ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

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
    

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.

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.