In almost all businesses, your employees can make you or break you.

It’s no different in the Call Center business.

A well trained, motivated workforce of customer service representatives (CSRs) is critical to allow managers to outperform company goals and to allow a call center to achieve maximum efficiency and profitability.

CSRs must be constantly coached and monitored by managers and supervisors of a call center operation.

Coaching and monitoring provides vital insight to call center management to allow them to improve or reward a CSRs performance and the metrics needed to calculate which underperforming ones should be weeded out of the workforce.

State of the art coaching tools are critical components in any call center platform to assist managers to accurately and consistently measure and critique a CCRs performance on the job and then to either reinforce proper job skills or reform their performance and behavior.

Quality management applications allow managers and supervisors to perform their coaching and monitoring functions in a uniform, efficient manner and are mission critical to measure how well CCRs perform and conform to call center rules and standards.

Thus, it is important to create and update an automated systems environment to establish an effective coaching platform. This is particularly true as call centers expand their business and become multi-channel and virtual operations.

Applied Business Technologies is the best in the call center business in providing call center supervisors the ability to perform assessments on agents and implement coaching techniques by using a fully integrated auditing tools. Agents are audited and scored based on specifically defined criteria.

Our software delivers high impact call center monitoring that categorizes all recordings and stores them for later playback directly from your network that allows supervisors and managers to gather the critical performance information necessary to assess and coach CCRs.

The technology we implement in a call center platform allows a manager or supervisor to simultaneously listen and audit the recorded calls and screens of a CCR. They have access to the entire agent and customer transaction and performance reports that allow them to analyze and evaluate the performance of individual agents, groups or auditors.

With our quality assurance tools, supervisors and managers can compile a comprehensive quality audit on each agent by viewing the synchronized screen and voice recording — while auditing within a single replay window screen. They can fast forward, pause, rewind, scan, and expand screen recording depending on preference.

These critical coaching tools gives supervisors the ability to determine areas of improvement and to provide invaluable coaching to agents within the contact center-and build greater call center profitability.

Is it time for you to improve the quality of your call center monitoring to build your coaching and monitoring platform?

Don’t let your CCR’s ruin your business! Call ABT today at 561-272-1232 or email me at rmorriss@appliedcorp.com and let’s get started building an individualized coaching and monitoring platform for your call center today!

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) was passed by Congress with the intent to protect the privacy rights of individuals with regard to their confidential medical records.

Today, under HIPAA, there are extensive rules and regulations regarding the dissemination and transmittal of personal patient information that have been implemented to protect these rights.
There are substantial fines and penalties associated with failure to comply with HIPAA policies or breaches in customer data security so it is imperative that a call center comply with these stringent rules. Due to these strict HIPAA privacy requirements, call centers must guard against improper disclosure of customer information and safeguard its storage in the proscribed manner within the call center.

Thus, this explosion of HIPAA regulatory requirements has had a huge impact on the operations of call centers. If a call center client is in the medical or the health insurance industry, it is critical that both management and IT understands the importance of being compliant with all aspects of the HIPAA/HHS guidelines concerning the safeguard and proper usage of patient information, including adhering to the HIPAA Privacy Rule and the HIPAA Patient Safety Rule.

A HIPPA compliant call center must make sure that its existing operations and data security programs incorporate the necessary controls to monitor and track compliance with HIPPA rules and regulations and should incorporate secure voice and data processing and encrypted data record storage that can be monitored by enhanced call monitoring, tracking, data management, and reporting.

It takes a concerted effort by a call center organization to establish rigorous standards and to deploy a recording platform with the proper program controls to secure Protected Health Information (PHI), which is defined as any information, including a patient’s medical record or payment history that is linked to a client’s health status, treatment, and payment of such services.

