ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

To answer this question about live monitoring versus selective call recording, we reached out across 30+ LinkedIn groups to ask professionals spanning call centers and almost every vertical industry.  Among the many respondents, here are a few key ones:

"It's easier and quicker to listen to recorded calls. But by listening to live calls you have the opportunity to coach your agents immediately after the call. The call is fresh in the agent's mind. Being able to point out any possible issues can be addressed on the spot, providing immediate feedback allows the agent to immediately implement any needed changes through coaching. If you wait and listen to recorded calls how many calls could the agent handle incorrectly after that? Selective recorded calls of a caller having issues can also be a great coaching tool." (Division Manager at top 5 Call Center Outsourcer)

"Both methods have merit and both are valuable tools to improve and maintain quality. I would advocate a combination with live monitoring and immediate feedback together with recording and review by the call handlers and their peers." (Executive at Call Center Consulting Firm)

"I believe that both have their benefits, but I prefer live monitoring so I can provide real time coaching/feedback to my employees. I do happen to use selective recordings when conducting 1x1's with direct reports so the agents hear how they come across to the customer. Once they have listened to the call, we discuss areas of improvement and come up with an action plan." (Call Center Management Professional at a Real Estate Firm)

"I have found that listening to recordings is a much better use of my time. I choose the recordings based on the amount of time one has been on the phone. Live monitoring causes me to sit and listen to all of the bad numbers, no contacts, call backs, etc. With recordings I can cut to the chase and evaluate the effectiveness of the call and all of its attributes quickly and efficiently." (CEO at Market Research Firm) 

Business VoIP providers need ways to stand out from the competition and also new approaches to increasing ARPU.  This typically comes in the form of additional/complementary solutions, features and the like to augment one's core VoIP service, such as offering:

• VoIP phone systems
• Hosted call center solutions
• Expandable PBX trunks
• Online faxing
• Call routing
• Caller ID
• Auto-attendant
• Softphone
• Virtual PBX
• ...and so on

But are these things on their own really enough to take your company and revenue to the next level?

What about cross-selling your VoIP customers on call recording and quality monitoring cloud solutions?

Three of the top 5 business VoIP providers are already doing it.  Perhaps it's time you consider adding these offerings to your portfolio as well.

To help you understand how you can sell these solutions to your customers, I've compiled a list of probing questions you can use to bridge the conversation from VoIP to quality assurance and call recording.  Here you go:

1. How are you capturing customer calls today for quality assurance, compliance (HIPAA, PCI-DSS, etc.) and order verification/dispute resolution?

2. How much is your on-premise call recording system costing you today in maintenance alone? (Obviously only ask this if you know ahead of time they already have call recording in place.)

3. How do you ensure you are delivering quality customer service in your organization today?

4. What are you doing today to monitor your agents/staff to ensure they are following your compliance requirements?

5. When you have a customer dispute over whether they gave consent for a purchase, e.g., how are you proving to the customer what they actually said during their conversation?

6. What approach do you use to tap into the voice of your customer to know what is really important to them?

7. How do you demonstrate to your call-handlers how a proper customer call is handled?

8. What approach do you use to train your call handlers? 

9. What do you use today to evaluate your agents/call handlers on quality assurance, compliance, etc.? 

10. What is your strategy for improving the customer service capabilities of your organization to better satisfy customers and their needs? 

With these (and other) types of questions, you have the ability to probe your customers a little bit to uncover some of their pain points around customer service, compliance and dispute resolutions.  Many of your customers have these issues and by offering hosted call recording and quality monitoring software, you can help allay these needs and challenges. 

We all know you can use your call recording software to monitor call center agents for compliance and quality.  You can also use it to verify orders and resolve disputes.

BUT, did you know there are countless other alternative, derivative uses for call recording software?  Here are 10 you may have not thought of:

