Every organization wants to know what its customers are thinking. After all, when you’re armed with this information, you have the ability to develop new products and services – or modify existing ones – to help bolster sales conversion, market penetration, and, ultimately, profits. Fortunately, insight into the minds of your customers is closer than you think, through the power of call recording. With this tool, you can listen to the actual voices (including the tone and intonation) of your customers when they call your organization to order a product, file a complaint, cancel a subscription, or ask a question. These calls can provide various types of market intelligence that can help your organization succeed, including:

• Product Feedback: Call recording software provides access to every conversation your sales and support staff have with customers. This means you’ll hear, first hand and in their own words, whether customers are pleased or dissatisfied with your products – what they like, what they don’t like, why they purchased your product, or why they want to return it. This information can then be shared with your product development team to help them better understand and segment your customers so they can provide more targeted, improved products and services.
• Competitive Insight: When customers call your company, they sometimes reveal details about the activities of your competitors. This information can take the form of statements such as, “Well, XYZ Corporation doesn’t require a credit card for a free trial” or “I can get a free widget when I enroll in XYZ’s program.” These disclosures by your customers can give your sales and marketing team the insight they need to perhaps realign certain products to improve sales conversion. This information also can help your customer service staff learn how to address these situations in the future, perhaps by countering with a similar offer.
• Buying Behavior: Call recording software can help reveal why customers in a certain geographic region are purchasing (or are dissatisfied with) your product. You can also glean seasonal patterns (for example, do product sales pick up around holiday times?) and determine what might be done in certain geographic regions to help address these disputes or capitalize on these trends. You can also use this data to identify and increase cross-sell or up-sell opportunities.

While most call recording software gives organizations the ability to record customer calls and analyze them at a later time, other solutions can actually provide real-time access to these calls. With live monitoring software, a call center supervisor can listen to a call in real time, enabling the supervisor to quickly send information (via chat, for example) to help an agent retain the customer. Similarly, some monitoring software solutions enable you to set up a report that flags every call in which your sales or support person visits the “Cancel my account” page, or in which an account was actually closed. You can then send those calls to your account rescue team to prevent the customer from leaving or help win him or her back.

Equipped with this market intelligence information, your organization can also prepare a list of “canned responses” to customer indications of defection. These can help with customer retention and also improve the skill sets of your agents. The truth is, the cost of acquiring a new customer is six to seven times greater than keeping an existing one, which means that keeping the customers you have is a business imperative for every organization.