In addition to a call center ensuring that all CSRs receive appropriate HIPAA training to protect the confidentiality of patient’s medical records and payment histories, a call center must ensure that the proper call recording and monitoring platform integrating both screen and voice is in place that protects confidential information under HIPAA guidelines without compromising the training and evaluation of its CCR’s performance.

ABT is a leader in the Call Center Industry in designing and building HIPAA compliant software based call recording platforms that provide unique, state of the art conformity in secured call recording, workforce management, and speech analytics.

For those call centers that strive to conform with HIPAA best practices and compliance, ABT’s call recording and quality monitoring solutions allow users to configure and operate data recording, call monitoring, and encrypted data protection that conforms with HIPAA requirements. We build and maintain HIPAA compliant solutions that will keep your calls recording and your customer’s information within the mandatory HIPAA confidentiality guidelines.

Isn’t it time for you to contact ABT for a consultation to review your HIPAA practices and controls?

Call ABT today at +1 561-272-1232 or email me at rmorriss@appliedcorp.com and let’s get started insuring your HIPAA compliance today!

The call center business is an extremely competitive global industry.

Whether call center operations are located in the United States, India, Latin America, or elsewhere, managers are continuously facing big demands to deliver high quality customer service with a very efficient business model.

The primary goal for a call center of any size doing business in this tough global environment is to run at optimal operational efficiency while simultaneously meeting business goals and objectives and achieving customer service parameters.

The power of evolving IT platforms has become a critical component in assisting call center management to deliver low operating costs and better customer service by measuring agent performance, efficiency, and quality parameters.

Company objectives and customer demands can change rapidly and call centers must confront the challenge of changing their operational methods and IT to meet these needs in order to keep up and stay profitable. As the call center industry continues to mature worldwide in staggering dimensions and complexity, there has been a corresponding growing sophistication in the operational breadth and complexity of Call Center IT technology.

These IT tools such as call recording, speech analytics, post call surveys, and workforce management tools provide call center management with a better understanding of customer service experiences and the relationship between a call center agent and the customer. At the same time, this technology allows managers to staff the right number of CSRs with the right skills and prepare schedules in order to meet an uncertain, time-varying demand for service.

Call center managers have had to develop continually evolving management practices and business models to integrate these increasingly powerful IT platforms into their management plans that often times develops a tension of sorts between IT operations and the critical nature of efficiency, management goals, and the quality of service delivered by call center employees. It is imperative for IT managers to recognize and understand the continuous strain that call center managers and call center representatives face in their daily operations to meet operational goals and costs as well as to provide the best in customer experience.

Conversely, call center managers and employee have to concurrently recognize the depth and complexity in the design and operation of IT platforms and their limitations to instantaneously react to a fast paced business environment.

Applied Business Technologies is a premium supplier of industry recognized “Best of Breed” call center software that allows management and IT to work together and operate in an optimized call center environment that increases contact center productivity, customer satisfaction and most importantly, profitability.

ABT can help your organization achieve great success through implementation of proven call center centric performance management technology products that allow IT and management to together adjust and expand features and functionality in real time and fix problems in a timely manner.

Our quality assurance software platforms help make decisions which ultimately leading to better resource utilization and lower customer waiting times-and success in meeting business goals and profitability projections in a very competitive global business environment.

Isn’t it time for you to contact ABT for a consultation to introduce a seamless IT call center platform that will allow both your management and IT department together meet performance and profitability goals?

Call me today at +1 561-272-1232 or email me at rmorriss@appliedcorp.com and let’s get started today building your IT call center platform that will allow your call center to run at optimal IT operational efficiency while simultaneously meeting business and customer service goals and objectives.

Growing worldwide competition and the integration of the Internet and social media into the call center business models drive a need to continually improve contact center business processes and upgrade call center infrastructures dramatically.

When making technological infrastructure improvements, an established call center has to make a choice-to quickly reengineer its call center centric platform or to make changes in increments using the infrastructure in place.

