access point.

By capturing and unifying every conversation across multiple platforms, service providers can generate significant value for their customers, which in turn drives greater retention and stickiness to their services.

4. Modernise legacy call recording solutions, reduce CAPEX, and develop a stronger ROI model with modern conversational recording solutions

Legacy systems can cost organisations up to a 15% budget increase every year for maintenance. This is not to mention the high costs of staffing and the opportunity cost of not investing in emerging technologies such as AI.

Service providers can modernise their approach to call recording and remove costly legacy solutions. Cloud-based SaaS unified conversational recording and AI solutions have far stronger ROI models, meaning telcos can do far more with less investment.

Solutions that can be embedded into networks and that already integrate with critical infrastructure also add to compelling business cases for service providers.

The question every Microsoft Operator Connect partner needs to answer now is: Are you ready to differentiate and 2x your Microsoft Teams ARPU?

Dubber delivers an immediate advantage on every Microsoft Teams endpoint. Cloud-native and compliant, Dubber switches on with a click and is easily integrated with your current provisioning and billing engines. But the benefits don’t stop there:

1. First Microsoft Certified compliant unified call recording platform fully integrated with Microsoft Teams
2. Unify call recording from any eligible end-point – not just Microsoft Teams – increasing your footprint with the customer
3. Fully integrated cloud service, delivering the ultimate combination of reliability, scalability and security
4. Significant upsell revenue growth – we’ll provide the pathway to other revenue streams that no other provider can offer

With more than 75% of business conversations set to be recorded – and business drivers spanning compliance, revenue, people and customer intelligence, the time for Microsoft Operator Connect partners to integrate unified call recording and conversational AI is now.

Voice calls are the main point of contact for Australian Military Bank members. The Bank uses Dubber call recording as an essential part of improving the member experience and compliance.

Here’s the backstory

Australian Military Bank is a member-owned mutual bank. Open to everyone, however, it provides specialist banking and finance services to Defence personnel and their families.

There are 14 branch locations across Australia and 11 internal Departments connected to Dubber CallN.

Head of Marketing Penelope Killick says the bank’s membership differs from other financial institutions. Many members serve in the Defence Force, they get deployed across Australia and may find themselves posted overseas.

She says: “We’ve got members who are always on the move. That’s why contacting via phone is so important. Our members may be deployed in places where they don’t have access to a branch. For these reasons, voice calls are the main point of contact for many members. It’s vital that we get it right.”

While the Bank has a central call centre in Sydney, many calls are either directed to branches or routed to them. The system can transfer after-hours calls in Eastern Australia to a branch in Perth. The contact centre team are able to handle many enquiries that might otherwise be a branch’s job.

Customer Experience is everything

Rizwan Dean, the Bank’s IT manager, says the Bank uses Dubber CallN for quality assurance, call recording and analytics. It allows staff to go back into calls, review a conversation, understand what members are talking about and identify their pain points.

He says: “We get a lot of information by listening to calls. Our conversations with our members tells us a lot about what they really want from us as their bank. We find Dubber is a very useful application.”

Killick says improving the member experience is a key priority for the Bank. “We can provide them with services to meet their requirements. We can help members particularly at the moment when Covid can mean circumstances may change”.

“Being able to log-in, and look at what is happening with member enquiries is important. We like having the ability to coach our staff in how to better respond to what are often unique requirements. And we find the tool useful when it comes to handling complaints, which is part of improving the member experience.”

Proactive Fraud Detection and Compliance

Dean says the Bank also uses voice recordings to detect and deal with fraud. Calls are easily checked if the fraud team suspects there is an issue or if a customer asks a staff member to do something fraudulent.

Another important related use is bank compliance. Australian regulators require the Bank to keep customer recordings for seven years. The recordings provide immutable evidence of every customer conversation.

As part of that process, auditors have the opportunity to review sample recordings and their own quality assurance checks. They provide reports to the Board and to regulators, to demonstrate they are meeting compliance requirements.

