Call Accounting Featured Article

Call Recording, Deregulation & the Always-On Consumer

  By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC

We hear a lot about how our still relatively new always-on world has placed more control in the hands of end users. Today, we’re reminded again and again, consumers have a greater ability to compare available solutions and pick the suppliers of their choice. And that, we’re told, is forcing businesses and other organizations that serve the populace to be more responsive and deliver better solutions and customer experiences.

Perhaps.

On the one hand, more businesses are talking about and considering customer experience than in the past. At least it seems like that’s what’s happening.

However, at the same time, businesses are always coming up with new ways to contain and lower their customer service costs. And sometimes that adversely impacts customer experience.

In some ways, technology is working to help businesses to improve customer experiences. For example, call recording can help businesses understand what customers want and when call center agents need assistance or coaching.

But call recording – like any solution – also comes with some challenges. For example, at least one end user has asked a company that recorded her conversation with a call center agent to share that recording with her.

Of course, most companies don’t want to do that. With some call recording solutions, finding and delivering specific recordings can be time consuming. It takes time, and time is money.

Some believe there should be a federal law allowing callers to access call center transcripts of their conversations with agents. And there are solutions available on the market that can easily enable that.

However, in the current environment of deregulation, the chances of something like that happening seems like a longshot.