Call Center Management Featured Article
The Cloud Turns Call Recording from a Burden to a Benefit
To the contact center of 10 or 20 years ago, call recording was a heavy burden. Companies engaged in it for two reasons: compliance with the law, particularly in financial services or the healthcare sector, or because there was no other way to accurately gauge the performance of employees when it came time to review them. For the latter function, not all calls were recorded, just a select few of them from which employee performance management solutions were drawn.
Regardless of why call recording was done, it was an expensive, time-consuming process. The solutions themselves were very pricey, and the need to store all those recordings put a huge strain on IT personnel and budgets. Once recorded, the calls were very difficult to find and retrieve and often required a full-time IT person just to manage. For this reason, call recording was available only to the largest of companies with big IT budgets.
Luckily, thanks to today’s on-demand call recording solutions, call recording in the contact center is a very different beast than it once was. It has turned into a technology that is not only no longer a burden on an organization, but can be a distinct operational benefit, particularly when coupled with modern performance management and analytics solutions. Companies can quickly and easily search the treasure trove of intelligence they collect in the form of call recordings, searching for efficiencies and ways to improve the customer experience, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo.
“Calls that are recorded are calls that can be analyzed later to gauge the efficiency of call center agents,” he writes. “It is also a means to gather research on consumer trends that can be utilized in the formulation of marketing and sales strategies.”
In fact, every department in the company can find value in the call center’s recordings. Marketing can determine how a new campaign is being received from customers. Product managers can gain an understanding of what customers want and don’t want, and how their products or services are being used. Advertising can better target their efforts or revise campaigns that aren’t working. Back-office functions such as accounting can find ways to streamline their communications with customers.
There are also significant implications for the contact center workforce itself, as managers can evaluate more calls an get a better (and more regular) picture of how employees are performing.
“Calls that are recorded are calls that can be analyzed later to gauge the efficiency of call center agents,” writes Ciarlo.
Thanks to notifications and fast reporting, managers can actually get a picture of performance in real-time, allowing them to make adjustments on-the-fly that will immediately improve the overall performance of the contact center.
Largely thanks to the cloud, call recording has changed radically, from a technology that companies dreaded having to support to one that can offer benefits to every corner of the organization.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi