ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Call recording systems are often times only as good as the team that is adminstering/using them. If an organization has a robust call recording system in place, but its people aren't fully trained or committed to using it to its fullest potential, then the system's perceived success will be very low. This can impact performance and future resource allocation for the call recording system. 

For a successful call recording program within your organization, you need to start off on the right foot with the right strategy in place. This will help ensure passionate buy-in for your call recording system from your contact center team, your business users and your management team.  

Below is a framework to help you organize and launch a successful internal campaign for your call recording system.

NOTE: Even if you already have a call recording system in place, you can still adapt this process to fit your current needs and breathe new life into your call recording program.

To ensure you communicate the value of the call recording system to all relevant parties within the organization, it is best to view it from a three-tiered perspective consisting of three levels of value - tactical, operational and strategic - each with their own internal target audience(s).

TACTICAL VALUE:

Target - call center agents

This level describes how your call center agents can/should interact with the system. They can review past calls to see what went right and wrong, view performance reports on the length of their calls, the first call resolution rate of their interactions, how they measure up to others in their group, and so on.  It is important to communicate these things clearly to your agents to ensure maximum uptake, acceptance, utilization and impact of your call recording system.

OPERATIONAL VALUE:

Targets - call center supervisors and quality evaluators

This level represents how your call center managers and evaluators can leverage the system to improve their jobs.  For call center supervisors, this means monitoring agent and group performance to see where improvements need to be made in staffing, skill sets, process workflow and so on.  For evaluators, this level is about using the quality monitoring evaluation forms to assess and train agents for improved performance.  

STRATEGIC VALUE:

Targets - business users (marketing, sales, product management) and senior managers (VP Customer Service, COO, VP Compliance, etc.)

There are as many call recording solution providers out there as there are letters in the alphabet, with a large revenue disparity between the top two behemoths and the rest.  With regard to this bifurcation of the brand name players and all the others, the question becomes:

Does it really matter if you buy call recording software from a big guy or a small guy?  The short answer is a resounding "No".  Why do I know this?  Because I've worked for over six call recording companies including the number one provider, and I can tell you that customer after customer comes to the smaller guys following a dissatisfying experience with a big guy.  It happens all the time!!

Behind my nine-plus years in the call recording industry, I believe buyers of call recording systems sometimes play it safe by purchasing a system from one of the 800 pound gorillas, when in fact they could be just as well served (or even better served) spending far less by going with a smaller provider. At the end of the day, call recording systems really come down to four components which all vendors have some flavor of:

1. Call capture software - the software that actually records the call/screen and puts it in a storage location.

2. Logging hardware - the physical hardware that stores the recording(s).

3. Call query software - the software you use to go back and find and call up the calls you want to listen to.

4. Quality monitoring software - the software that lets you filter out a select number of calls for evaluation purposes and then facilitates the assessment process with reports, forms, etc.

The dirty little secret in the call recording industry is that most solutions offered by the various call recording companies all do the same thing - with a handful of bells and whistles bundled in to spice up the offering.  In most cases, these added features aren't even necessary or used.

To ensure you have or are purchasing a good call recording system, be sure you can answer "Yes" to the following questions:

A. Can you capture incoming calls and the computer screen activity of your call center agents?

B. Can you choose to record all calls or just a sampling of calls?

C. Can you query recordings for select calls based on agent, phone number, customer name, time of day, etc.?

D. Can you/did you implement the solution in two days or less?

E. Do you have to perform little to no maintenance on the system?

F. Can you easily customize the solution to your needs without asking for professional services help from the vendor?

If you answered "No" to one or more of these questions, you really need to think hard about the solution you have or are considering.  The truth is, there are very similar options out there for you to select, which are easier to install and maintain, are offered at a much lower cost and offer essentially the very same core functionality.

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.

Call recording solutions come in all flavors, sizes and styles but at the core, most have one basic function, and that is to capture customer calls and store them for compliance, quality assurance and/or dispute resolution.  So, if they all essentially do the same thing, then why are there so many different call recording vendors out there?  There are actually over 40 in all!

Here are some variables to help you distinguish between the huge selection of call recording solutions out there:

Scalability - some systems can only record up to a few hundred channels or employees.  You want a solution that can capture as many as you have plus room for more as you grow.  You really want a solution that can handle 1,000 or more.

