Oaisys Tracer – Release 6 – Contact Center Call Recording and Workforce Management Solutions

Thank goodness for Thanksgiving and turkey, as I’m giving thanks for just a week of slow down, so I can attempt to catch up. Between VoiceCon and the Cisco Collaboration Summit, there was just too much going on to focus on announcements from vendors that weren’t at those two events. That isn’t entirely true. I did have several briefings outside those events; just not time to write about them. So, on Thanksgiving Eve, I’m taking the time to go back and look at one of the announcements that I was very impressed by, and that was the November 19th launch of version 6 of Oaisys Tracer.

You might not have heard much about Oaisys as they are a completely channel-centric company that provides contact center management solutions delivered through strategic partners, but you should take a deep look. In the business for over 12 years, Oaisys provides call recording, quality monitoring, and workforce management solutions to these partners including Mitel, Toshiba, PrairieFyre software, Avaya, and ShoreTel.
Oaisys’ two core products are Talkument and Tracer. Talkument is a voice documentation solution that creates digital media documents from business calls. It uses a patent-pending technology called Oaisys Portable Voice Document (PVD) to develop voice documents, stores them in a secure network repository, which is then accessible by contact center personnel to retrieve, annotate, playback and share as needed. This allows the contact center to quickly share call information, with notes, and the recorded call to back it up without having to listen to (unless they choose to) or transcribe calls.
Tracer has the same feature set as Talkument, plus a lot more. Tracer uses PVD technology to enhance a slew of contact center management functions including live monitoring of calls, real-time coaching, and quality assurance and employee performance evaluations.
In release 6 of the Tracer product, Oaisys added a bunch of really compelling features to enhance the capabilities of what a contact center manager can do. Here is what they announced and my take on it.
Live Call Monitor – an integrated feature enabling supervisors to monitor multiple systems and listen to live calls locally or remotely. This is a pretty slick feature in that a manager can see some or all of the calls and can control call recording manually, selecting which calls to record.
Auto Call Monitor: this feature allows for real-time automatic live monitoring of calls which meet criteria that are pre-defined by management. What I thought was neat about this feature is that a every supervisor can set business rules up that would trigger a call to be monitored, and they can enable or disable these rules as they see fit. For example, they could set up a rule that says if an agent has been on the phone for over a specific amount of time, I need to listen to what is going on. When that thresholod is met, those calls are automatically played into the supervisor’s headset whether they are at their desk or somewhere else, so they get them right then. Along with this supervisors have the option to receive an immediate visual and/or audible notification of a situation requiring their attention. A good example that Oaisys gave for this was a supervisor being clued into a call where an agent has an upset customer, and the supervisor immediately hears the call and can jump in to help.
Live Annotations and Coaching: This was cool. Tracer provides the ability for supervisors to create text annotations directly to calls during live monitoring, so that they can capture their observations in real-time. They can annotate live calls as they are in progress. Not only is this a record they can go back to later, but they also have the ability to use integrated instant messaging with their agents, so that they can coach agents directly an unobtrusively during calls. Coaching is a two way street too. Agents can click a button to ask for help from a supervisor as well. The agent can also start or stop a recording if they have permission.
All of this, including annotations and coaching sessions are logged in context with the voice recording, providing an easy way to reconstruct contact center incidents later, and becoming a permanent record. Also with live notes the supervisor can add things like links to web sites, and account information, for example.
Quality Control Work Queues: this feature allows users to create rules for the count and types of calls that supervisors must evaluate, speeding up agent evaluations and ensuring supervisor objectivity.
Automated Call Organization: this feature identifies calls that meet set criteria based on call filters, such as agent ID or extension lists, and categorizes them within a specific search folder. For example, a supervisor can set up different folders for sales, or certain campaigns, or agent skill sets, etc, making it easier to hone in on specific groups for performance evaluation.
Owner’s Report: the Tracer’s Owner’s Report feature shows who is using Tracer, how often and for what purpose, making them more accountable for its use. Some of the factors considered in the owners’ report are the number of live calls that were monitored, and who listened to them, the number of calls reviewed or evaluated, the number of reports run, and the number of calls that were coached.
The last feature, the Owners’ Report, I really liked. What I really liked about this is that it holds management accountable for using the system. Here we have wonderful features to help manage a contact center, but if it isn’t used, or used properly, it’s a total waste.
In all, I just felt that Oaisys has put a lot of thought into really helping the supervisor do a better job of handling a mass amount of information that is helpful in managing the contact center, as well as providing agents with tools that will help them, and make them feel they are part of coaching and quality monitoring rather than being a subject of it. It was a great announcement.