We all know that call recording and quality monitoring software can help your business capture customer calls to assess customer service performance, settle disputes, maintain PCI/HIPAA compliance and so on.  But what you may not know is that there are a host of unique ways to also leverage your call recording software. These are ideas to help you realize even greater value from your existing call recording system, or to provide additional incentive for purchasing your first recording solution.

Here is the list:

• Share Recording Snippets on your Website - Capture select segments of high-performing agents while on the phone with actual customers and include those excerpts on your website as a testament to how well you treat and service customers.  There is no better way to demonstrate great service than to provide actual examples.

• Use Voice of the Agent for Marketing Campaigns - Similarly to number 1, you can take best-practice segments of customer interactions and use them in your advertising/marketing campaigns. Telcos, computer companies, travel industry firms and the like are always touting their stellar customer service capabilities but we all know sometimes the view under the covers isn't always as pretty.  Why not share audio segments through online banner ads or other promotional vehicles?  NOTE: Keep the customer's name or other personally identifiable information out of the recording sections you choose.

• Create a Hall of Fame of Recordings - There is no better way to incentivize your phone staff than to recognize them.  Why not create a customer service hall of fame on your internal website featuring the very best interactions. This will instill pride in those that are chosen and inspire those that were not.  It can also serve as a great training tool to new staff.

• Kick off Team Meetings - Start team meetings with best-practice and worst-practice calls as a means of sparking discussion around what to do and what not to do when servicing prospects and customers. You will surely find the resulting discussion very illuminating for all.

• Create a Tag Cloud of Customer Praise - Extract key phrases of customer praise from your best interactions and use them to create a tag cloud that you can blow up and put on the walls in your call center.  You might even share it with the broader company for them to display as well.

Organizations of all sizes today employ call recording software to help optimize sales, service and compliance; and when chosen and managed correctly, these solutions can be invaluable in this regard.  However, call recording software is not always selected or utilized properly, and when this happens, its effectiveness can be significantly stifled.

Below is a list of the top 5 mistakes companies make when purchasing, deploying or managing a call recording software system:

1. Neglecting to try the software out first before purchasing it.  You wouldn't buy a car without first test driving it. The same holds true for call recording software.  You must install it in your environment and give it a test run before committing to a full purchase.  Not all call recording software providers offer such a trial, but some do. Demand that you get to trial the software upfront.

2. Ensuring it has the necessary compliance capabilities.  Most firms today fall under some sort of regulations - PCI-DSS, HIPAA, Telemarketing Sales Rule, etc. You want to be sure your new software supports these requirements with call masking/muting, e.g. to eliminate sensitive information from the call recording, or other capabilities.  

3. Not creating and saving specific search queries.  You should be able to develop highly specific search queries for pulling up all calls that meet certain criteria - such as all calls over five minutes that mention the word "cancel", or all calls involving support for a new product, etc. These search parameters need to be able to be saved and running in the background so these interactions are automatically cued for you for quick and easy discovery. Speech analytics software may need to be installed in concert with call recording software to bring these capabilities to life.

4. Not leveraging call recordings for the benefit of the full organization - There is no better way to tie your complete staff directly to the voice of the customer than by letting them hear the actual voice of the customer.  If you have a loud speaker in the office, notify all staff to listen for three minutes - once a week or so - while you play a good service call for them.  If you don't have a broadcasting capability, simply email a select recording to all staff and require them to listen to it, again, once a week or so. Almost no organizations today do this, but it's a fantastic way to tie the customer and all of your employees together.

5. Not ensuring the software has an open API or tested and easy integration to your PBX, CRM system, and so on. The last thing you want is a new solution that is very difficult to integrate with your current environment.  Be sure to ask for testing certifications from switch vendors, proof of a true open API, etc.  This is a very big pitfall that many organizations fall into.  Call recording vendors love to tell you that they can integrate seamlessly with any PBX but when push comes to shove it's a clunky, complicated, arduous and time consuming process.  You want to avoid all of this hassle at all costs.  It slows down your implementation, rings up your cost and creates a whole lot of unnecessary headache. 

