Call Recording Featured Article

Call recording is like paper. Every industry needs it, but each industry uses it slightly differently.

For instance, compliance is a huge issue at contact centers that serve the financial industry. Making sure that legal compliance is met can mean the difference between an efficient contact center and one that costs a company hefty fines.

As an example, regulations that financial contact centers might need to follow include Basel II, Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards, USA Patriot (News - Alert) Act, AML (Anti-Money Laundering, SEC 17-a-4/NASD 3010, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, Equal Credit Opportunity Act, Truth in Lending Act, and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The list goes on.

Call recording helps ensure that contact centers stay on the right side of regulation. It not only helps managers better train employees by giving them real-world examples and providing better feedback, but it also often can enable in-call alerts that help guide staff if compliance has not been met. Further, a recording of all customer interactions acts as a shield against accusations of compliance violations.

Legislation in many countries and states mandates that calls are recorded for banks, insurance companies, trading houses and other financial institutions, too.

For the hospitality industry, it is all about keeping the customer happy and creating a welcoming environment. At the same time, the volume of both staff and customers means that cost effectiveness is also a strong secondary consideration.

Call recording benefits the hospitality industry because it can be used for gleaning additional insight about customer behavior. When paired with speech analytics, call recording lets hospitality firms better uncover the needs, wants and mindset of its callers and future callers. This adds up to a better customer experience.

Call recording also helps the industry keep staff trained properly and uncover agents that are not performing optimally.

“One of our biggest customer service issues was that when a call was processed incorrectly we did not know where the point of failure occurred," noted Jane Adams, call center operations manager for Sacred Heart Health Systems. “Now when a call is processed incorrectly we can go back to the call and listen and see what happened. We can then update our database or make process improvements.”

Speaking of healthcare, the medical industry leverages call recording for liability protection, a big issue for the industry.

Likewise, both regulations such as HIPPA and security are big concerns, and call recording allows for easy storage of patient information.

And when it comes to quality standards, healthcare calls cannot fail due to the sensitive nature of many calls.

“Kids Doc at Children's Memorial Hospital, Chicago, installed VirtualObserver in June 2007. We monitor all incoming and outgoing calls for 40 agents,” said Tobey Aronsohn, RN, MSN Director-Kids Doc, referring to CSI’s (News - Alert) call recording and workforce optimization solution. “By recording all calls and auditing data and productivity reports for each team, individual registrar and nurse managers can determine how to reduce hold times, transfer fewer calls and provide more callers with what they need with just one call.”

He added, “This tool also improves management's ability to train and coach staff to enhance the customer experience. The call center uses internally designed evaluation templates to measure quality, accuracy and completeness of contact with families.”

Every industry uses call recording slightly differently, but one theme unifies them all: Call recording matters.