Call Recording Featured Article

The hosted contact center market is growing by leaps and bounds, driven by efficiencies, cost savings and the ability to support a geographically dispersed remote workforce. IDC (News - Alert) put spending on hosted center services at $1.1 billion last year, and that number is expected to jump to $2 billion by 2018.

With those benefits comes the challenge of managing a widespread workforce and ensuring high levels of quality and efficiency are maintained. Call recording offers an excellent way to keep tabs on those factors, and is becoming an increasingly popular and important component of hosted contact center solutions.

Not only can call recording be used to ensure agents are performing up to par, but it can help in resolving customer disputes as well as yield data about purchasing trends and preferences. And when implemented in a hosted or cloud-based environment, it’s possible to record every call, which offers a valuable tool in the effort to provide the highest levels of customer service.

With built-in call recording becoming a standard component in hosted contact center solutions, there isn’t any good reason why service providers shouldn’t be offering it as a value add for their customers. The benefits are measurable – actionable insights on the performance of remote workers as well as data that can be mined for valuable trends on customer preferences.

And then there’s the cost factor. A recent survey from ClickSoftware (News - Alert) in tandem with Harris Poll shows that consumers are not only fed up with what they perceive as poor and inadequate customer service performance, but that those experiences are losing money for U.S. businesses. The study revealed a combined productivity loss of $108 billion annually due to time wasted dealing with sub-par customer service.

Consumers also disclosed that a few simple changes on the contact center side would go a long way toward changing their views, and call recording is certainly an important component in the overall picture. Not only does it help the contact center in the event of a customer dispute, but it gives the consumer a permanent record of the transaction, which could simplify the process moving forward and save time for both contact center agents and customers.

Ultimately, call recording is not a panacea for lousy customer service. But it offers a vast amount of benefits for very little investment on the infrastructure side, especially in the case of hosted and cloud-based contact centers. For hosted contact center providers, who are trying to cut costs and yet operate effectively with a remote workforce, call recording provides a fantastic way to maintain high levels of customer service.