ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

As appeared in Feb. 2016 Contact Center Pipeline

By Scott Bakken, MainTrax Founder and Partner

While placing my order for a $2,000 fish-finding tool, I envisioned walleyes jumping into my boat faster than I could toss them in my cooler. After a few frustrating afternoons on the water, I realized I would have been just as well off with a simple $149 model. Shelling out two grand for a tool loaded with bells and whistles would make sense if I were deep-sea fishing for tarpon. But deploying it for walleye was like using a bazooka to kill a mosquito.

Depending on what information they’re looking to reel in, contact centers investing in “big data” may also experience buyer’s remorse. Big data is all the rage these days but for many organizations, big data is overkill. What it often produces is big expenses and big headaches.

Indeed, big data, which is engineered to optimize predictive analytics and other sophisticated methods for extracting value from unstructured information, requires a big, big effort. Collecting a critical mass of data and gaining clarity about how to massage it to achieve predetermined objectives is a big job in itself. The processing piece that comes next demands highly skilled analysts who know how to discern operational subtleties and find the proverbial needles in an endless supply of data-stuffed haystacks. That’s a tall order for organizations of any size, much less contact centers whose size and budget don’t allow them to even consider jumping on the big data bandwagon.

Go Lean

A better option? Skinny data. More specifically, skinny speech data. Unlike big data, which is essentially a collection of data sets so large and complex that they become awkward to work with using traditional database management tools, we can define skinny data as solving specific problems around targeted business issues with minimal supporting data.

A data source that’s particularly well suited for skinny data applications is speech analytics, which enables you to move from data creation to easy-to-interpret results to business decision faster than you can say, “I can’t believe how inexpensive this is.” In fact, valuable “skinny” bits of information are probably in the speech tool you’re already using.

Leveraging skinny speech data can help contact centers improve agent effectiveness, minimize compliance risk, capitalize on selling opportunities, identify complaint trends, reduce customer churn, decrease operational costs and mine rich new veins of business intelligence.

Conversations I had with data science executives from two large insurance companies demonstrate the folly of pursuing big data when skinny data can get the job done quickly and efficiently. The first executive told me he wanted to process large customer data sets to predict churn using voice, text, e-mail, demographics, tenure, surveys and other forms of data.

The second executive was confident he could leverage speech analytics to generate valuable insights about churn and other business issues. He told me, “We already have so much big data that we don’t know what levers to pull right now. I just need some basic information that’s aligned with our KPIs (key performance indicators).”

Bingo. Skinny data can help you cross the finish line while big data is still generating a multitude of reports that are just as likely to confuse as impress. The contrast is stark: why sink $1 million or more into an enterprise CRM when actionable targeted analytics can be achieved by simply combining customer interactions and sales data?

Granted, if you want your analysis to uncover issues that are currently unknown and unanticipated, that’s a job for big data. But skinny speech data is ideally suited to boost contact center profitability by applying basic but effective methodologies to issues like First Call Resolution (FCR), root cause of calls, uninformed or unprofessional agents and customer frustration.

Skinny Speech Studies

A speech analytics pilot study built around an important business issue can help you discern the why behind the what and serve as a catalyst for change. For instance, if your rate of repeat calls is trending upward, an exploratory study can help identify the root cause of the higher rate and provide the necessary insights to take corrective measures.

Start your study by identifying an issue that relates directly to your KPIs, then spend two or three weeks searching through agent-customer conversations to find calls that support the study’s objectives.

Next, fill a bucket with 75 to 100 relevant recordings to share with your company’s decision makers. Invite them to sit around a table and listen to selected calls. Actually hearing the voice of the customer is far more impactful than reading reports or interpreting a set of dashboards.

Presenting the study with a compelling narrative interspersed with skinny pieces of data—snippets of audio and nuggets of analysis—can build awareness, initiate discussion and move your team to action.

Conclusion

Unlike long, complex initiatives that take nine to twelve months and produce results that don’t always justify the expense of producing them, skinny speech projects can generate fast, low-cost wins in four weeks or less and demonstrate to key stakeholders that your speech software is generating a healthy ROI.

About MainTrax

MainTrax is a leading provider of speech analytics managed services to end users and industry partners. Free of allegiance to any one solution or supplier, MainTrax has earned a reputation as an independent, unbiased resource for consulting expertise across a variety of products and providers.

Running a call center takes more than just connecting a set of agents to your office Asterisk PBX. At the very moment you start working, you realize that you need a set of tools to make sense of what is going on. This is true not only for large call centers, but even when you start having one person answering the phone, it does make sense to ask questions like: are we doing what is expected from us? Are we living up to our standards of quality? And most importantly: are people happy about the interactions they have with us? 

Because if they don’t, we are sooner or later in for an unpleasant surprise.

The big problem here is that you get no intuitive sense of what is going on in a room with agents talking on the phone; and so you need tools to augment your intuitive perception. And as things grow, or you start having agents working remotely, the problem gets even more serious.

