ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

Call center agents must field all sorts of inquiries – from standard “I want to purchase product XYZ” requests to complaints about a defective or missing piece of equipment, all the way to frustrated inquiries like “how exactly does this widget work?”. Satisfied, annoyed, angry, or uncertain customers: those are the variety of individuals who your call center agents must contend with.

For most businesses, it’s vitally important to have a total call recording system that can capture each and every call that comes in to your customer service and sales agents. Having a complete catalog of these calls – and being able to store them for a predetermined time – can serve a variety of purposes, both reactively and proactively.

On the reactive side, call recording can help to protect a business against a multitude of challenges. It can help:

Verify customer consent data, if a question arises about whether consent was given to transact an order. The fact is, sometimes customers forget they gave approval to charge their credit card, or sometimes they simply want a way to back out of a purchase after changing their mind. Recorded calls can also help to insulate a company from he-said/she-said disputes, in case there’s a debate about what was promised, what something cost, or any other matter where a customer believes they said one thing and an agent believes they said another.

Rescue customers about to defect, wherein retailers can set up a report that flags every call in which sales or support staff visits the “Cancel my account” page, or in which an account was actually closed. These calls can be sent to an account rescue team to help prevent the customer from leaving or to bring him or her back.

Confirm industry or regulatory compliance, because for retailers, compliance with PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), which ensures credit card number privacy, is a top priority. With a library of recorded calls as a reference, retailers can make sure that agents are keeping to the full letter of the law in this regard.

In addition to these more reactive uses, recorded calls can also help businesses take proactive measures to improve their products, enabling them to:

Improve sales conversion: When telesales people have a particularly successful or challenging call, those calls can be shared with the rest of the sales team. Reviewing these calls can be especially valuable for motivating underperforming sales staff or training new sales staff.

Gain competitive intelligence data: Sometimes customers phone into a call center and, often unknowingly, share information about a retailer’s competition – as in, “I got a free such-and-such when I bought this from ABC Company.” This competitive intelligence can provide a sales and marketing organization with the insight they need to re-align campaigns. Agents can also keep this information in mind when other customers/prospects call in so they can anticipate how to address this response, perhaps by countering with a similar offer, for example.

Glean product information: Call recording systems allow retailers to run reports segmenting calls by product or product line. From these calls, retailers can learn what specific problems or concerns were cited by customers. This information can then be shared with the product development team so they can fix any glitches.

We surveyed several contact center industry groups on LinkedIn and garnered 25 replies on the topic of: Which Contact Center Metrics Matter Most. While I know some of you may be saying 25 is not a large enough sample size, I tend to agree with you. However, instead of ditching the results, I thought I'd at least share them in case you found some value in them.

Based on 25 different contact center KPIs/metrics, the five that seem the most relevant to these 25 respondents are:

1. Customer satisfaction - 44%
2. Call quality - 32%
3. Average handle time - 24%
4. Average speed of answer; and first call resolution both received 20%

Full results follow in the graph below.

Company websites have evolved into a powerful, persuasive tool. Not only do they provide current customers with critical information, but they also are frequently the portal through which new customers learn about your enterprise. Take a look at your current website: You might have snazzy graphics, crisp copy, and user-friendly navigation. But are you doing all that you can to both promote your enterprise and capture the very best attributes of your organization?

For companies that want to take their websites to the next level, consider using recorded calls as a unique and innovative feature that will help you stand apart from your competition. Because the truth is, no one can sell your products or services better than your existing customers. They’re the best source for testimonials, and when you use call recording software, you have those testimonials captured perfectly and for all time, just waiting to be used for purposes like this.

There are various ways that you can feature recorded calls on your website. Here are a few suggestions:

• When people visit your website, allow them to click on a link titled “Hear from our customers.” That link will then play a 30-45 second audio segment where the listener can hear the actual voice of a customer.
• Feature an audio montage on your home page. Here, you can take snippets from recorded customer calls and have them as running commentary that folks will hear when visiting your site.
• You can even create different montages to highlight various things your company is doing well. You can craft a montage that focuses on great customer service calls, one for great product/service calls, and one in which callers talk about how much better your product/service stands up to the competition, for example. You can rotate these montages on a daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly basis.
• If featuring actual recorded calls seems too daunting, you can also transcribe select snippets from recorded calls and have a streaming marquee on your home page with written customer quotes. Again, you can rotate this marquee on a regular basis.

