ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

While call recording software can add significant value to your customer service, compliance and risk mitigation efforts, there are certain rules an organization must live by with regard to its use.

Call Recording Do's:

1. Set-up pre-defined search queries for the specific types of calls you are looking for (e.g. all calls that result in a cancelled order).  The availability of this intelligence will help you make important decisions.
2. Notify all customer-facing staff and customers that their calls are being recorded.
3. Record your sales calls too.  It helps to have recorded sales calls on hand to share with others that are brought in on the deal and also they are invaluable for training new salespersons.
4. Keep a repository of best and worst calls to help train new agents or to improve the skills of existing ones. Store calls that span all different types of interactions, including calls that resulted in a closed sale, up-sell, cancelled order, dispute, unhappy customer, etc. 
5. Be sure the call recording system you choose can integrate with most leading PBXs.  You may choose to replace your PBX one day or you might merge with/acquire another company that has a different PBX and you'll want to be able to integrate with that switch as well.

Call Recording Don'ts:

1. Don't purchase a call recording solution that doesn't also offer quality monitoring/selective recording because you may need/want it later on and you'd hate to have to migrate all of your recorded data to a new platform that can offer it.
2. Don't purchase a call recording solution without first trying it out.  Like anything else, you want to be sure it works in your environment, provides you with the functionality you require and is easy to navigate and utilize. 
3. Don't purchase call recording software that doesn't offer an open API so you are assured it will interoperate with your existing and future applications.
4. Don't under-utilize the system.  Ensure all staff that can benefit directly from the system are successfully trained on its use and have access to recordings.  This includes staff from Sales, Marketing, your Executive team and so on.  They can all realize significant value from hearing the actual voice of the customer.
5. Don't dump recordings before a year if possible.  You will see as times goes by how valuable these past calls can be for training, dispute resolution, agent incentivization and so on and you'll want to have them accessible for these reasons up to 12 months down the road.

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!).

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.

We've all heard the statistics that it costs 6-7 times as much to land a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.  While the challenge of mitigating customer defection is an ongoing one, it can be overcome with call center recording.

Call center recording systems enable you to capture your customer interactions and learn what went right or wrong during the call so you can go back and fix any problems.  You can also use the call recording system to monitor agents to learn why they are successful and unsuccessful so you can go back and better train them.  This same software can also help you quickly identify customers that are about to defect.  What if you created an alert that told you every time an agent visited a "cancel a subscription" page?  That would give whoever is responsible for rescuing fleeting customers instant notification of one about to leave.  Just think for a second how valuable such an alert or intelligence would be in terms of stemming the flow of departing customers. It would be huge.

The capabilities call center recording brings to your organization (whether a tiny, small, medium, large or enormous call center) can make a profound impact on your ability to increase customer satisfaction and dramatically decrease customer defection rates.

Here are some tips for lowering customer defection rates within your organization using call center recording:

1. Set up alerts to notify your customer account rescue team (or person) that a person is about to defect - or already has.

2. Monitor agents to determine who has the highest number of customer defection calls and train them accordingly.

3. Send training modules to all customer-facing staff with tips on how to persuade customers from leaving.

4. Query, identify and flag all recorded customer calls in which the customer has indicated dissatisfaction of any kind.  Then, assign these customers (by their phone number) to your best agents so they are handled as delicately as possible the next time they call in.

5. Create two recorded call libraries to train staff - one containing best-practice calls in which the unsatisfied customer was persuaded to stay, and the other containing poor-performing calls in which the call was handled poorly and the customer did indeed defect.

6. Hold rapid fire training sessions with all customer-facing staff to share positive and negative experiences with handling customer dissatisfaction.

7. Create a customer rescue team that follows up with all dissatisfied callers within 24 hours of their last contact with your organization.  These individuals can offer the customer some sort of incentive to smooth things over - such as a discount, a free offer, etc.