ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

Companies spanning every industry, every size and every geography are realizing the true power of call recording software as a resource to ensure service quality, resolve disputes, train and coach call center agents, verify orders, ensure compliance and much more.

In fact, a survey of 80+ call center, sales and marketing professionals cited 14 areas of value that call recording capabilities provide.  See the graphic below.

Let's take a deeper dive into the top five areas on this chart:

Ensure service quality/assess agents

Call recording software can help ensure agents are delivering the best possible service. Recorded calls offer insight into how agents are doing their jobs – all the way from making sure they’re polite and respectful to ensuring they’re equipped to tackle tough questions. Quality of service is a business imperative when you consider a report by the U.S. Small Business Administration and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which cites 68% of businesses cite the number-one reason why customers leave as the negative treatment they receive from agents.

Resolving Disputes and Verifying Orders

With call recording, you have an easily referenced resource to resolve he-said/she-said customer disputes. Call recording provides protection to battle these disagreements, and it offers a valuable resource should the problem escalate to litigation. With the actual interaction stored on your server, you can pull it up whenever needed to verify precisely what was said, and not said.

Training/Coaching/ Developing Staff

Through call recording you can gain insight into which regions of your customer base have the most individuals who agree to a subscription upgrade or a cross-sell, for example. This information can help your sales staff spend their time on the most promising targets.

In addition, listening to customer calls is useful in training agents to close more deals and to ensure they correctly understand a customer’s intent to purchase or not. 

Ensuring Regulatory Compliance

Did you know that a single PCI Compliance violation can cost your organization upwards of 10,000-$50,000?  Multiply this figure many many times if you have a call center with thousands of agents, because whether you have the necessary contingencies in place, breaches and violations will happen. With call and screen recording software you have a definitive record of how a call was handled to help you prove proper compliance was followed.  This could go a long way toward avoiding unnecessary and costly fines.

Gleaning Sales and Business Intelligence Data

Call recording software can give you an inside glimpse into the activities of your competitors. How? Sometimes when a customer or prospect calls into a call center, they’re unsure about whether or not they want to make a purchase and may reveal information about your competition, as in “I get a free 30-day trial when I sign up with XYZ Corporation.” This competitive intelligence can provide your sales and marketing organization with insight to help re-align their campaigns or promotions.   

These are just some of the many ways in which call recording software can significantly impact your business and its bottom line.

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 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.

The time is right for you to seriously consider going after the real estate and legal verticals.  According to Heavy Reading, these industries are the most primed right now for business VoIP services. 

Wouldn't it be great if you had something really distinguishing among your offerings to make you stand out from the competition?  That something extra is a call recording system - a logical extension to your other business VoIP services.

Call recording can be a simple add-on service to your existing portfolio that you could very easily turn on or off for existing or new clients.  Think about the possibilities.  You would be able to:

• Upsell existing customers
• Strengthen your value proposition
• Extend your reach into real estate, legal and other markets
• Differentiate your business from other business VoIP providers
• Grow your business-VoIP practice
• Expand your footprint among SOHO/SMB businesses

Call Recording for Real Estate SOHOs/SMBs

Real estate professionals conduct a lot of business over the telephone, and new call recording capabilities will enable them to show proof of compliance (if necessary), verify what was said during a conversation, help resolve "he-said-she-said" disputes and more. Both commercial and residential brokers will have an easy-to-access record of every call they make so they can easily pull a conversation and play it back to also verify something they may have forgotten.  Often times a deal can be lost by a broker who simply forgot to do something important.  Recorded calls help agents avoid these mistakes and keep their clients happy and on board.

With the right call recording solution in your business VoIP arsenal, you will also empower your customers with the ability to search through their recorded calls for all conversations associated with a specific agent or customer or time of day. Think about how powerful and useful that will be to their business.

Call Recording for Legal SOHOs/SMBs

Lawyers and legal associates spend over 75 percent of their time on the phone with clients and their representatives.  With the ability to record client calls, law offices can maintain compliance, resolve disputes, document litigation discussions, verify fee agreements with clients, maintain case continuity between phone-based and non-phone-based conversations, and so much more.

Law firms can monitor how compliant their legal clerks and administrative teams are on the phone and easily identify and fix any problems or skill gaps.

Recorded calls are also a great way for legal firms to keep track of billable time on the phone with a client or when speaking with someone on their behalf.  It is often times very easy to underestimate (or overestimate) how much time was spent on the phone, without an accurate record to refer back to.

Again, like with real estate, the right call recording solution enables your customers

 to search and locate specific conversations associated with a particular case, for example.  This can be extremely powerful for legal entities.

Finding the Right Call Recording System

You want a call recording system that fits easily and seamlessly into your existing communications environment, is easy to use, and quick to turn on/off for customers.  You also want a solution you don't have to maintain or troubleshoot, and for the real estate and legal industries in particular, you need a Total Recording (100 percent audio/screen capture) software product that records both the voices of the two parties, and the screen of your employee.