It’s often possible for words to get lost or misinterpreted in a conversation. This is why it’s important to provide contact centers with the tools they need to ensure customer satisfaction. One of the most important features that each and every contact center heavily relies upon is call recording. The good news is, it no longer has to cost business owners hundreds of dollars in signup fees for call recording: OrecX’s free voice recording software can easily provide business with the tools they need to power their contact center agents.
Call recording can be used in many different instances: to aid agents in both tough and easy customer situations, to help resolve customer disputes, and to train both current employees and new hires. By allowing agents to listen in on experienced agent conversations can ensure proper training and can also provide management the tools needed to improve the quality of calls.
As a fresh new face in the call recording industry, OrecX offers its customers an affordable, easy to install, easy to maintain open source call recording software. OrecX offers a RESTful API, which provides full control over the application. By helping call centers and business with VoIP providers, OrecX’s free voice recording software can be downloaded in just 30 minutes and requires no maintenance. Plus, with no installation cost and a same-day return on investment, OrecX’s call recording service offers customers both open-source and open-platform formats, letting them choose the format that’s best for their business objectives.
SourceForge recently spoke with Steve Kaiser, the CEO and co-founder of OrecX, to discuss the importance of voice recording software and how it has become an absolute necessity in the contact center industry. Kaiser also offered some insight on OrecX and how their call recording service offers customers both open-source and open-platform formats, allowing them the opportunity to choose the format that’s best for their business objectives.
Q: First and foremost, can you give us an overview of your company?
A: OrecX, LLC founders are pioneers in the call recording industry. Sold first network-attached digital recorder in the world while at Stevens Communications, Inc. which was later sold to a publicly traded company in the late 1990s.
Steve Kaiser, the CEO and co-Founder of OrecX
Primary sponsors of Oreka GPL. Oreka GPL is a free, VoIP-ready, open source voice recorder, which can capture and retrieve calls via a browser-based interface. Downloaded for free, the Oreka GPL basic solution is the only free voice recording software on the planet that can be downloaded in just 30 minutes and requires no maintenance.
OrecX’s mission is to help organize the world’s spoken information with an open and powerful call recording application that converts voice communications into usable and actionable data.
Q: Who are some of OrecX’s current customers?
A: Use Cases for OrecX’s software include: premise-based call recording applications for SMB and call centers; cloud-based multi-tenant 3rd party managed call recording service for UcaaS providers; call & screen recording modules for 3rd party workforce optimization solutions; cloud or premise ‘black box’ call recording service for 3rd party speech analytics providers; and pure cloud-based call recording application.
Customers span the following verticals – financial, utilities, insurance, business services, outsourcing, telecom, and consumer.
Q: In your opinion, what advantages do open source projects and open source technologies offer to today’s businesses and contact centers?
A: Control, flexibility, and cost are the primary advantages. To elaborate, Control means everything from design, deployment, support and future development is improved with Open Source. Flexibility comes in the form of meeting diverse operating requirements within the same platform as opposed to the vertically integrated ‘frankenware’ approaches which dictate all things related to it. Finally, lowered Costs to acquire, operate and develop enhancements are benefits.
Speed is also worth mentioning. Many of our customers/partners reference that the speed in which they can design, test, deploy, and support is dramatically improved over proprietary software.
Q: So how is OrecX using and utilizing open source in both its products and solutions?
A: OrecX’s front and back-end are built with modern and open software libraries, and we offer a RESTful API which provides full control over the applications. Related, we partner with and sponsor projects with organizations such as Freeswitch, Asterisk, OpenSIPs, QueueMetrics, and others in the open-source community.
Q: In your opinion, what does a contact center solution need to possess in order to be successful?
A: We recently did a survey of 50+ contact center professionals asking them which contact center optimization tools they felt were must-haves. The results were as follows:
- Quality monitoring 67%
- Total call recording 62%
- Workforce management 43%
- Screen capture/recording 37%
- Speech analytics 29%
- Surveys 28%
- Mobile phone recording 13%
- Desktop analytics 7%
Specifically, to be successful today, contact centers need to satisfy their customers’ needs quickly, while providing a pleasant experience. We feel the best way to accomplish this is to ensure a business’s customer service agents are appropriately and continuously trained in both the hard and soft skills. Call recording helps managers identify areas for improvement for individual agents. Supervisors can go back and listen to calls and also view the agent’s screen activity during the interaction. This provides a full re-enactment of the conversation. In addition, call recording systems help generate critical key performance indicators such as customer satisfaction, call quality, average handle time, average speed of answer, first call resolution, and others.