At Loway, we believe that a tool to keep track of what is going on should have four main areas of concern:

• A real-time view
• A historical reporting mode
• An agent’s page
• A Quality Assessment module

The real-time view lets you see what is currently going on. It should be able to scale up and down at different levels of detail, in order to power wallboards and to communicate the current status of teams and of the call queues they serve to team leaders, so that they take corrective actions quickly. A defining feature here is the ability to use the real-time view as a communication platform to send feedback to agents, and to be able to “barge-in” to live calls in order to actively inspect problem situations as they unfold.

The historical reports are the bread and butter of call center analytics. What is important here is not so much the number of computed analyses, but the ease of making sense of what is going on, and the capabilities to drill down with searches in order to pinpoint specific issues. It is very important to be able to integrate with call recorders, so that the details of any specific call are just a click away; and to be able to retrieve different kinds of documents related to each call – e.g. video recordings, or chat transcripts, up to the CRM form.

The agent’s page (or agent toolbar) is a very important function that your call-center monitoring tools should provide. Even if this is not strictly speaking a monitoring function, using an agent’s page greatly facilitates feeding the monitoring backend; plus, an agent’s page allows a degree of interaction that would not be feasible using a phone’s limited numeric keyboard. For example, it is far easier for an agent to select a call outcome or a pause code out of a drop-down list than entering it as a numeric code, and this means you can have codes that are more specific. Also, when working on multiple queues, it is not easy joining / leaving them using a numeric keyboard. An important feature here is that the page should be web-based and will ideally include a soft-phone: it will act as a launching point for your CRM applications, and will reduce your TCO because agent workstations do not need additional software and can be blank, interchangeable workstations.

The Quality Assessment (QA) module is your secret weapon to effectively manage your call center. By reviewing call recordings, you can create a quality profile for each call; and by aggregating these call profiles you can understand the strengths and weaknesses of each individual agent, and of the service you offer. It is important to have a tool that is flexible enough to create scoring forms and rules that effectively match your business goals and targets; and it is also important that the calls to be reviewed are selected automatically based on both attributes of the call (e.g. the queue, the call outcome) and of the agent who processed it. An automated selection process is important to avoid any bias human reviewers may have towards “interesting” situations (calls that are long, or short, or are known issues) as they may not tell the whole store about what the agent is actually doing. The QA process is often used to analyze QA data gathered directly and automatically from callers, e.g. by using a post-call IVR, in order to directly measure perceived client satisfaction.

At Loway, we strongly believe that quality is the result of a continuous learning process powered by objective measurement. During the last 10 years, we have seen organizations learn and improve, turning this process into an asset to outperform the competition by simultaneously reducing costs and improving the service offered. Whatever the size of your Call Center, there is no excuse not to do it.

Article by Lorenzo Emilitri, founder of Loway.

https://www.loway.ch/

https://www.queuemetrics.com/

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.

Financial institutions – commercial and investment banks, securities firms, insurance companies, and the like – handle some of the world’s most sensitive information. From confidential SEC disclosures to personal financial data to secrets that could impact the entire world economy, financial organizations need tools to ensure that the information they are privy to is handled properly.

Because of the proprietary nature of the work they do, financial institutions have compliance departments. These departments play a vitally important role within the organization, as they are responsible for setting corporate compliance policy and ensuring that all staff adhere to critical governmental, industry, and corporate regulations and policies.

For a compliance officer, call recording can prove an invaluable tool. Why? Because if a call center employee at a financial institution fails to abide by relevant regulations, the organization could incur costly fines or damaging lawsuits.

Regulations and regulators that impact financial institutions include:

• SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) regulations: these rules and requirements govern the practices of the U.S. securities industry. In its role, the SEC oversees the key participants in the securities world, including securities exchanges, securities broker/dealers, investment advisors, mutual funds, and more.
• State insurance regulatory bodies: oversee the practices of insurance firms by state.
• HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act): protects patients' private information
• Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform & Consumer Protection Act: protects consumers from abusive financial services practices by large banks.
• PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard): protects customers from the misuse of their credit card information.
• Truth in Lending Act: protects consumers in their dealings with lenders and creditors.

Call recording software enables compliance officers at financial institutions to record the calls of their call center agents. By taking a sampling of calls (quality monitoring) or listening to all calls (total call recording), compliance staff can verify that interactions are being handled correctly. And when they’re not? Access to these calls can help the department identify potential problem areas and implement corrective actions, thereby preventing the company from exposure to potential fines or legal action.

Call recording also proves helpful should a dispute ever arise about compliance. If your organization is notified by a government or other regulatory body that a compliance infraction may have occurred, many times proof of innocence is required. When you can offer such proof through a full audio or screen recording captured by a call recording system, it’s easy to disprove the accusation. Without such concrete evidence, a financial institution faces great exposure, whether the infraction occurred or not.

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.