1. C-level Insight - Why not play 2-3 carefully chosen customer calls at your next senior executive meeting to literally bring the voice of the customer right into the room?
2. All Employees Listen - How about sharing 2-3 carefully selected calls with every employee in the company on a monthly basis?  This way everyone in the enterprise has a direct connection to the customer and his/her wants/needs.
3. Employee Meeting Kickoff - What if you played one or two really motivating customer calls at the beginning of every sales or staff meeting/call.  Think about how inspirational that would be to your staff.
4. Buyer Personas - Use select calls to develop real buyer personas for your target customers and share them with the sales team so they know precisely who you are selling to.  This also helps bring the target customer to life.
5. Agent Submission Contest - Set up a contest for your call center agents in which they get to pick one fantastic call they had once a week and submit it to the call center manager for him/her to name one of them the Outstanding Call of the Week.  You can then incentivize the agent accordingly. Think about how this will entice agents to deliver the absolute highest level of service possible.
6. Customer Voice Montage - Take snippets from select calls and put them together into an audio montage to highlight on your home page.  Talk about a powerful testimonial/marketing tool. What if every call you picked was 5 seconds of a customer raving about your product? That would go a long way toward giving credence to the value of your solutions.
7. Customer Testimonial Library - On your website you could pick segments of select calls to highlight (keeping the customer names anonymous) customer satisfaction with your solutions.  Some companies have case studies or customer testimonials.  You would have the customers' actual voice speaking directly to your sales prospects.

On LinkedIn across various contact center groups I asked the question: "Is call recording necessary?".  I received some very insightful responses that I wanted to share.  Here they are:

A good starting point would be for the Call Center org to answer these questions? Are every single 1 of our Agents the best they can be without any Supervisor being able to play a Call Recording back to the Agent to Coach them into becoming better? Do you have proof that an Agent could be stealing company time by dragging out calls far beyond the time they should be? Do you have protection from an Angry Consumer that turns into a she said/he said scenario & they want a refund/chargeback or complaint to the BBB, FTC or any other organization that could be detrimental to your company? (By JA)

Call Recording is one of the most basic tenets of any quality management program. Aside from fulfilling any compliance requirements tied to proof of purchase/enrollment, or cancellation, call recordings provide a quality team with the ability to monitor the customer interactions and how well the agents are serving (or selling) customers. I believe call recording is a best-in-class functionality that should be deployed to augment live call monitoring for any call center quality management initiative. Beyond simply finding agents that aren't doing well, recordings of "great calls" can be a useful training tool as well. (By JK)

I do a lot of work in the area of quality management and believe it is critical to record calls to engage agents and provide them with a means of contributing to their own learning and development. It is the only coaching method that allows for self assessment. Listening to calls with agents provides an opportunity to not only review and enhance agent orientation,  skills and knowledge but also explore customer behavior and needs. It provides a collaborative forum for teaching representatives how to interpret and apply company processes, procedures and policy in the context of a customer interaction to develop critical thinking and problem solving capabilities. When sales representatives are given the opportunity to review and deconstruct calls, our experience has shown that they become more adept at hearing verbal cues and clues and understanding the buyer's motivation. This results in better call control, more relevant, customer-focused dialogue and increased sales. Additionally recorded calls can be leveraged to assess organizational performance. Literally the 'Voice of the Customer' can be used to demonstrate to other stakeholders within the company - Sales, Marketing, Compliance, IT, Training, HR even the C-suite - what's working and what's not from a customer perspective. This is particularly powerful when speech analytics are used to quantify the magnitude of an issue and the potential impact to the organization. (By JF) 

Recording calls is critical to the success of the organization. Listening to calls with agents regardless of experience level always provides learning opportunities in a safe environment. Employee engagement is another key part , agents who contribute to the "Library of Recorded Calls" become advocates for the QA team....(By JM)

A call center is only as good as the value it affords both the organization and its customers.  From the organization's perspective, there are several key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics that can be measured to evaluate the call center's performance. 

Here is a list of some of the most prominent and useful ones:

1. Cost per call
2. Customer Satisfaction
3. First Contact Resolution Rate
4. Agent Utilization
5. Aggregate Call Center Performance

These and other metrics help your organization - and particularly your contact center - measure cost, agent performance, customer service quality and so on.  With these metrics in hand, you can make the necessary adjustments to increase performance across the board.

Call recording software and quality monitoring software are great tools to help you drive improvements in these areas.

When you look at a phone recording software provider, all you should really care about is answering "yes" to these questions:

1. Is the product is any good?

2. Is the product affordable? 

3. Is the company reputable?

4. Will the company provide ample support?

5. Is the company going to be around for a while so they can support my ongoing needs and upgrades?

6. Does the company have a solid reputation (i.e. testimonials)?

7. Will the product fit easily/smoothly into my environment and will it work as prescribed?

If a phone recording software provider and its software passes this test, then you have found a winner.  So why then are analyst reports so focused on revenue as the sole determinant of ranking? I mean just because you have $700M in revenue, for example, should that really make you number one?  What about the five criteria above?  

