Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!
Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!
-
Congratulations Mike Lewis on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!
Call Monitoring Software
- Thread starter stalkerp
- Start date
DancingDave
Technical User
If you are looking to record the voice calls and store them in a meaningful format, two of the biggest players are Nice and Witness. Witness have recently announced becoming Nortel's preferred supplier (or something along those lines).
We use Nice, which does a lot but is expensive (we're stuck recording calls lineside, which adds further to the expense!)
DD
We use Nice, which does a lot but is expensive (we're stuck recording calls lineside, which adds further to the expense!)
DD
- Thread starter
- #6
Hi Mallana,
Our Call Center is about 250 agents strong.
We are considering VOIP for the very near future.
We looked into Witness (too expensive) and Remote Agent Observe (does not meet our requirements).
I don't know anything about Nice, but Dancing Dave says that it too is quite expensive.
I must say that I am a bit out of my league here, as my experience with these tools is just about non-existent.
Thoughts?
Our Call Center is about 250 agents strong.
We are considering VOIP for the very near future.
We looked into Witness (too expensive) and Remote Agent Observe (does not meet our requirements).
I don't know anything about Nice, but Dancing Dave says that it too is quite expensive.
I must say that I am a bit out of my league here, as my experience with these tools is just about non-existent.
Thoughts?
In our ComCentres, some calltakers log out by unplugging their headset, instead of using the Make Busy key: They don’t even wait to see that the “logged out” indication shows on their M3905 sets! The Standard Operating procedure tells them to use MSB, but it’s human nature to take shortcuts where they can.
In most cases, they get logged out without any issue; however, there have been some situations where a call gets presented to them at the moment they unplug.
Since call presentation is set to “Call-Force”, the call sits on their set without them even know. The Symposium doesn’t even realize that they have unplugged.
Has anybody else that have had this type of occurrence?
We are running SCCS 4.2 on M1-61C’s
In most cases, they get logged out without any issue; however, there have been some situations where a call gets presented to them at the moment they unplug.
Since call presentation is set to “Call-Force”, the call sits on their set without them even know. The Symposium doesn’t even realize that they have unplugged.
Has anybody else that have had this type of occurrence?
We are running SCCS 4.2 on M1-61C’s
DancingDave
Technical User
MathieK, was the last post for another thread?
With regards to Nice and Witness, if you are recording VoIP, especially if it is a 'green field' install, you will cut down on some of your cost.
As I said we record lineside which means that each of the phones that needs to be recorded is physically connected to the call recording logger. This is a massive overhead for doing moves and changes and also adds to the complexity of the solution making it more expensive to support. Currently our call centres (we have several distributed across several buildings in HO) may have for example 100 desks, of which only 40-60 are taking calls at any one time (although cost saving measures mean this is changing). This means we are paying for more capacity than we use.
Compare this to VoIP where you license to the maximum number of concurrent agents on line. E.g you can configure 100 agents but only pay to record up to 60 at any one time. Additionally, there is minimal cost associated with moves and changes as in an IP world, users have extension mobility and it is the user that the logger is recording and not a particular set (that's not to say that the physical set doesn't need to be taken in to account when setting up recording).
Further benefit can be gained from integrating to your call recording supplier e.g. create an application on the phone that allows you to tag calls with an outcome, a policy number etc. Other benefits include the recording of the calls as two seperate streams (Nice support this, not sure about Witness) i.e. you can listen to one half of the call if there is a lot of shouting or distortion. Most VoIP solutions also support record on demand. When using RoD, users who don't have a requirement to be recorded all of the time e.g. team managers can be set as RoD. If they receive a call which they realise halfway through they should record, they can record the call in its entirety.
Nice records the VoIP packets by sniffing the SPAN ports of the switches the phones are attached to. This means you are limited to how many phones you can record by the number of SPAN ports on the switch (you are likely to want to keep one freen to attach a network sniffer to in the case of network issues too). The Witness solution has no reliance on using SPAN ports, but instead creates a duplicate VoIP stream that it sends to the recorder. This does have the disadvantage of increasing data traffic on your network. Nortel are apparently to license this to Nice as well.
So in summary, VoIP recording is very powerful. The amount of money you spend can be enormous, but a simple solution with none of the bells and whistles shouldn't be prohibitively expensive. I have worked with Nice products for many years and only seen the Witness solution demo'd. I would say Nice would win in terms of functionality (it's a BMW compared to Witness's Ford). The strategic tie up with Nortel is a bonus for Witness though. If you are a Symposium user (now CC6), Nortel's strategy is integration of its products into a single management front end (web, email, outbound, inbound, reporting). It would make sense to also integrate call recording although I don't believe it's currently on their road map.
Hope all this helps
DD
With regards to Nice and Witness, if you are recording VoIP, especially if it is a 'green field' install, you will cut down on some of your cost.
As I said we record lineside which means that each of the phones that needs to be recorded is physically connected to the call recording logger. This is a massive overhead for doing moves and changes and also adds to the complexity of the solution making it more expensive to support. Currently our call centres (we have several distributed across several buildings in HO) may have for example 100 desks, of which only 40-60 are taking calls at any one time (although cost saving measures mean this is changing). This means we are paying for more capacity than we use.
Compare this to VoIP where you license to the maximum number of concurrent agents on line. E.g you can configure 100 agents but only pay to record up to 60 at any one time. Additionally, there is minimal cost associated with moves and changes as in an IP world, users have extension mobility and it is the user that the logger is recording and not a particular set (that's not to say that the physical set doesn't need to be taken in to account when setting up recording).
Further benefit can be gained from integrating to your call recording supplier e.g. create an application on the phone that allows you to tag calls with an outcome, a policy number etc. Other benefits include the recording of the calls as two seperate streams (Nice support this, not sure about Witness) i.e. you can listen to one half of the call if there is a lot of shouting or distortion. Most VoIP solutions also support record on demand. When using RoD, users who don't have a requirement to be recorded all of the time e.g. team managers can be set as RoD. If they receive a call which they realise halfway through they should record, they can record the call in its entirety.
Nice records the VoIP packets by sniffing the SPAN ports of the switches the phones are attached to. This means you are limited to how many phones you can record by the number of SPAN ports on the switch (you are likely to want to keep one freen to attach a network sniffer to in the case of network issues too). The Witness solution has no reliance on using SPAN ports, but instead creates a duplicate VoIP stream that it sends to the recorder. This does have the disadvantage of increasing data traffic on your network. Nortel are apparently to license this to Nice as well.
So in summary, VoIP recording is very powerful. The amount of money you spend can be enormous, but a simple solution with none of the bells and whistles shouldn't be prohibitively expensive. I have worked with Nice products for many years and only seen the Witness solution demo'd. I would say Nice would win in terms of functionality (it's a BMW compared to Witness's Ford). The strategic tie up with Nortel is a bonus for Witness though. If you are a Symposium user (now CC6), Nortel's strategy is integration of its products into a single management front end (web, email, outbound, inbound, reporting). It would make sense to also integrate call recording although I don't believe it's currently on their road map.
Hope all this helps
DD
There are several other companies you can look up I found when doing some investigation. I haven't had any dealings with them, other than voice conversation or sales literature, but you may find that any alternatives are worth investigating.
If you don't find any of these fit your needs try checking out CallCenter Magazine and see if they have any back articles or reviews.
If you don't find any of these fit your needs try checking out CallCenter Magazine and see if they have any back articles or reviews.
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked
- Question
- Locked
- Question