Even though companies rely on communications to prosper, the content and quality of customer interactions are often unexamined. In contact centers, where communications serve as the sole business driver, it is critical to deliver quality and cost-effective service to stand out from the competition.

Call recording and quality monitoring fill the knowledge gap of what is going on by monitoring business processes and agent communications. Analyzing service level and core competencies guides agents and tunes their communication skills.

Traditionally companies use live monitoring, spreadsheet-based forms and manual reports to evaluate agent performance. But the world is changing and in large call centers, where supervisors and trainers must process lots of data for a representative overview, live monitoring has become singularly inefficient and expensive.

For call and screen monitoring, statistics and information from speech analytics engines represent only the first step. It must be used to implement insights through training and coaching.

When large companies or high-volume contact centers invest in a high-end quality monitoring solution, they must also evaluate performance and flexibility. During periods of rapid growth, the system must be easily enhanced to support more agents. The architecture should handle more users with one server or expand through new servers without major changes to the configuration or central administration.

Large organizations often require multiple branch locations. In addition, when a center grows rapidly it may need a second site. Flexible solutions must support several physically-separated servers. For cost-effectiveness even when agents are located at different sites, companies may require administration from a central location. This becomes increasingly important in light of the latest trends towards outsourcing and virtualization.

Centers with a larger number of agents and multiple sites may need to transfer highly-sensitive information between locations. Therefore, quality monitoring solutions must support modern security mechanisms and related software architecture. Evaluating fulfillment of the Payment Card Industry security standards is a good place to start.

Modern speech processing techniques help process lots of data quickly. Solution capabilities range from simple keyword spotting to emotion detection to fully-automated call categorization and evaluation.

The call center market is growing. Traditional quality assurance methods are continuously being replaced by software-based quality monitoring solutions. Large and rapidly-growing companies need flexible solutions for expansion and modern techniques to survive the data flood.

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