Call Recording Featured Article

We don’t just talk to our friends and family through a single communications channel. Definitely not. No, we Facebook (News - Alert) chat, email, call, text, video conference—and we might even see them in person.

While seeing customers in person may not be possible, the modern contact center should engage its customers on all the other channels they are used to using. Calling someone—who does that anymore?

Well, okay, people still call. In fact, 70 percent of homes still have a landline, according to Astute Solutions. But calling has been joined by other channels, and social media and web response has been integrated into more than half of all contact center operations.

Just having social media support in the contact center is not enough, though. With an increasing range or communication channels and ways to engage with those channels, the contact center of the future must be able to easily route calls to the right agent based on a number of variables.

These variables include the language of the customer, the skill set of the agent, and the device that is being used. For instance, the customer experience is vastly different when a customer is connecting with a laptop vs. a smartphone—and a full 25 percent of smartphone users say they now go online mostly through their phone, according to Astute Solutions.

With so many different ways that customers can reach the contact center, it is necessary to have skill- and resource-based routing.

Getting there requires new business processes, but it also needs better analytics—and this is where call recording plays such a crucial role.

While agent skill can be determined to some degree during the hiring process, the hiring process and regular performance reviews are blunt instruments in the modern contact center. They are too slow and inflexible, and they do not fully gauge agent skills and capabilities.

With call recording, however, contact center managers can get real-time visibility into where agents succeed and where they are failing.

This can happen when call recording is mixed with speech analytics, which can analyze phrases and even emotions in real-time to bring new levels of visibility into agent performance. From this, it then is possible to properly route contact center communication to take the best advantage of those on staff.

With so many communication channels, and increasingly complex interactions, this must be done. Modern contact centers need to be flexible and leverage specialization. Call recording and an awareness of the different ways that customers will reach out are two key components of this flexibility.