No doubt agent screen capture is a great tool for call centers. Opposed to what a lot of people think, the primary purpose is not spying on agents but to get a better understanding of what it takes to do their job. Why does one agent have an average call length of 20% higher than the others when he/she should perform the same job? Is it lack of training on the latest CRM application, incorrect use of knowledge base or are the IT systems just to slow? And how about to use the recorded screens synchronized together with voice as content for coaching new agents on how to perform standard tasks?
The challenges with deploying a screen capture solution in general are following:
- There needs to be some kind of an application installed on the agent desktop. This application needs to be updated every now and then which can be painful from an administration perspective. In a large organization, every such change requires a lot of testing in a sandbox environment and roll out to users is slow and expensive.
- Screen capture solutions tend to cause high load on the agent desktop, making his / her work harder to accomplish.
- The captured screens generate a lot of data on the network and require large storage, which are still expensive in enterprise environments.
- Paring agent desktops with phones can be a challenge too – free seating environments where agents log into a different phone and desktop every time they come to work can cause a lot of pain for administration and proper pairing of voice and screens.
- There are all kinds of additional small glitches like security issues, firewalls & proxy servers in between the agent computers and data center or virtual environments that can make things much more complicated.
It is clear that all the issues above make it difficult if not impossible to offer screen recording in a hosted environment where you have often little control over the agent desktops, bandwidth is limited and the call center software is somewhere in the cloud. It kept us busy for some time and we didn’t want to give up that it must be possible to make it happen.
We have screen capture in ZOOM’s portfolio for several years now offered as ZOOM ScreenREC and naturally all the issues above were concerns to our customers during implementations. About 18 months ago we decided to change it once and for all and rewrite our screen recording solution from the ground up to make sure we address all the painful points mentioned earlier without a compromise. The “first version” of this new solution was released almost a year ago in September 2010 and now, by the end of July 2011 we are releasing a version where tons of small details were added to make it a perfect solution.
We are proud to announce, that we launched a hosted screen recording solution with LiveOps in July 2011. We have found in LiveOps a very knowledgeable partner that has experience in offering hosted contact center solution for very large customers. During the pilot phase with several LiveOps customers we learned how exactly the solution has to function so it will work flawlessly and without any efforts from administration and management. After all with the amount of agents connected to their cloud you can’t afford to troubleshoot often, it just has to work!
The screen recording that LiveOps is using today is exactly the same technology behind our ScreenREC so every ZOOM customer can enjoy it as well.. Here is a quick feature highlight:
You do not need to install anything on the agent desktop. Period. So how does it work? The agent desktop (doesn’t matter if it is Cisco, Genesys, AVAYA or your home grown version) executes a digitally signed applet that launches the screen capture client and it runs in the background, invisibly for the user. Once you logout of the agent desktop or close the application, the screen capture is closed as well. When capturing screens, the client never takes more than 5% of CPU, never disturbing the agents’ work. Simple and elegant.- We spent a lot of time and effort to come up with a way, how to use minimum bandwidth while keeping good quality of the image. We transfer only changes on the agent screen with configurable frames per second intervals, picture quality and scaling (you can still have very good overview what the agent is doing if the screen is scaled in 1:2 or 1:3 ratio).
- The solution fully supports Citrix and Windows Terminal Services which are gaining popularity in contact centers for easy management and administration.
- When the client application is launched, it contacts the server and establishes connection first which is then used by the server to start and stop recording. So there are no problems in passing firewalls since the connection is initiated from the agent desktop – an absolute must in hosted deployments.
- Client can be told which agent ID is logged in to make proper pairing of voice with screens or it can read Windows login details and lookup the agent automatically – which means zero administration.
- The process of uploading the captured changes on the screen is done via http or https that push to a web server. The server doesn’t really do anything, it just stores the content to a file. Which means it can take a pretty big load of up to 1,000 concurrent sessions per server and by nature this scales out-of-the box just by adding more web servers. ScreenREC fully supports proxy servers as well, since they are often deployed in larger enterprises.
All ZOOM customers are welcome to upgrade to the latest ScreenREC free of charge (we do not charge for any major versions if you are under valid maintenance). Just contact ZOOM’s Sales Manager and we will make it happen for you 
