The Insider’s Guide to Live & Legacy Call Recording Part 3

It is Part 3 of The Insider’s Guide to Live & Legacy Call Recording and we would like you to meet Anna, a Control Centre Manager who works within the Emergency Services sector.

Meet Anna

Anna is the Control Centre Manager of an ambulance service control team. Her responsibility is to oversee the team of call handlers (often also known as medical dispatchers) and ensure that all incoming calls are handled to the expected high standard.
In this series Anna has to address two critical issues:

• Ensure speedy and accurate call retrieval & replay, whilst meeting NHS’ requirement for storing these call recordings for a period of up to 27 years
• Continuously improve call handlers skills and therefore the speed and accuracy with which each call is dealt with

Problem #1: Ensuring speedy and accurate call retrieval & replay in live & legacy call recording

Anna’s emergency dispatch call handlers deal with all types of 999 calls taking essential information of the patients’ condition and exact location, whilst logging them onto their computer system and allocating the nearest ambulance to the scene as quickly as possible.
A year ago, a call handler had to give medical advice over the phone as the caller was in a life-threatening situation. The same caller is now claiming that incorrect medical advice was provided at the time. Anna is aware that the first thing she has to do is locate the call and listen back to the recording. Unfortunately for Anna, she finds out that this particular call was recorded and saved on one of their older recording systems and is now sitting on tape.
The laborious process of having to locate the correct tape that holds this specific call and finding the right time and part of the tape with which this call features could take hours or even days. This has happened several times before and on each occasion has eaten up several resources within the organisation which could be better spent elsewhere.

Currently, Anna’s organisation has two call recording systems stacking up –the old tape-based recording system and a soon-to-reach end-of-life presently used to record and store the calls. For Anna, switching between the two systems does not facilitate her administrative duties, on the contrary it creates unnecessary complexity and often causes friction with their IT support department as well as management. Some of these complexities include the fact that there is no unified view from which to extract useful insights and statistics for reporting purposes, as well as multiple support costs to consider. Anna needs this complex process simplified – what options are available to her?

Solution

Anna needs to consider a call recording portal with an easy user interface that will protect previous investments allowing her to easily retrieve and replay recordings from both the live and legacy systems with a single search.  Moreover she will have peace of mind that the entire estate of recordings is secured and the integrity of the recordings guaranteed.
With one system to manage instead of multiple, Anna will also save on multiple support costs for maintaining their legacy infrastructure, including recording platforms, obsolete operating systems (EOL/EOS), as well as software and subject matter expert knowledge.

Problem #2: Improving Call handling speed and accuracy 

As a control centre manager, Anna is aware that in emergency situations, calls need to be answered and handled swiftly yet effectively, and so it is important that her team’s phone skills and ability to deal with situations under pressure is at a high standard. This is where Anna’s ability to effectively coach and train her team in order to meet required response times and ensure accurate exchange of information, is vital.
Although she has been using basic call recording technology for playback and manual evaluation (entered into excel) for randomly selected calls, the process is extremely time consuming and it is unlikely she is selecting the most useful calls for training purposes.
Anna needs to consider a simpler solution that will be less time consuming and much more effective in allowing her to find problematic calls and helping her team improve in those areas that they need the most. What add-on applications for live call recording should Anna be looking for?

Solution

In order to boost the performance of her team, Anna needs to consider a Call Quality Monitoring solution which is essentially an add-on application for her call recording system. Quality monitoring solutions have been developed in order to enable evaluation of calls in a standardised and comparable way based on user-definable criteria (e.g. agent, content, time of day, CTI event). Moreover many systems for example come equipped with a ‘replay speed’ functionality giving Anna the opportunity to speed up the call by 20-25%, thereby giving her the opportunity to listen to more calls and get a better sense of training needs.
This will in turn improve call handling speed, accuracy and response times. Anna has three options to choose from when deciding to procure a Quality Monitoring (QM) solution:

• Consider implementing an enhanced call recording portal as mentioned previously, that also has quality monitoring features such as evaluation, calibration & reporting.
• When she opts for a new call recording system, she can consider one that will be open to different Quality Monitoring plug in applications regardless of manufacturer. (This way Anna is not forced into buying a specific, potentially expensive QM solution and can shop around for one that will deliver the results she needs).
• Consider different types of call recording systems that already come equipped and are already integrated with the QM functionality.

We’ve now come to the end of our 3 part series to ‘The Insider’s Guide to Live & Legacy Call Recording’ where we met Dave in part 1, Ian in part 2 and Anna in part 3. If you didn’t get a chance to meet either Dave or Ian here is your chance: