"This call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes."
This phrase is something that almost everyone has heard when they have called a company's contact center, indicating that the particular business has a call recording system in place. And while most customers probably do not give a second thought to their conversations being recorded, contact centers that use call recording know how invaluable it can actually be to providing a superior customer experience and the widespread benefits it can have on a business.
Improve Training
Originally intended to focus only on new contact center hires, call recording is proven to be a valuable training resource for employees with varying levels of experience. Call recording helps teams focus on their strengths while also identifying what might not be working for both them and their customers. For instance, if a certain response or phrase from a call center representative seems to have either a detrimental or positive effect on the customer, call recording will identify and address this data much more efficiently.
Call recording can also show which employees might need a little extra training, picking up bad habits and correcting them faster. In addition, it allows businesses to identify and address employees who do not follow protocol or tend to behave unprofessionally toward customers. By showing which agents are not meeting expectations and which agents are exceeding them, call recording can help ensure a contact center has only the best people answering its phones.
C.Y.A. (Cover Your Agents)
Recording phone calls also helps safeguard businesses against accusations from customers and effectively resolve any disputes that could arise. Rather than finding themselves in an "Agent Said/Customer Said" quagmire, contact centers that use call recording can hear exactly what was said by whom. This is especially helpful in today's world of social media, where one bad review can have a devastating effect on companies.
Call recording can also help employees and departments share vital information, making problem-solving easier and more pleasant for customers.
Finally, many companies must adhere to strict legal, industry, and service-level compliance guidelines. This means that there are certain words and phrases that agents are required to say when speaking with customers. Call recording allows companies to confirm their call center agents are faithfully following these guidelines, preventing legal action and maintaining quality control.
Convert Big Data to Actionable Insights
Calls placed to contact centers might seem like nothing more than questions to be answered and problems to be solved--things to be dealt with and then forgotten. But dig a little deeper and these calls hold a wealth of information that can greatly impact companies. Call recording can help managers see which questions and complaints occur most frequently, allowing them to more easily address these issues and even help prevent them beforehand. Call recording can also help reveal patterns in calls. For instance, if call-in leads are scored, call recording can see if there is a pattern among the highest scored leads, making it easier to determine which ones will be most worth pursuing. Finally, call recording allows businesses to determine which of their marketing campaigns are the most effective and which can be left by the wayside. All of this information can help businesses adjust the way calls are handled, yielding far more positive results.
Call recording provides some amazing benefits, but if the thought of having to listen to every single incoming call is a tad overwhelming, consider also using audio mining software like speech analytics. Speech analytics makes finding and extracting critical business insights exponentially easier, quickly scanning thousands of phone calls for specific words and phrases, revealing which calls are being abandoned and which are being converted into sales. Like a power combo in a video game, call recording and speech analytics together can give any contact center a real boost.
Once a luxury that only larger companies could afford, today's call recording and speech analytics options are more affordable and have become a viable resource for businesses of all sizes. When contact centers are able to hear what customers are truly saying, they can better address the questions of today and have a clearer vision for tomorrow.
Jeanne Landau is director of marketing at CallFinder, a provider of cloud-based speech analytics software.