Q: Share with us a bit more information in regards to OrecX’s solutions, specifically in regards to how the company is empowering today’s contact centers.
A: OrecX offers a suite of call recording solutions for contact centers including Oreka TR (total recording), Oreka CR (cloud recording), Oreka QM (quality monitoring), Oreka SC (screen capture), Oreka MR (mobile recording) and Oreka GPL (open source recorder). And, we have an extensive partner ecosystem that can address Speech Analytics.
This suite meets the Compliance, Performance, and Risk Management (CPR) requirements of call centers with an inexpensive, powerful and future-proof investment.
Q: What do you believe are the most critical features that a contact center needs to possess in order to effectively support agents (and thus power a business)?
A: Providing great, low-cost, and timely service is one of the constants over the last three decades. The variable is managing evolving customer expectations based on channel type and customer demographic. Since no one has a crystal ball to predict future customer expectations, we believe the best way to support the evolving needs of the contact center, is to provide a software platform that evolves at the pace of their needs.
Q: Call recording is one of the most important features that contact centers sometimes overlook. In your opinion, why do you believe call recording is absolutely crucial for today’s contact centers?
A: In general, the oversight is looking at call recording as an application only. If the perspective is changed to finding a solution that efficiently records calls and associated metadata and provides access and tools to shine a light on the previously dark data, then the value of the deployment grows exponentially.
OrecX is unique with this view. While others build closed, rigid, and proprietary applications, OrecX attracts a broad ecosystem of partners in areas such as speech to text, speech analytics, voice biometrics, and Business Intelligence by providing access and control to call and associated metadata.
Q: Can you share with us some different use cases for call recording and how it can aid agents, companies, and customers?
A: Some standard use cases for call recording include:
- Compliance – listening to recorded calls and agent screen activity to ensure compliance protocols are being followed – HIPAA, PCI-DSS, etc.
- Performance – using call recording to assess past agent calls to identify areas for skills improvement
- Risk – Using a recorded call to settle a he-said/she-said customer dispute
Q: How does OrecX address any security concerns when it comes to contact centers and call recording?
A: We take security and customer privacy very seriously and have put in place multiple levels of security when it comes to recording calls:
- Web security – we are the only OWASP Level 2 compliant call recorderEncryption – the system can be configured to automatically encrypt all recordings
- User authentication – password rules ensure a minimum level of difficulty in password creation
- Tamper-proof – a mathematical formula of every media file is computed at recording completion and stored in the database to be able to identify any file tampering.
Q: The past year saw a slight shift in the contact center industry, with more of a focus being placed on both the customer experience as well as the user (agent) experience. So in your opinion, why is it important to address both sides of the coin?
A: Customers come and go in any industry but what keeps them sticky to your business is the customer experience. To ensure the highest level of service you must ensure first that the agent is satisfied and has the tools necessary to do his/her job. Only then can you work to ensure your agents are thereby providing the highest level of service.
Q: There was (and continues to be) a lot of buzz around AI and machine learning in regards to its rise and impact on business communications as a whole. How do you believe these technologies will affect the contact center industry?
A: In the simplest terms, AI and machine learning need data to work. And, the higher the data quality the higher the results. The contact center industry will figure out how and when to use each for the benefit of their customer experience, but today, it has a long way to becoming mainstream.
Q: What sort of trends or customer desires do you see shaping the contact center industry in 2018?
A: Leveraging public and private Cloud to reduce cost and improve infrastructure, database management, application flexibility, and managed services are trends within our customer/partner base.
Specific to call recording, active recording interfaces, RESTful API used to control customer experience and/or improve the data quality, and re-purposing call data with 3rd party speech analytics vendors are major trends that we see.
About OrecX
OrecX is Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and is driven by a leadership team that has over 20 years of experience in voice recording, product technology, and software architect. The company focuses on being a part of the emerging technologies that help organize the world’s spoken information. OrecX is recognized by Inc. Magazine as the number one call recording provider on its Inc. 5000 list. They partner with and sponsor projects with organizations such as Freeswitch, Asterisk, OpenSIPs, QueueMetrics, and others in the open-source community.