With storage costs relatively insignificant and speech analytics better than ever, enterprise call recording is proving increasingly useful for contact center return on investment.

“Around call recording, there are lots of ROI drivers,” said Renee Gut, Content Center Practice Lead West for Carousel Industries, in a recent blog post by the company. “Almost every client either already has call center recording, wants to improve it or is looking to acquire it.”

There are both revenue-generating and cost avoidance reasons for using call recording aggressively in the contact center.

One of the most important uses for contact center call recording is compliance. Recordings give hard evidence that companies are staying in compliance of all applicable regulations. Although not revenue-generating, protecting against penalties and liabilities is a potent form of indirect ROI that every company should consider.

Modern enterprise call recording solutions must stay on the right side of regulations, too, however. Gut pointed to PCI (News - Alert), the regulations that spell out how companies must deal with credit card data, as an example of how enterprise call recording must address regulations.

“Credit card information is very sensitive, so call recording solutions have to be able to accommodate that,” Gut said.

Accommodating sensitive data means that solutions should have the ability to pause recordings during credit card portions of a call and keep sensitive data private and safe with encryption.

Aside from compliance, call recording in the contact center is a ripe opportunity for improving ROI through customer feedback. Speech analytics mixed with call recording now is giving companies the opportunity to learn from customer interaction in an ongoing basis without the need to manually sift through hours of customer interactions.

“Speech analytics is a terrific play to really understand what’s happening with your brand without forcing managers to listen to thousands of hours of phone calls,” Gut noted. “There’s a tremendous gold mind of information resident in call recordings.”

With speech analytics, companies can search for keywords without the need to manually go through hours of recordings. A company could search for all instances of the word “frustrating,” for instance, honing in directly on situations and business processes that bother customers and therefore could be improved.

The ability to search for keywords also can allow contact centers to check if agents are including appropriate verbiage and promoting relevant special offers. With speech analytics, it is relatively easy to check every agent against the promotions and scripts they are supposed to mention during a call.

This highlights a third way call recording can boost ROI: improving customer service. Not only does call recording give contact centers the ability to search for keywords, it also helps in the training process.

Gut said that using call recording for peer review is the biggest new trend. Having agents listen to some of their own calls, as well as their peers, is a great way to improve customer interactions. Not only does a recording make mistakes more obvious, it also can be a gentler way to point out mistakes if the review process is set up to let peers critique each other. The end result is improved customer service and greater ROI.

If you want to learn more about the important role Call Recording plays in the enterprise and how you can ensure Your Call Recording Complies with PCI Data Security Standards, you’ll want to check out this upcoming Webinar hosted by CallCopy (News - Alert).

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.

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