Call Center Management Featured Article
Call Recording for the Next Generation Contact Center
In the contact center, data is almost everything these days, whether it’s customer data or information that helps a company determines how the contact center is performing. Often, this data comes from recordings of telephone calls.
Call recording is perhaps one of the most useful technologies in the contact center. It can help resolve disputes, determine how an agent is doing his or her job, yield clues to customer preferences and opinions, uncover information about business trends and more.
Many contact centers, however, still recording only a portion of their calls, largely to evaluate agent job performance. This traditional is generally due to technological constraints: most companies simply couldn’t handle 100 percent call recording, since premise-based solutions are expensive and cumbersome, and storing all those call recordings is an impossibility for a small center.
Today, however, cloud-based call recording solutions make it easy to record 100 percent of calls, and there are numerous benefits in doing so, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo, who notes that while recording a portion of calls might deliver solid statistical information, recording every call provides more insight into agent performance.
While no one can listen manually to every call, analytics today make it easy to extract knowledge from nearly all calls. This can help companies listen for trends, spot customers about to churn, ferret out information on competitors, discover how marketing and advertising campaigns are working and even identify small troubles with call center operations before they become large troubles. Thanks to cloud-based solutions, offsite call storage, easily searchable calls and analytics, all this becomes possible.
One hundred percent call recording is also helpful in resolving disputes (it’s not good enough to hope that a problematic calls was one of the random calls an older system happened to record) and evaluating agents on a more regular basis, particularly if quality assurance (QA) is coupled with a grading component, says Ciarlo.
“When CR and QA work together, the result is a system that increases productivity and improves adherence to corporate procedures.”
It can also spot agents who need extra training quickly, allowing managers to correct small problems before they turn into large problems. Managers can review agents more often – monthly, even – helping them improve their own performance and meet goals, which is a fast way to boost employee engagement.
In the end, call recording, once a burdensome necessity for the average contact center, today, as an on-demand technology, can provide a deep well of benefits to the average contact center and literally pay for itself very quickly.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi