Call Recording Featured Article

One of the most common complaints heard around the world involves poor customer service or some type of negative customer interaction. It’s a universal woe, and new research from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and SAP (News - Alert) shows that a majority of organizations are falling short of the mark when it comes to listening to and responding effectively to their customers.

The organizations teamed up to interview more than 300 senior marketing executives for their “Mastering Adaptive Customer Engagements” report. They found that an overwhelming number of respondents, at 73 percent, believe customer centricity is critical to business success. And yet a mere 14 percent report that customer centricity is a hallmark of their company, while only 11 percent believe their own customers would agree to that description.

Those are pretty poor results, particularly given the enormous number of tools today’s contact centers have to work with. One item in particular is available in most customer service toolboxes and yet all too few companies make full and proper use of it. Call recording provides an easy and foolproof way to monitor and manage customer and agent interactions. It can be used to highlight examples of good customer service as well as to pinpoint where an interaction may have gone wrong. And many solutions offer deep analytics and reporting to identify trends and create strategies for improvement.

According to the CMO Council and SAP, one of the main problems organizations have with creating a customer-centric culture is that they do not have processes set up to ensure the delivery and management of a superior customer service experience. And they haven’t deployed the technologies required to make that happen, even though many of them already possess them and it’s simply a question of making proper use of them.

"We now have the opportunity to engage with customers like we never have before,” said Bernard Chung, senior director of solution marketing for SAP. “But this will take strong cultures centered around the customer, processes that set up teams for success, and a technology foundation that can shift and move with the requirements of the customer."

Call recording certainly provides that foundation and is already available in many contact center solutions. Once businesses realize how much value and insight they can glean from call recording and the analytics and reporting that may be extracted from it, they can move one step closer to a customer-centric culture, giving them a major edge over competitors while they’re at it.