Amethyst delivers 100% call recording reliability Datatex Case Study Client: Directfin Solutions Industry: Financial services: Direct marketing and telemarketing Background DirectFin Solutions, founded in 2002, provides specialised direct marketing and telemarketing services to the financial services industry, primarily to short- and long-term insurers such as Metropolitan, AIG, Channel Life and Mutual & Federal. Based in the Cape Town suburb of Bellville, DirectFin’s core operation includes a call centre with capacity for 450 sales agents per shift, working two shifts a day. The call centre makes around 3 calls per second or 40,000 calls per day, using 20 30-channel PRIs on an Alcatel PABX. In terms of South African laws and regulations including the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act (FAIS) and the Policyholder Protection Rules, DirectFin must record and archive all calls in which any form of financial advice or service is offered. In addition, in a telesales environment the recording of a call in which someone agrees to take out a policy serves as the contract for the policy. Call records are queried at the rate of several a day, typically when a customer denies having agreed to take out a policy or when there are questions from the insurer. Business issue As DirectFin’s marketing executive Roy Figueira says, call recording is “a business critical application. We need 100% recording accuracy; 99.99% is not good enough.” Figueira notes that clients pay Directfin per contract secured – and in the absence of a call recording, there is no contract. Even worse, in the event of a disputed claim where a recording has been lost or damaged, DirectFin could be held liable for the amount of the claim. call recording is “a business critical application. We need 100% recording accuracy; 99.99% is not good enough. During 2006, the call recording system DirectFin was using couldn’t deliver anywhere close to the level of reliability required, creating a substantial business risk. Figueira says the company was losing 5-7% of all calls made. We were losing large numbers of calls: IT manager Darryl Fuchs says the previous system, developed by an international company, had been incorrectly specified. “We were losing large numbers of calls: we knew from our telephone management system that they’d been made, but there was no recording at all. We were also getting lots of “crossed lines”, where two recordings would be overlaid on each other and completely unintelligible.” Despite several attempts to fix them, the problems remained. To make matters worse, dealing with an offshore company meant support was often slow and inadequate. Fuchs was also unhappy with call storage and archiving under the previous system. “The system only held 11 days of live data and archiving involved copying call records to backup tapes. It could take up to 30 or 40 minutes to find and restore a call from tape, and if any dust got on a tape we could lose weeks of calls.” Considering whether to upgrade its existing system or buy a new one, DirectFin compiled a wish list of features that included: 100% accurate and reliable call recording Ability to handle large call volumes Good recording quality Quick, easy retrieval from storage Ability to query call records by telephone number, agent or date Solution A chance remark during an unrelated conversation with long-term IT partner Faritec alerted DirectFin to the existence of the Amethyst call recorder and it opted to test the solution. Amethyst appeared to offer better reliability, competitive pricing and, being based in South Africa, more reliable and attentive support. DirectFin tested Amethyst on one of its 20 PRIs for one and a half months, during which not a single call was lost, before deciding to implement the solution across the whole organisation (including administrative staff as well as the call centre) in late 2006. Amethyst appeared to offer better reliability, competitive pricing and, being based in South Africa, more reliable and attentive support The Amethyst system now stores two to three months of live call data, although provision has been made for storing up to nine months live. Recordings are archived to a network file system to allow direct listening and searching, and to removable 120Gb IDE hard drives which are replaced every month. As a third failsafe, the network file system is backed up to tape every night. DirectFin requested some modifications – notably an upgraded search function and an interface between Amethyt’s built-in agent quality management functions and DirectFin’s own system. This enables supervisors, call centre managers, quality assessors, trainers and network administrators to evaluate and assess calls either live or after the fact, using a simple web interface. Results The project, including the ordering and configuration of hardware, installation and training, was complete within two months of approval. Installation took place over a single weekend so there was no interruption to DirectFin’s operations. The result have been everything the company wished for: most importantly, in several months of operation DirectFin hasn’t lost a single call. Installation took place over a single weekend so there was no interruption to DirectFin’s operations. Searches that used to take up to half an hour can now be completed in seconds through a simple web interface. One surprise happened soon after implementation when DirectFin’s automatic dialler, which is used to test and clean its number database, came on line and started making 80,000 to 150,000 additional calls a day. Despite this massive increase in the number of calls, the Amethyst solution remained stable and recorded every call. The system has now been adjusted not to store these recordings of test calls, to use storage space most efficiently. DirectFin’s Darryl Fuchs says service levels from Datatex have been outstanding: “They’ve accommodated lots of tweaks and special requests and they actively manage the system to ensure we have no problem, including weekly site visits.” It was a very, very smooth implementation, with all issues that arose being addressed quickly and sorted out. And we haven’t lost a call yet.” – Roy Figueira, DirectFin