Call recording has come a long way. Agents are not nearly as apprehensive about it as they used to be. Cheap data storage led to 100% recording, which led to speech analytics; automatic training and real-time coaching are more popular now and the rest of the enterprise is starting to see the wealth of useful data that comes out of the call center via quality monitoring systems.

We talked to a lot of the industry's quality monitoring vendors and asked them what was new. The consensus is the technology is getting so good that it isn't the weak link anymore. In some cases it's a matter of catching call centers up, not just on the latest technology, but some of the old stuff, too. Rick Daley, vice president of sales and marketing for Columbus, Ohio-based CallCopy told us, "Someone once said 'the next big thing is making the last big thing usable' and I think that is the case in regard to quality monitoring applications." That's apt. "Please spend time looking at your processes," pleads Witness Systems' (Roswell, GA) quality monitoring expert Oscar Alban. "Because if you surround a recording product with very poor processes, you're not going to get a lot out of it."

So what is new? And what's important in the call recording and quality monitoring side of the call center universe? We know total recording is becoming the norm. As one vendor told us, the price of recording everything is so low now, there's no reason not to record everything. With the help of some of the industry's leading vendors, we've spotted some more trends. Some will confirm what you know or thought. Others may be a revelation.

Trend one: Less big brother-style punishment, more training

Agent complaints about their supervisors using the quality monitoring system to spy on them have diminished in the last few years. Part of it went away with the advent of 100% recording: now it's constant -- less like a pop quiz.

With total recording comes more targeted training and coaching, which means agents can see how recording helps them. As Verint's (Melville, NY) vice president of global marketing Mariann McDonagh told us, "At the end of the day, the agent is happier because the business is supporting them to do their job." She continued, "As the solutions have matured, and space has matured over time, that's become less of an issue because there is definitely more direct benefit to the agents."

If agents complain these days, it's more likely that the call center is using recordings to punish, or that they're not doing a good job showing how recording can help. Roger Lee, business consulting director for Irving, Texas-based etalk says he spends a lot of time with call center executives going over the message and purpose of call monitoring. "Sometimes, it's not very clear. There's not a clear direction or definition of why we monitor the agent. There are perceptions, and as you well know, if the perception is not positive, it takes a lot of work to overturn that perception," Lee says. "It is a tool that's meant help and coach an agent's performance. But there's a lot of work that needs to be done to make sure you're consistent with that. It's not a 'gotcha' tool."

Mercom's (Lyndhurst, NJ) Kristyn Emenecker takes that one step further: "It should really be viewed as employee development and career development," she says, noting that call monitoring can help agents grow and prepare for more responsibility in the call center. "As call centers and businesses in general learn to use these [tools] in that method, we're limiting, at least, and minimizing the amount of that big brother fear that comes along with it."

Trend two: Greater market penetration

Most vendors we talked to say about half of call centers in the U.S. use some kind of quality monitoring system. If that sounds low, consider the fact that some of those centers are still using tapes to record selected interactions. Cheaper data storage should begin to bring the technology to the smaller centers that are still using tape because they think they can't afford more advanced systems.

The market is just opening up for speech analytics, too. Mercom's Kristyn Emenecker thinks the industry is still in the early phase of adoption for this technology. "It's the larger companies that have adopted it, those with more money. I think we're going to see the prices come down. I think there's a lot of interest, but we're going to start to see it being actually installed and utilized within, say, the mid-sized market, which really hasn't touched it yet," she says.