Agent productivity (or the number of calls your CSRs successfully handle) can mean the difference between thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of dollars saved or spent each month in your call center, depending upon how large your center is.  Any efficiencies you can draw out of your agents will therefore yield tremendous bottom-line value. This is where call recording, and especially screen recording, comes into play.

When your agents are on the phone with your customers, they should be serving their needs quickly and effectively, by swiftly and accurately navigating the necessary screens on their desktop to access and input customer data, find product/service information, etc.  Sometimes these screens or workflows can be interrupted by navigational problems (by the agent or the system) or application glitches (not the agent's fault).  With screen recording software, you can monitor these workflows to identify any system or agent issues and remedy them at once.  As mentioned before, these fixes can translate into substantial time and cost savings for your call center.

Here are the top five reasons to record agent screen activity during customer interactions:

1. Identify application or system breakdowns that affect agent screen navigation

2. Discover areas to improve agent efficiency through additional skills training (for example, increasing proficiency with certain applications or workflows)

3. Uncover unauthorized personal activity by agents (for example, checking their own facebook or playing Solitaire during a customer interaction)

4. Identify PCI or HIPAA compliance issues upon data entry (such as the agent's screen erroneously displaying the credit card information upon entry when it's supposed to be masked).   

5. Record best-practice agent screen performance to share with underperforming agents

Agent screen recording solutions today can capture full motion video of the agent's desktop throughout the entire customer interaction.  This recording, synchronized upon playback with the corresponding agent and customer audio recording) gives supervisors and managers a clear, 360-degree view of exactly what transpired during a given customer interaction.  

For ease of retrieval, recordings (screen and audio) can be identified and accessed by date, user name, agent, phone number, and so on. These same recordings can be shared and viewed in industry-standard MPEG4 format and played or viewed on any desktop or capable mobile device.   

How do you know if you're getting the most utility from your recorded calls?

Well, there is a litmus test you can take that will help you score the value you are realizing from recording customer calls.  Here it goes; answer the questions and keep a tally of your scores, which are represented in parentheses after each scoring option:

1. How many calls per agent are you monitoring a month for quality monitoring?

Five (3 points)

Seven (5 points)

Ten (7 points)

Over 10 (10 points)

2. Do you listen to past customer calls at contact center staff meetings and discuss them collectively to identify best practices and/or areas for improvement?

No (0 points)

Yes, just best practice calls (5 points)

Yes, just improvement opportunity calls (5 points)

Yes, both best-practice and improvement-opportunity calls (10 points)

3. Do you have new agents listen to good and bad calls to help with training?

Yes, good calls only (3 points)

Yes, bad calls only (3 points)

Yes, both good and bad calls (7 points)

No (0 points)

4. Do you have agents self-evaluate themselves on good and bad calls?

Good calls (3 points)

Bad calls (7 points)

No calls (0 points)

5. Do you capture every customer call (100 percent total recording)?

Yes (10 points)

No (0 points)

6. How long do you retain all calls for order verification, dispute resolution and compliance purposes?

Two weeks (0 points)

One month (1 point)

Two months (2 points)

Six months (3 points)

One year (5 points)

Two years (10 points)

7. Do you regularly share select call recordings with outside-the-call-center business users/managers/executives? If so, how often?

Never (0 points)

Once a month (3 points)

Once a week (7 points)

Daily (10 points)

8. Do you have call-of-the-week/month contests with agents and incentivize winners?

No (0 points)

Yes (7 points)

9. Do you selectively record and live monitor calls for quality assurance?

No (0 points)

Yes (5 points)

10. How often do you use a call recording to support/settle a dispute or verify an order?

Never (0 points)

Weekly (10 points)

Monthly (5 points)

Annually (1 point)

Assessment:

Now, tally your score if you haven't already and check yourself against the following scale, which helps you understand how well you are leveraging your recorded customer calls:

Over 60 - You are the gold standard that other companies should look up to.