The recent strides in call center technology presents call center management with a large array of different of new and improved solutions to address the functionality of a number of varying tasks that are designed to improve productivity, cost efficiency, and customer service. It can be a daunting task.

When refitting or redesigning a call center platform, managers have to consider how to improve a number of call center software applications ranging from solutions for speech recognition, predictive dialing, call recording and monitoring, workforce management, analytics and interactive voice response.

Some of the various factors to regard in this process include how well the new technology will integrate with other components of a call center’s telephony environment; whether such software provides support for additional sales activities such as outward facing campaigns, promotions, and up-sell and cross-sell initiatives; whether such call center programs deliver comprehensive performance management functionality to allow managers to define and communicate goals and establish key metrics and indicators for success; whether the new applications enables interactions through multiple channels such as email, IM/chat, and fax; and whether the software can be designed to support activities across a number of disparate locations.

ABT is a leader in the Call Center Industry in designing and building call center software platforms that provide unique, state of the art conformity in secured call recording, workforce management, and speech analytics that provide the solutions needed to update a call center platform.

We have years of experience in consulting with management in call centers worldwide to help chose and implement the proper solutions that best fit the needs of their operations and then to help them remain cutting edge in the competitive call center industry.

Call ABT today at +1 561-272-1232 or email me at rmorriss@appliedcorp.com and let’s get started making your operation more competitive-and more profitable.

ABT provides the best, most powerful turnkey applications to properly measure and enhance your FCR benchmark averages

DELRAY BEACH – In the call center business, customer service is the name of the game-and properly measuring and increasing the First Call Resolution (FCR) rate in your contact center operation is the key to increased operational efficiencies, building customer satisfaction metrics, decreasing operational expenses, and most important, reaching higher profitability.

The FCR measurement is the percentage of incoming calls dealing with a customer’s issue or concern that are immediately and successfully addressed and do not require either a callback from or an additional call to from a helpdesk to resolve the case.

In terms of the customer experience with your call center enterprise, if a contact regarding an inquiry or problem is made, it should be resolved immediately so that you can prevent additional operational resources from being utilized to fix the problem.

The current call center industry CCR average is between 60-70%, which means that about one-third of customers contacting a call center with an issue can’t be too happy with the initial service given to resolve the problem. That can be very costly in terms of time, efficiency, and even to the moral of your call center representatives. The more time is spent making multiple contacts with a customer, the more disruptive and expensive such repeat contacts are to a call center operation.

Therefore it is imperative to implement the right policies and industry FCR best practices measure the correct metrics and identify the CCRs causing the majority of repeat contacts.

FCR best practices include both management and CCRs committing to improving FCRs by effectively and efficiently managing customer calls and being made accountable for improved results; call center management is trained to coach CCRs in accomplishing FCR; and to evaluate the sources of error of two or more contacts.

Most importantly, a call center mush set up the right technological platform to unite FCR call center policy, procedure, and monitoring to read and improve FCR results and call center operation efficiency.

Applied Business Technologies is the best in the business in providing the Call Recording, Speech Analytical, and Quality Assurance solutions to build an individually designed operational approach and platform to dramatically increase customer satisfaction, eliminate repeat contacts, and reduce multiple contact volumes with customers.

Are your FCRs averaging 70%? 80%? 90%? If not, isn’t it time for you to contact ABT for a consultation to review your best practices and customer service platform to improve your FCR rate, optimize your business model, and make your contact center more profitable?

Call me today at 561-282-6318 or email me at rmorriss@appliedcorp.com and let’s talk about how we can improve your FCR best practices and FCR rate and the delivery of a great customer experience, improved productivity, and most importantly, increasing your bottom line.

DELRAY BEACH – A profitable call center operational model builds, maintains, monitors and optimizes an operational platform that defines and exploits the customer experience to meet established business process and performance valuation goals.