Feature Stripping - some solutions offer all-in-one offerings with call recording, quality monitoring, screen recording and mobile recording all bundled together.  These typically offer the biggest bang for the buck.  Other sell a core call recording product and then charge a small fee for added capabilities.  Still, others sell you call recording functionality and then charge an arm and a leg for all added capabilities.  Beware of these types of offerings as you may wind up buying things you don't really need (and that are very expensive) just because they sound good at the time of purchase.  On the other hand, you also don't want to go with a vendor that strips away some of the core features in their "basic" version.

Speech Analytics - do you really need speech analytics?  Some companies may find a real business need for it but most can easily get by without it.  Yes it can add tremendous value but there is also a huge margin of error in accurately capturing content/calls of interest.  I wouldn't consider this a make or break in terms of picking the best call recording vendor out there.

Interoperability - this is really a big one.  The word "proprietary" should never come up in any conversation you have with a call recording provider.  If they mention it, run.  You want a call recording system that is "open" in its architecture and that can interoperate with virtually any third party software (CRM, Sales Force Automation, ERP, etc.) or hardware (i.e. PBX switches).  Some recording vendors tout the five or 10 switches they have interoperability with.  In today's world of best-of-breen contact centers, why would you want to paint yourself into a corner?  What happens if you add a new switch that isn't supported by the vendor?  This is why it is imperative to go with an "open" system that has an "open" API so you can work seamlessly with any existing or new application, hardware, switch, etc.

Installation - some companies take weeks to even get to your installation and then weeks or even months to facilitate and complete it.  You don't have time for this.  You want to start recording calls now, not next quarter.  Don't be fooled by one of these providers.  There is nothing they offer that is worth waiting months for. 

You want a solution that can be installed:

A. on your own without the vendor's support

B. in hours (not days, weeks or months!)

C. easily

These are just some of the many criteria to consider when purchasing the right call recording solution for your business.

Call recording software is typically purchased for one of a few business purposes (customer service, compliance or risk management), however, this article will detail many other uses you probably haven't even thought about.  The truth is call recording software can help your contact center or enterprise in a multitude of ways, such as:

1. Best practices library - create a repository that all agents can access which houses dozens of "best practice" customer interactions to show other/new agents a great interaction.  You can even replay these calls in team meetings to showcase how well a certain agent did on the phone.

2. Marketing intelligence - When a customer mentions something of interest to your Marketing team, email the team a copy of the recording.  This could include an idea for a better promotion, insight on why a certain product/service doesn't work for them, etc.

3. Technical intelligence - When a customer mentions a unique problem they are having with your product, why try to relay the information to your technical team?  Why not simply forward them a copy of the actual interaction?

4. Bad calls library - like the best practices library, also create a repository of under-performing calls to show agents what not to do on the phone with customers.

5. Product development ideas - Perhaps a caller has a great suggestion for how you can improve your product or service.  With call recording software, the agent can email a copy of the call directly to the product development/product marketing team.

6. Supervisor follow-up with unhappy caller - As a customer, wouldn't it be nice if that supervisor that you asked for knew what they were talking about when they called you back regarding your complaint?  With call recording software, that supervisor can easily pull up and replay every dissatisfying interaction you had with the call center agent.They can do this to arm themselves with your past interactions before ever calling you.

7. Identify on-screen navigational bottlenecks - With screen recording capability (typically comes with your call recording software) supervisors can detect agent screen navigational issues and correct them to decrease average handle time (AHT).

8. Offer senior management "voice of the customer" access - With recorded calls, you can give your company's top management (CEO, SVP, etc.) access to the customer's actual voice so they can stay plugged in to what your customers are saying/asking for and so on.  The best way for a top executive to stay connected with his/her users is to listen to them first hand.

9. Showcase your customer service excellence - Take several snippets from best-practices calls and showcase them on your website to demonstrate how superior your customer service really is.

10. Reward best agent performance - Once a month you can award a "gold", "silver" and "bronze" medal to the agents with the three best interactions that month, and you can then play them for other agents during a team meeting to recognize the high-performing agents and also to demonstrate best-practices for other agents.  You can even award prizes to the medalists each month for added incentive to perform at the highest level.