BPA Featured Article

Contact centers commonly record conversations with customers. But, a far fewer number of those organizations make use of those recordings to improve their personnel, processes, and customer service. However, if they did, they would find that these customer interactions can help them better coach their agents, improve their products and services, streamline their processes, and a whole lot more.

To make the most out of these efforts to use call recordings, organizations need to define their goals, identify the key performance indicators they will measure. They’ll also want to decide on what to include on their scorecards, who will review and rate the recordings, and how many and which recordings to review. Additionally, these efforts should be clear on who will decide what actions to take based on the results and how these actions will be carried out.

This is a service assurance exercise, so improving customer experiences are likely one of the key goals. If that’s the case, the effort should involve looking for trends, both good and bad. Sometimes it may be difficult to listen to some interactions. However, those reviewing the recordings must remember that this exercise is about improving overall performance. It’s not necessarily about addressing every grievance of every caller. So, they need to remember not to react too strongly or focus too many resources on any one call – that is, unless that call is indicative of a larger trend that needs to be addressed.

One obvious way call centers can leverage these recordings is to see what agents are doing during calls. Are they following procedures? Treating callers with respect? Addressing their concerns in a friendly and efficient manner? Call recording reviews can help organizations figure all that out.

Call centers can then use that information to provide more targeted coaching. But as call centers do they, they should remember to be fair and helpful, treating their agents with the same respect in training that they want their agents to treat their customers.

And in rating an agent, and offering coaching, remember this agent is a whole person. Perhaps the agent isn’t particularly fast in helping callers, but does a great job at expressing empathy and getting callers’ problems solved. Congratulate that agent on what he or she is doing right. Then kindly tell them where they can use improvement, and work to help them get there.