How do you select which interactions or snippets from calls to feature? Consider calls where your customers:

• Express delight about the customer service they’ve just received
• Provide a comment about how well they like your product/service
• Remark specifically about what your product/service enabled them to do or the benefits it provided
• Commented about how your product/service is superior to your competitors’.

With a little extra time and effort, you can take calls captured through call recording software and use them to boost the marketing effectiveness of your website and impress your customers, both current and potential.

Good managers are always seeking new ways to communicate with and convey information to their staff. Directly and persuasively reaching employees can help to bolster employee performance – and better performing employees usually leads to happier employees and, as a result, more satisfied customers.

One of the most important ways that managers communicate with their staff is through meetings. They are obviously ubiquitous in today’s corporate environment, used to discuss strategy, goals, monthly or quarterly results, and countless other topics that are necessary for running a business. Sometimes these meetings are long; sometimes they’re boring; sometimes they’re useless and don’t accomplish much. But what if there were a way to help add a little extra “oomph” to those meetings – to get staff thinking about your products, services, or even entire your business, from a new perspective?

That’s just one of the many uses for recorded calls. By using select calls captured with call recording software, you can jump-start your meetings with the true voice of the customer – actual feedback from real individuals who buy your products or services and have something to say about what you’re doing (right or wrong).  These calls can also reveal if your front-line employees – those who interact with your customers – are doing (or not doing) their jobs well, thus providing fodder to analyze best practices.

Recorded calls can be used for kick-off meetings by an organization’s:

• VP of Customer Service: Responsible for the customer-service strategy of the company, this person sets the agenda for how the company interacts with customers. Use recorded calls for monthly or weekly staff meetings and have agents analyze what went wrong or right with a call.
• Call Center Manager: As the person in charge of the daily running and management of the center, this individual can use recorded calls to kick off staff meetings as a way to help demonstrate:
  • High first call resolution
  • High customer service levels
  • Low average handle time
• VP of Sales: As the person responsible for the direction and management of all sales and business development operations, this individual’s primary focus is increasing sales revenue and attracting new customers. He/she can play recorded calls at staff meetings to show how customers responded to a new sales campaign or service offer.
• Head of Marketing: This person is charged with developing and executing a clearly defined marketing and communications strategy to support sales and market-share growth. Recorded calls can demonstrate the need for potential new products or services that your organization is considering. This person can also use these calls to brainstorm other ideas to meet customer demand.

Recorded calls provide a perfect springboard, both for analyzing employee performance and for developing or refining new ideas. There’s nothing like hearing something in-person to make reality come to life. Instead of starting your meetings with vague analyses or yawn-inducing spreadsheets, you can lead off your gatherings with recorded calls than accurately – and persuasively – prove the points you want to make.

Most top executives don’t have the time to track the grass-roots views of their organization’s customers. C-suite professionals (aptly named because of the “C” in their acronym: CEO, CFO, CMO, CIO, and the like) are simply too busy. They expend most of their efforts shaping and executing the organization’s strategic direction, addressing big-picture challenges related to finance, mergers & acquisitions, or operational expansion, and making a myriad of other critical business decisions.

But while these strategic issues are vitally important to the successful running of any enterprise, so, too, is keeping a pulse on what customers are actually thinking. And that appears to be a big problem among many companies today. Indeed, a 2013 article from Forbes, titled “10 Reasons Why CEOs Do Not Understand Their Customers,” accurately summed up the challenge: “Most companies today are woefully – and perhaps disastrously – out of touch with the feelings of their customers and prospects.”

There’s a great way to access the “feelings of customers and prospects” – by using call recording software. With a call recording system, an organization can capture the actual voice of customers and potential customers and use those calls to keep senior-level executives connected to ultimate end-users of your company’s products and services.