Let's think about this for a moment.  You could be ranked the number 1 or 2 or 3 phone recording software provider in the world according to a leading industry analyst but you might not have a great product, it might be very expensive, and your solution might not integrate well into your customers' environments.  Hmmm.

This is an interesting point.  Consider the revered "Magic Quadrant".  It ranks companies on "Ability to Execute" and "Completeness of Vision".  How truly important are these aspects to you if you are a 20-agent call center or a small law firm, for example?  You wouldn't really care, would you?  You are most concerned with questions like 1 through 7 above, right?

What if there was an industry ranking or analyst report which based its ranking of call recording software providers on such non-financial criteria?  It would matter to you, wouldn't it?

All revenue really tells you is whether or not the vendor is making money, and yes - whether they are likely to be around for a while.  Revenue doesn't really tell you much more, does it? Then why is it so darn important?

All I can hope is that I am not the only one that thinks this way, and perhaps, some day companies will be recognized for more than just their sales figures. 

Your call center is only as good as the customer experience it delivers, and a poor experience can lead to rampant customer defection - which is the very last thing you want to deal with.  We all know it costs upwards of six times more to secure a new customer than to keep an existing one. 

Here are some important call center management statistics to help you understand just how important it is to focus as much on your call center's customer experience as it is to focus on the product/service you deliver/support:

1. 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience. But only 1% of customers feel that vendors consistently meet their expectations. Source: Customer Experience: Is it the Chicken or the Egg, Forbes 
2. 40% of organizations cite ‘complexity’ as the greatest barrier to improving multichannel customer experience. Source: Econsultancy MultiChannel Customer Experience Report 
   
3. 13% of unsatisfied customers tell more than 20 people. Source: White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Washington, DC 
   
4. 96% of unsatisfied customers leave without complaining. Source: Harris Interactive
5. Just a 10% improvement in an enterprise's customer experience can translate into more than $1B in increased revenue and other benefits. Source: Forrester
6. 15% of customers from American businesses defect due to poor customer service. Source: US News & World Report
7. 90% of U.S. consumers still prefer to solve their customer service issues using the telephone. Source: fonolo.com
8. A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10%. Source: Leading on the Edge of Chaos, Murphy and Murphy
9. Reducing your customer defection rate by 5% can increase your profitability by 25 to 125%. Source: Leading on the Edge of Chaos, Murphy and Murphy
10. The average business loses 50% of their customers every five years. Source: Harvard Business Review
11. Top reasons customers leave: 68% because they are upset with the treatment they received; 14% are not satisfied with the product or service; 9% simply begin doing business with someone else; 5% seek alternative products/services or develop other business relationships; 3% move away; and 1% die.  Source: U.S. Small Business Administration and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
12. Globally, the average value of a lost customer is $243. Source: KISSmetrics
13. Customer Loyalty can be worth 10 times as much as a single purchase. Source: White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Washington, D.C.
    
14. It takes 12 positive service incidents to make up for a negative one. Source: Rudy Newell-Legner
    
15. 68% of Customers leave because they think you don’t care about them. Source: Rockefeller Corporation
    

Call recording systems are often times only as good as the team that is adminstering/using them. If an organization has a robust call recording system in place, but its people aren't fully trained or committed to using it to its fullest potential, then the system's perceived success will be very low. This can impact performance and future resource allocation for the call recording system. 

For a successful call recording program within your organization, you need to start off on the right foot with the right strategy in place. This will help ensure passionate buy-in for your call recording system from your contact center team, your business users and your management team.  

Below is a framework to help you organize and launch a successful internal campaign for your call recording system.

NOTE: Even if you already have a call recording system in place, you can still adapt this process to fit your current needs and breathe new life into your call recording program.

To ensure you communicate the value of the call recording system to all relevant parties within the organization, it is best to view it from a three-tiered perspective consisting of three levels of value - tactical, operational and strategic - each with their own internal target audience(s).

TACTICAL VALUE:

Target - call center agents

This level describes how your call center agents can/should interact with the system. They can review past calls to see what went right and wrong, view performance reports on the length of their calls, the first call resolution rate of their interactions, how they measure up to others in their group, and so on.  It is important to communicate these things clearly to your agents to ensure maximum uptake, acceptance, utilization and impact of your call recording system.