An essential element in developing and improving the business performance of a call center is measuring and evaluating all aspects of the interaction of their employees with customers. An indispensable tool for elevating the operation and efficiency your call center’s core processes is having the right screen recording solution that allows hands-on management of call center operations and the gathering and analysis of business intelligence.

Thus, the right screen recording solutions integrated into a call center operational platform is an essential tool to build the best in customer experience, contact center employee performance, and to achieve the highest possible profit and efficiency.
Applied Business Technologies is the best in the business in providing the state of the art Screen Recording platform that captures the entire customer interaction experience in your contact center.

Capturing the full customer interaction experience in your contact center with screen recording lets you identify and address day to day operational issues and optimize call center processes. It also allows call center managers to capture critical data from the agent desktop screens to boost productivity, enhance customer loyalty, enhance training procedures, and comply with various regulatory compliance issues such as PCI and HIPPA.
Utilizing the Cacti Screen Logger 2.0 platform, ABT builds a call center’s ability to record call center agent’s desktop activities to allow playback and review of the customer experience, provide insight into the agent’s efficiency and productivity, and identifies areas for improvement in training and delivery of customer service.

This screen capture solution is part of an open architecture non-proprietary recording solution for voice and screen activities of advocates (agents) within the contact center on a standard Windows Server platform.

These screen capture solutions are cost effective, easy to install and maintain, integrates effectively with many different call center technology, and supports all telephony platforms.
Thus, by implementing an individualized screen capture platform to assess your contact centers performance in several key areas, ABT can help you assess and upgrade an your business platform and performance.

Isn’t it time for you to contact ABT for a consultation to begin to evaluate whether your screen recording platform is optimizing your business model?

Call me today at 561-282-6318 or email me at rmorriss@appliedcorp.com and let’s talk about how the right screen capture solution can enhance the delivery of a great customer experience, improve productivity, and most importantly, increase your bottom line.

DELRAY BEACH – The development of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) standard over the last decade has had a huge impact on the call center industry.

Call centers are required to maintain the appropriate call recording and data management and storage systems to protect the transmission, processing, and storage of credit card contact data as well as safeguarding by appropriate controls of agent/caller interface within the physical call center.

As a result, one of the primary goals for any call center should be to in strict compliance the PCI DDS standards and to make sure that your call center environment minimizes payment card data loss.

The current 2.0 version of PCI DSS, which was implemented in late 2010, specifies twelve (12) control requirements that must be met each year:
1. The installation and maintenance of a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data;
2. The prohibition of use of vendor supplied default system passwords and other security parameters;
3. The protection of stored cardholder data;
4. The encryption of transmissions of cardholder data across open, public networks;
5. The use and regular update of anti-virus software on all systems commonly affected by malware;
6. The development and maintenance of secure systems and applications.
7. The restricted access to cardholder data by business need to know;
8. The assignment of a unique identification to each person with computer access;
9. Restriction of physical access to cardholder data;
10. The tracking and monitoring of all access to network resources and cardholder data
11. The regular testing of security systems and processes;
12. The development and adherence to a policy that addresses information security.
A compliance validation process established by PCI DSS 2.0 calls for the annual review of standards by an external “Qualified Security Assessor” for call centers handling large volumes of transactions or the filling out of a “Self-Assessment Questionaire (SAQ) for those entities with smaller transactional volume.

Pursuant to a recent PCI DSS issued FAQ specific to call centers, any form of digital audio recording containing CVV information cannot be stored if that data can be queried. Thus, call centers that record cardholder data in audio recordings are barred from using formats such as WAV, MP3, etc. involving CAV2, CVC2, CVV2 or CID codes after authorization.

If various measuring and tracking call recording and monitoring tools exist within a call center platform that potentially can query a variety of digital recordings involving cardholder data, if the technology exists in a platform to prevent recording of these data elements, it must be enabled.

