ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

How do you know when it's time to shelve the old call recording software and purchase a new call recording solution?

There are several signs to look out for, some of which may seem obvious while others may not:

1. The product's end of life is coming up and will no longer be supported.

2. The product can no longer scale up to support your growing needs (channels, sites, etc.).

3. It cannot easily integrate with other software you are installing. 

4. It requires too many IT support resources to maintain the system.

5. You are heavy into M&A activity and the current system cannot support the multiple PBXs of the various merging entities.

6. It does not have the added capabilities you need, such as quality monitoring, screen capture, live monitoring or even mobile recording.

7. It costs a lot of money to bring on new users, sites and/or capabilities, and it requires expensive professional services support to do these things.

8. The software does not support all of the compliance requirements you have to deal with, such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, Do Not Call, etc.

9. It is complicated to use and learn and takes too long to get new users up to speed.

2014 is right around the corner and now is the time to start thinking about your overall customer service capabilities, strategy and resource allocation. Do you have the right call recording and quality monitoring technology in place, for example?  Are you focused on the right metrics?

Below are several important statistics from this year to help you focus your efforts for next year so you can increase your overall customer satisfaction.

42% of service agents are unable to efficiently resolve customer issues due to disconnected systems, archaic user interfaces, and multiple applications. (Forrester)

89% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company after experiencing poor customer service. (RightNow Customer Experience Impact Report)

Consumers are 2 times more likely to share their bad customer service experiences than they are to talk about positive experiences. (2012 Global Customer Service Barometer)

Consumers still prefer telephone assistance the most - Phone (61%), email (60%), Live Chat (57%), online knowledge base (51%), “click-to-call” support automation (34%). (eConsultancy)

70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated. (McKinsey)

Almost 10% of consumers have experienced being transferred from agent to agent without any resolution of their problem. (American Express)

A 10% increase in customer retention levels result in a 30% increase in the value of the company. (Bain & Co)

The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%.  (Marketing Metrics)

For every customer complaint there are 26 other unhappy customers who have remained silent. (Lee Resource)

On average, agents spend 11% of their time looking for information needed to manage customer interactions. (Aberdeen Group)

46% of contact centers identify improving agent productivity and utilization as a main objective. (Aberdeen Group)

Only 26% of companies have a well-developed strategy in place for improving the customer experience. (Econsultancy MultiChannel Customer Experience Report)

A good, inexpensive and easy to install call recording and quality monitoring system can help you address these and many more customer service needs.

Almost one in every three people in the world uses email, and there are over 6.8 billion mobile subscribers globally.  This same ubiquity should hold true for call recording.  The ability to record calls enables you to document and store important business discussions, treasured personal conversations and more.  Wouldn't it be great to be able to go back and pull up that call you had with that client a few weeks ago who mentioned that great new product idea?  Or how about that call you had with your 1 year old last month in which he spoke for the first time? What about that last call you had with your loved one that recently passed on?

Having these conversations recorded and stored for easy access would add significant value to our lives.  Wouldn't it?

I think we take for granted just how big a part of our life the telephone still is.  Sure we are all texting, emailing and chatting more and more, but I'll bet you placed or received at least one phone call in the last 24 hours.  Am I right?

Why shouldn't we all (whether big business, entrepreneur or everyday individual) have access to call recording that is either free or extremely inexpensive so we can leverage its value to our business and/or personal lives?  The cell phone is a seminal component to our every day lives now and we do not have a foundational capability that we should have with it - recording our calls.

While I am primarily referencing cell phone recording, this same premise applies to landline phones too.  Most of us still use them at home and especially at work.

In order for the pervasiveness of call recording to explode, several things have to happen:

1. People need to embrace the concept of recording business and personal calls.

2. Mobile apps for cell phones need to emerge.

3. The cost of call recording software needs to come down dramatically from most vendors (OrecX is already extremely affordable!).

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