45-59 - You are doing a great job.

35-44 - You could be using call recordings much more effectively/often.

25-34 - You are doing the bare minimum to utilize your recorded calls.

Under 25 - You are not using your call recording system effectively at all.  Consider contacting a call recording consultant for help. 

In this episode of Asterisk Live (by Asterisk), Bruce Kaskey, COO of OrecX joins the call to discuss voice recording with Asterisk. Bruce notes, "OrecX, which stands for 'Open Recording Systems', provides both open source and commercial versions of call recording and voice data software. OrecX solutions work in tandem with Asterisk to do passive, SPAN-based calling recording. This offloads the CPU of your Asterisk PBX allowing it to be able to handle more simultaneous call load. Additionally, OrecX provides data solutions that allow for screen capture recording. SMB Contact Centers can use screen capture in tandem with voice recording to train contact center agents.

Click below to view the entire webcast.

Every business deserves to have call recording software but not all can afford it. Call recording software helps companies across all industries improve customer service, minimize risk, verify orders and maintain compliance.    Many systems cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy, tens of thousands to implement and tens of thousands to maintain.  Not all systems do, however. Some call recording software is much more affordable, can be installed in just minutes and requires little if any maintenance.  These are the systems that every organization has a right to own. 

In fact, there should be a Call Recording Bill of Rights to ensure every business has access to call recording software, as it has essentially become a business critical application today.

Bill of Rights:

1. Call recording software shall be affordable enough that any business in need can easily acquire, install and maintain it.
2. Call recording software shall be flexible enough to interoperate with any technology environment.
3. Call recording software shall be installed remotely or onsite.
4. Call recording software shall require little, if any, maintenance and support.
5. Call recording software shall feature at the least voice/screen recording, quality monitoring and mobile call recording.
6. Call recording software shall be open source or open architecture to ensure full interoperability with existing systems.
7. Call recording software shall cost nothing or almost nothing to customize and tailor to one’s environment.
8. Call recording software shall be offered as a free trial prior to purchase.
9. Call recording software shall be interoperable with leading PBX systems – both TDM and VoIP – such as Avaya, Cisco and others.
10. Call recording software shall be both PCI-DSS and HIPAA compliant.
11. Call recording software shall be installed in hours, not days, weeks or months.
12. Call Recordings shall be portable and available in industry-standard file format.
13. Call recording software should be easy enough to learn in just a few hours.
14. All call recording software advanced features shall be available in all product levels - no feature stripping for basic offerings.

While call recording is obviously not a right, we at OrecX we believe it should be. 

Call recording software can bring substantial value to any organization in the form of improved customer service, regulatory/industry compliance, order verification and dispute resolution capabilities.  In this piece we are going to focus only on the customer service and dispute resolution value of call recording.

When you capture customer calls (and agent screen activity), you have a goldmine of data to help you dramatically enhance your entire customer service operation. The reason is that these interactions are precisely where your company delivers its service.  These customer conversations with your agents are at the very center of your organization's ability to deliver a stellar customer experience. So not only do you want to record these interactions, but you also want to listen to what the recordings are telling you.

Here are the top 3 things you can learn from your recorded calls:

1. Which customers might defect and why - why not have each agent ask callers at the end of the conversation to rate the service given on a scale of 1-5.  With this information, your supervisors can review the calls of anyone who gave a score of 1-2 (possibly 3) and call them back if necessary to keep them from defecting.  You can also use these recordings to ascertain where the problem lies - was it due to poor agent performance, a correctable workflow issue, etc.

2. Which workflow processes need fixing - A dissatisfied customer might be the result of faulty workflow processes.  When supervisors listen to a sampling of calls (and view the screen recording) from each agent, they may discover workflow issues.  For instance, you might find that certain data (like purchase history) isn't populating properly on the agent's screen.  Perhaps there is an on-screen glitch in order processing and certain orders won't take and need to be resubmitted.  With the recordings, you will be able to identify such root causes of customer service disruption so you can work to correct them right away.

3. Who is at fault in a customer dispute (agent or customer?) - Customers often times say one thing and recall saying something else.  When this happens, disputes can occur.  With the specific recorded call at your disposal, you and the agent can listen to the interaction and determine precisely what was said.  If a customer did in fact provide authorization to charge his/her credit card, for example, you will hear it.  If he/she did not offer such approval, you will learn that too.

Did you know all the different types of insightful business data you can glean from your call recording software?  You can garner important information to help you make performance improvements and more informed business decisions.  This data goes far beyond the standard agent performance, quality monitoring type of data. There are likely some new types of data listed below that you might not have thought of before, and these can help you realize maximum value from your call recording system as well as drive improvements across specific areas of your organization.

Some of the key pieces of data you can glean from your call recording software include:

Geographic Purchasing Data - Which parts of the country or the world are most receptive to a new product or marketing campaign?  From this data you can ascertain some important insights regarding your products and specific markets.  The same holds true for particular vertical industries.  In other words, why are you receiving calls from a recent campaign from insurance company prospects (or from individuals in Greece) only?

Solution Problem Identification - You can determine which products/services are receiving the most support calls and can pass this information along to your product development and product marketing teams along with specifics on what the most prevalent problems were.

Competitive Intelligence - What are callers saying about what they like or don't like about the other products they've tried or are considering? Customers love to tell us how great our competitors and their offerings are.  What can we learn from this competitive data that can help us improve our products/services and sales and marketing campaigns moving forward?

Dispute Patterns - Are there certain geographies, industries or sizes of companies that are yielding more disputes than others?  What might this tell you?

Promotion Ideas - Customers often tell agents about a great promotion or deal a competitor is offering in hopes the company will match it, for example.  You can pass this important data on to your sales and marketing teams to help them with their efforts.

False Promises Data - What if your call center receives a bunch of cancellation calls for a specific product?  Might this tell you that the sales/marketing messaging around the product might be misleading and making false promises or claims?

These are just some of the many unique things you can learn from your call recording software.

Before you purchase a call recording solution you need to be sure you receive adequate answers to a number of very important questions.  The right answers to these questions will ensure the system will fit your specific needs, will scale with you as you grow and will  interoperate with your existing environment. 

These are the questions:

1. Do I pay upfront as a capital expenditure or is there a subscription fee?

2. Do I have to sign a long term contract or simply pay as I go?

3. What does the implementation process entail? How long? How much involvement is required on my end? Do I need to have specific technical expertise?

4. Do I have to pay for all features and capabilities or can I select what I want? In other words, is it a single integrated solution or modular and I can pick and choose call recording, quality monitoring, screen recording, live monitoring, mobile recording, etc.?

5. Is there an open API so I can integrate with my other existing applications?

6. What PBXs does the system support?

7. What are the ongoing maintenance requirements?

8. What is involved in customizing the software to my specific look and feel, requirements, etc.?  Does it require your professional services support?

9. How many current users/customers do you have?  What countries are they in?

10. How do I know you will be around in three to five years?

11. Can I review some customer success stories?

12. Do you offer a free trial so I can test the software out in my environment before I purchase?

13. What type of training do you offer and how long does it take to become proficient with the software? Is it easy to learn?

14. How many channels/seats can your software support?

15. Can I use my own server(s)?

16. Does your software support multi-site? How about multi-tenant?

17. Can I speak with some satisfied customers?

18. Is your software PCI Compliant? HIPAA Compliant?

19. Are recorded calls portable in an open-file format?

20. Do you support TDM and VoIP?

21. What if I need to add more users? Do I need more hardware? What is involved?

22. Do you offer mobile phone recording?