ABT is a leader in the Call Center industry in building software platforms that provide strict adherence to the requirements of PCI DSS 2.0. We build and maintain secured call recording platform that comply with PCI DSS best practices standards that protects cardholder data. Our software implements PCIDSS 2.0 controls that limit access to cardholder systems and data, and institutes monitoring for unauthorized access and suspicious behavior for voice and screen capture.

Do you have the most up to date and appropriate measures to protect your call center systems that store, process and transmit cardholder information? Are you in true compliance with PCI DSS 2.0?

Fines for breaches in credit card privacy and data protocols can be significant-as well as lose you business and impact your bottom line!

ABT offers call recording and quality monitoring solutions that bring a call center best practices PCIDSS 2.0 compliance that allows users to configure and operate data recording and protection and call monitoring solutions specified by PCI DSS 2.0 standards and other industry standards.

Isn’t it time for you to contact ABT for a consultation to review your PCI DSS 2.0 practices and controls?

Call me today at 561-282-6318 or email me at rmorriss@appliedcorp.com and let’s get started today!

DELRAY BEACH – Contact Center Representatives (CCR) can make or break a contact center business.

A trained, professional CCR is a key asset to a contact center business and is very hard to replace. They are critical in increasing sales and market penetration, sustaining competitiveness, and ensuring quality customer relationships.

Employee retention and productivity is also directly tied to higher ROIs, revenue streams and the ultimate success of the business.

Thus, reducing turnover and recognizing and retaining the best, most productive CCRs is very essential to operating a contact center.

One of the biggest challenges in the call center industry is retaining top CCRs. It is fundamental to the operation of a call center that their best employees are identified, assessed and retained.

Studies have shown that an average call center can suffer up to 200% attrition in a year, which means that significant resources and time are spent on addressing this employee turnover.

It is important to discover the most significant factors contributing to less than desired motivation and skills that affects your CCRs and their longevity in your workplace.

Such assessment prevents disruption in call center operations by negating the need to interview a constant stream of applicants, constantly fixing mistakes of mediocre employees, and-most importantly-not losing customers because of poor customer service.

Applied Business Technologies (ABT) is a leader in the contact center industry in enabling organizations to address and increase employee retention by measuring and tracking specific criteria and results which allows a call center operation to retain CCRs-and protect their bottom line.

The professionals at ABT are call center industry experts in assessing a contact center’s work environment and provide complete, personalized solutions to address CCR retention in several crucial areas utilizing cutting edge Call Center software, call recording solutions, and quality monitoring platforms.

Our evaluation and implementation of solutions employing both our expertise and experience with employee retention issues leads to better retention of key personnel and call center operations, significant cost savings, improved competitive advantage, and most importantly, increased profitability.

ABT offers call recording and quality monitoring solutions that allow call center supervisors to audit and score CCRs based on specific criteria that can measure agent performance, identify their strength and weaknesses, and other gauge other measures that will increase agent moral and reduce staff turnover.

With call center software assessing the contact centers performance in several key areas, we can help you assess and maintain an environment that will allow you to retain personnel-and achieve important cost savings from reduced turnover.

Our solutions are cost effective, easy to install and maintain, integrates effectively with many different call center technology, and supports all telephone platforms.
Isn’t it time for you to contact ABT for a consultation to increase your CCR retention?

Call me today at 561-282-6318 or email me at rmorriss@appliedcorp.com and let’s get started today building your employee retention and profitability.

It’s time for ABT to build you a cutting edge contact center performance platform!

By Ryan Morrissey

DELRAY BEACH – Recently, I spoke to a call center manager about having his company partner with Applied Business Technologies (ABT) to rebuild his company’s inadequate call center platform to the highest level of sophistication, compliance, and profitability.

Actually, he was not a “new” prospect, but one I had met at a trade show about two years ago. Back then, after our initial meeting, we began talking about raising his company’s call center performance. Our team evaluated and reviewed with him the needs for optimizing his company’s call center operation and proposed a number of solutions and improvements for implementation in regards to Call Recording, Workforce Management and Speech Analytics.