OPERATIONAL VALUE:

Targets - call center supervisors and quality evaluators

This level represents how your call center managers and evaluators can leverage the system to improve their jobs.  For call center supervisors, this means monitoring agent and group performance to see where improvements need to be made in staffing, skill sets, process workflow and so on.  For evaluators, this level is about using the quality monitoring evaluation forms to assess and train agents for improved performance.  

STRATEGIC VALUE:

Targets - business users (marketing, sales, product management) and senior managers (VP Customer Service, COO, VP Compliance, etc.)

There are as many call recording solution providers out there as there are letters in the alphabet, with a large revenue disparity between the top two behemoths and the rest.  With regard to this bifurcation of the brand name players and all the others, the question becomes:

Does it really matter if you buy call recording software from a big guy or a small guy?  The short answer is a resounding "No".  Why do I know this?  Because I've worked for over six call recording companies including the number one provider, and I can tell you that customer after customer comes to the smaller guys following a dissatisfying experience with a big guy.  It happens all the time!!

Behind my nine-plus years in the call recording industry, I believe buyers of call recording systems sometimes play it safe by purchasing a system from one of the 800 pound gorillas, when in fact they could be just as well served (or even better served) spending far less by going with a smaller provider. At the end of the day, call recording systems really come down to four components which all vendors have some flavor of:

1. Call capture software - the software that actually records the call/screen and puts it in a storage location.

2. Logging hardware - the physical hardware that stores the recording(s).

3. Call query software - the software you use to go back and find and call up the calls you want to listen to.

4. Quality monitoring software - the software that lets you filter out a select number of calls for evaluation purposes and then facilitates the assessment process with reports, forms, etc.

The dirty little secret in the call recording industry is that most solutions offered by the various call recording companies all do the same thing - with a handful of bells and whistles bundled in to spice up the offering.  In most cases, these added features aren't even necessary or used.

To ensure you have or are purchasing a good call recording system, be sure you can answer "Yes" to the following questions:

A. Can you capture incoming calls and the computer screen activity of your call center agents?

B. Can you choose to record all calls or just a sampling of calls?

C. Can you query recordings for select calls based on agent, phone number, customer name, time of day, etc.?

D. Can you/did you implement the solution in two days or less?

E. Do you have to perform little to no maintenance on the system?

F. Can you easily customize the solution to your needs without asking for professional services help from the vendor?

If you answered "No" to one or more of these questions, you really need to think hard about the solution you have or are considering.  The truth is, there are very similar options out there for you to select, which are easier to install and maintain, are offered at a much lower cost and offer essentially the very same core functionality.

We've all heard the statistics that it costs 6-7 times as much to land a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.  While the challenge of mitigating customer defection is an ongoing one, it can be overcome with call center recording.

Call center recording systems enable you to capture your customer interactions and learn what went right or wrong during the call so you can go back and fix any problems.  You can also use the call recording system to monitor agents to learn why they are successful and unsuccessful so you can go back and better train them.  This same software can also help you quickly identify customers that are about to defect.  What if you created an alert that told you every time an agent visited a "cancel a subscription" page?  That would give whoever is responsible for rescuing fleeting customers instant notification of one about to leave.  Just think for a second how valuable such an alert or intelligence would be in terms of stemming the flow of departing customers. It would be huge.

The capabilities call center recording brings to your organization (whether a tiny, small, medium, large or enormous call center) can make a profound impact on your ability to increase customer satisfaction and dramatically decrease customer defection rates.

Here are some tips for lowering customer defection rates within your organization using call center recording:

1. Set up alerts to notify your customer account rescue team (or person) that a person is about to defect - or already has.

2. Monitor agents to determine who has the highest number of customer defection calls and train them accordingly.

3. Send training modules to all customer-facing staff with tips on how to persuade customers from leaving.

4. Query, identify and flag all recorded customer calls in which the customer has indicated dissatisfaction of any kind.  Then, assign these customers (by their phone number) to your best agents so they are handled as delicately as possible the next time they call in.

5. Create two recorded call libraries to train staff - one containing best-practice calls in which the unsatisfied customer was persuaded to stay, and the other containing poor-performing calls in which the call was handled poorly and the customer did indeed defect.

6. Hold rapid fire training sessions with all customer-facing staff to share positive and negative experiences with handling customer dissatisfaction.

7. Create a customer rescue team that follows up with all dissatisfied callers within 24 hours of their last contact with your organization.  These individuals can offer the customer some sort of incentive to smooth things over - such as a discount, a free offer, etc.