Cost Savings, Reliability and Productivity in the Cloud

Australia Military Bank’s dispersed network uses unified communications and that’s a natural partner for Dubber’s unified voice recording.

Dean says it means the Bank can use a single solution for all its recordings.

He says; “When I joined the Australian Military Bank one of the biggest pain points was that the Bank had to put physical computers and hardware at each site. These connect to our network and sit listening to voice traffic.

“The recordings were then uploaded back into the CallN portal. That was a problem because our branches are located at Defence sites. When there was maintenance, security work or patches on the Defence network, our branches would lose their connectivity. That meant we would have gaps in our quality assurance and compliance.

“Going to Dubber CallN cloud made our lives so much easier. That’s because it no longer matters where someone is dialling in from, even from mobiles, the recording happens at the Telstra gateway, not the branch.

“It means the gap is now closed. We don’t miss anything. It also means the overall hardware footprint and the capex is significantly reduced.”

The cost and productivity savings to the Bank are considerable. Previously every time a computer broke down, they’d have to replace it and send it out to the site and all machines required constant patching and upgrades to stay compliant.

As a result of the move to the cloud solution, they’ve eliminated the huge number of hours spent every month building and patching computers and guiding staff how to set them up on site.

Like to Learn More?

The Australian Refrigeration Council turned to Dubber for better staff training, to monitor the quality of contact centre calls and collect the evidence it needs to deal with abusive calls.

The ARC operates a call centre where employees help tradespeople and other specialists apply for new licences and renew existing licences. It’s the main point of contact for the organisation.

IT operations manager Andrew Growcott says at first the ARC deployed Dubber call recording in the Melbourne-based call centre. There’s a team of about 18 staff who handle around 1100 calls each week. They wanted recordings to track the quality of customer interactions and also to help deal with abusive calls when they happened.

Why ARC Chose Dubber

Andrew says ARC found Dubber when searching online for call recording systems. He liked the fact that Dubber is an Australian-based business and that the service is available from Telstra and runs on their calling system, Telstra TIPT. He says it was easy to deploy and get started.

Before it used Dubber, managers were able to listen in on calls for training purposes. If an abusive call came in, they might jump on the line, but often by the time the manager was involved, the caller had calmed down so the conversation was missed. There was no recording or transcription.

Staff training

Team leaders review calls for staff training purposes. If someone reports an issue, they’ll focus on that call, otherwise they pick calls to review at random. The team leaders will sit with staff members and help train them on how they can handle calls better and how to answer certain questions.

“It helps us identify who is lacking knowledge in certain areas and needs more training”, Andrew says.

Visibility during COVID lockdown

In normal times they all work in the main building, however during lockdown the people worked from home. Dubber, which works in the cloud and records at the carrier network level, was able to go on recording all incoming calls as normal. That’s not something on-premise recording systems are able to do. This meant team leaders still had access to every call without interruption.

Dealing with abusive calls

Sometimes the call centre receives abusive calls from customers that might be unhappy with the cost or frustration with the licence process.

Team leaders use Dubber to review the calls and either coach staff in how to better handle difficult customers or so the manager can follow up with the customer.

Expanded use

Since first deploying Dubber, the ARC has expanded its use and recording now covers almost everyone in the business.

Andrew says: “We looked at how well recording went in the call centre and decided to expand the recording to everyone in the business. If managers get abusive calls forwarded to them we can now track that whole interaction. Letting everyone record means we can now review the calls and decide how to deal with them.”

Like to Learn More?

Fewer wasted trips for NT Recycling Solutions trucks with Dubber

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

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

Here’s the backstory

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

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

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

The Solution

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

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

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

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

The Benefits

Speedy dispute resolution

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

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

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

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

Staff training and reduction of costly errors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the backstory

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

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

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

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

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

The Dubber solution

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

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

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

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

What are the results?

Effective staff training for customer service performance

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

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

Better customer satisfaction

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

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

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

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

Visibility of remote workers conversations

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

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

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

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

Traceability of crucial conversations

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

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

Thousands of dollars saved

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

Like to Learn More?