Our initial discussion involved identifying goals the company wished to achieve, the best way to measure performance, and how to align these strategies with enterprise-wide target. We proposed a number of high quality solutions to build an infrastructure that would maximize efficiency, productivity, and the company’s competitive edge-all within his allotted budget for this project.

After receiving our in-depth recommendations and quotes, he said he was talking to other vendors and would get back to me.

But I never heard from him again-until recently-when he needed immediate assistance to troubleshoot a major problem caused by a cheap, poorly designed Call Recording and Quality Assurance system he had instead opted for when we first talked.

It was not the first time we have been called in to fix the problems caused by fly by night consultants designing and selling low cost, substandard call center platforms.

As in most other industries, in the contact center business, “you get what you pay for.”

Decision Makers in this industry know that the business has drastically evolved over the last decade and that there are no cheap, easy and simple solutions if you want to do things right-and make good money too. Applied Business Technologies has been the best in the business since 2001 and our primary focus has been to provide the best in quality solutions at competitive prices to businesses of all sizes. We are not the cheapest in the business, but we are no doubt the best and most reliable to our customers.

Is your call center is the top of the line?

Are you getting everything you can from you present platform and current vendor in terms of cutting edge customer service, Call Recording, Speech Analytics, and most importantly, profitability?
If not, it’s time for you teamed up with Applied Business Technologies and work with the best in the business! Our staff will support your business in setting up and fully utilizing our performance management solutions to bring your operation to a top of the line industry standard. We will design the best, custom-made call center performance package specifically suited to meet your call center’s needs-and just as important-provide you with the best in reliable, personalized support.

We are confident that we can dramatically improve your call center performance-and increase profits and enhance your operations.
Call Ryan today for a consultation at 800-683-6590 x220 and start building a top of the line-and much more profitable-call center today!

By Ryan Morrissey

DELRAY BEACH – One of the biggest challenges facing contact centers is effectively evaluating and augmenting the presentations of contact center representatives (CCRs) so that their performance is optimized.

Contact Centers today are striving to deliver the best customer experience, strengthen operating environments and effectively meeting business objectives and performance goals.

Implementing Speech Analytics provides the necessary insights into improving the customer experience and beyond. Speech Analytics enhances data exchange and interaction between the contact center, sales department, marketing department and operations all while providing the tools supervisors need to train and evaluate their staff to help improve interactions with customers.

Overall the integration of automated Speech Analytics into the QA (quality assurance) and QM (quality management) processes allows a contact center to increase revenues, reduce costs, and increase customer retention.  It also boosts performance of the call center by providing the critical information necessary to innovate and improve customer service levels and aid in regulatory compliance requirements.

Speech Analytics systems are key applications in a contact center platform-they analyze recorded CCR voice interaction with customers and deliver actionable information mined from these conversations.  This information makes your company more profitable and your operation run more smoothly.

Speech Analytics is used to evaluate a CCR’s proper call opening and verification of customer information, improve agent speech and script adherence, increase first call resolution and identify trends in customer dissatisfaction.  Speech Analytics also ensures campaign and regulatory compliance.  It is also used to evaluate and perfect training programs, marketing plans and operational solutions, allowing a company to get the entire perspective of its business.

Applied Business Technologies (ABT) specializes in integrating Speech Analytics into any contact center platform.  At ABT, we are experts in assessing a contact center’s business model and work environment and then providing a complete, personalized Speech Analytics solution which addresses many critical metrics.  The end result always shows significant and measurable improvement in customer experience.  After implementing Speech Analytics, our customers realize significant cost savings, improved competitive advantage, and most importantly, increased profitability.

Isn’t it time for you to contact ABT for a consultation to increase address your Speech Analytics need and to improve your customer experience?

Call me today at 561-282-6318 or email me at rmorriss@appliedcorp.com and let’s get started today building your employee retention and profitability.