Consider the following ways to share the needs and concerns of your customers with your executives:

• Senior executive meeting: Bring the voice of the customer right into the room at your next high-level meeting. Share select recorded calls and use them as a kick-off point to address key issues and problems. Consider the impact of actually hearing a customer say something like “Your products lack innovation” or “I wish I could get your XYZ service on the West Coast.”  
• Offsite seminar: At your next corporate retreat, conduct a session specifically devoted to addressing customer concerns and use these recorded calls as the basis for that session.
• Corporate mandate: Require that every senior VP or C-suite professional listen to just a few customer calls per week (or per month). This will no doubt go a long way in giving them great new insight.
• Staff the call center: If you want to take a more drastic step, require that your senior staff take a customer service call every now and then. Just imagine what they would hear and discover!

By instituting even just one of these suggestions, you can help bring your top-level executives closer to the actual opinions of your customers. And consider how much more customer-focused your management meetings would be if these steps were put into place, helping your organization to make decisions based on real customer feedback, not simply statistical research or spreadsheet analysis. Recorded calls offer a great tool to help executives at every level do something vitally important: listen and learn.

In today’s competitive and technologically advanced environment, companies all over the world are using call recording for a variety of purposes. From ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements to assistance with dispute resolution or order verification, recorded calls can play a vital role in helping an organization achieve its strategic goals and support its day-to-day operations.

In addition to the more obvious uses of recorded calls, there’s also what some would consider “outside the box” ways that recorded calls can deliver value to an organization. One such way: crafting customer personas.

Just what is a customer persona? According to the Buyer Persona Institute, an organization devoted to helping organizations craft personas to achieve their sales and marketing objectives, the precise definition is: “An example of the real person who buys, or might buy, products like the ones you market, based on what you’ve learned from direct interviews with real buyers.”

In simple terms, the ability to craft a customer persona can bring to life your target buyers in a way that can help your staff see inside the minds of these individuals. Customers are no longer amorphous entities or vague abstractions – they’re actual people, with specific interests, needs, preferences, and problems. And with the correct buyer personas you have captured the true essence of who you are selling to and this can go a long way toward increasing sales, executing more targeted marketing campaigns and providing more customized service.

In order to develop useful, valuable customer personas, you need information. It’s certainly not always possible – or even advisable – to reach out to actual customers and interrogate them about their buying habits, geographic location, special concerns, and the like. But when you use call recording software, you probably possess that insight already through the calls that are handled by your customer-facing agents. These calls provide a treasure-trove of data from which to craft customer personas -- and vital information that can be passed along to your sales and marketing teams.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to using recorded calls for this purpose:

• Step 1: Flag Calls -- Request that your customer-facing phone staff flag calls from customers that express specific interests, personality traits, buyer behaviors, demographic data, or pain points.
• Step 2: Listen to Recorded Calls -- Have your marketing department listen to these flagged calls. This can be done as a team activity or by individuals. Consider establishing a regular interval for listening to these calls – perhaps every quarter, month, or even week. For organizations with fairly static products and markets, once every six months may suffice.
• Step 3: Create Personas -- Ask the marketing team to come together and develop real, working customer personas to describe your target customers very specifically.
• Step 4: Use Personas in Marketing/Sales -- Challenge your marketing and sales teams to use these personas to more accurately execute programs that will attract these individuals and ultimately prompt them to buy from you.
• Step 5: Repeat as Necessary -- As you introduce new products/services or enter new markets, make sure to repeat these steps. As your products and services change, so will your customer personas. Make sure you keep current with them.

Accurate customer personas can help your marketing and sales forces succeed, both by helping you attract new customers and ensuring you keep your current ones.

Here is a HubSpot blog post that goes into customer personas in detail and even provides a link to download a customer persona template.

FBI estimates of the cost of insurance fraud in the U.S. are staggering: Non-health insurance fraud is estimated to be more than $40 billion per year, which impacts consumers due to higher premiums. It also harms insurers’ profits and the country’s economic stability. The insurance industry itself is massive – consisting of more than 7,000 companies that collect over $1 trillion in premiums each year – and its size contributes significantly to the cost of insurance fraud by providing numerous opportunities and greater incentives for committing illegal activities.

Here are some of the more common insurance fraud schemes:

• Premium Diversion, or the embezzlement of insurance premiums. This is most common type of insurance fraud, and occurs when an insurance agent fails to send premiums to the underwriter and instead keeps the money for personal use. Another common premium diversion scheme involves selling insurance without a license, collecting premiums, and then not paying claims.

• Fee Churching, which is when a series of intermediaries takes commissions through reinsurance agreements. In this scenario, the initial premium is reduced by repeated commissions until there is no longer money to pay claims. The company left to pay the claims is often a business the conspirators have set up to fail. When viewed alone, each transaction appears to be legitimate—only after the cumulative effect is considered, does fraud emerge.

• Asset Diversion, or the theft of insurance company assets. This occurs almost exclusively in the context of an acquisition or merger of an existing insurance company and involves acquiring control of an insurance company with borrowed funds. After making the purchase, the subject uses the assets of the acquired company to pay off the debt. The remaining assets can then be diverted to the subject.

• Workers’ Compensation Fraud. Some entities purport to provide workers’ compensation insurance at a reduced cost and then misappropriate premium funds without ever providing insurance.

• Disaster-Related Fraud, which involves false or exaggerated claims by policyholders. Claims could include misclassification of flood damage as wind, fire, or theft; claims filed by individuals residing hundreds of miles outside the disaster zone; bid-rigging by contractors and falsely inflating the cost of repairs; contractors requiring upfront payment for services and then failing to perform the agreed-upon repairs; and charity fraud scams designed to misappropriate funds donated for disaster relief.

Faced with such an enormous job, fraud officers need as many tools as possible to help identify and thwart these schemes. The trouble is, finding evidence for fraud can be tricky – but sometimes, it’s just a phone call way. That’s where call recording software can help. Call recording systems can enable a call center to flag and easily query all calls associated with a specific claim. Fraud investigators can then scrutinize each call where fraud is suspected to identify any inconsistencies or discrepancies that might indicate fraudulent activity.

Call recording can be a powerful weapon in a fraud officer’s arsenal.

More and more organizations today are using business process outsourcers (BPOs) to perform some of their most necessary functions. BPO categories can range from front-office customer services, such as technical support, to back-office business operations like billing. Recent research shows that since the mid-1990s, the number and scope of BPOs have grown exponentially, particularly in India, which ranks as the world’s preferred market for BPO companies, followed (in no particular order) by Australia, China, the Philippines, and Ireland.

Because they’re located offsite from an organization, quality control of BPOs becomes an important consideration, both for the company doing the outsourcing and for those performing the outsourcing services. That’s why call recording can offer valuable assistance, providing a window into what’s taking place and insight into:  

• Regulatory and industry compliance: Helping to ensure that all proper procedures are being followed. This includes guaranteeing, for example, that credit card information and personal data are being appropriately handled or that HIPAA (Health Information Portability & Accountability Act) rules are adhered to.
• Operational performance: Allowing managers to screen employees’ activities to identify areas where workflow was hampered or interrupted. Calls can also provide insight that can assist with staff training and development.
• Service quality: Providing access to customer interactions so that managers can know whether agents are providing the highest level of service. And should a dispute ever arise, these calls can be analyzed to help resolve the problem.
• Critical business data: Gathering key pieces of information about customers, their concerns, and their buying habits. You can glean geographic data, for example, as well as gain competitive intelligence based on what callers say about what they like or don’t like about other products they’ve tried or are considering.

That’s the easy part: knowing you need call recording software. Next comes the hard part: selecting one. Actually, it’s not such a difficult choice, because regardless of where you or your BPO is located, you need to look for the same thing when it comes to call recording software – a solution that’s affordable, scalable and keeps you in complete control so that you can deliver the best possible results for your business.

When evaluating call recording software for a BPO, look for solutions that offer:

• Open recording architecture: You’ll want software that’s free from any proprietary hindrances.
• Ability to work with any operating system, server or database: In “techie” terms, the software should be “system, server and database agnostic.”
• Open data model: Make sure you own the data.
• Customizable solution: Enables you to fully customize the software with open APIs (Web 2.0)
• No maintenance required: Worry-free software means you can spend your time thinking about more important concerns.
• Software which can be learned and used in minutes: No special training or technical expertise is required to install, operate or manage the system.

Employing the services of a BPO can provide tremendous benefits to an organization, including productivity improvement, improved use of resources, cost savings, and the ability to focus on core business areas. Just make sure your organization is making the most out of its BPO relationship by gaining the insights that only call recording can provide.

CEO Jim Murphy

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