Looking For
Reasons To Record? Now There Are More Than Ever
By John Kaiser,
Dictaphone Corporation
If you're a contact center manager, you
probably have one of the toughest jobs on the planet. In many ways, your
company's success rests on your contact center and the actions of your
agents. Your contact center agents wield tremendous power. Each time
they pick up the phone and speak to a customer, they are ' for better or
worse ' 'your company.' What they say and how they say it can drive
sales, or drive customers away. Your contact center is also, in many
ways, the voice of your customers ' a place where customers freely
express their opinions, desires and dissatisfaction. Organizations that
capture this 'customer voice,' listen to it and use that knowledge to
adapt will ultimately succeed. Companies that ignore it risk a slow
death and possible extinction.
In the midst of all of this, contact centers must also pay attention to
a growing list of legal regulations that govern doing business over the
phone. Suffice it to say, if your contact center is looking for reasons
to record, today there are more than ever. This article explores how
contact centers can use recording and monitoring technology ' together
with new tools for workforce relationship management ' to improve agent
performance, harness customer intelligence and ensure legal compliance.
Optimizing Agent Performance
In a survey conducted by the Aberdeen Group, almost half of senior managers,
directors and C-level executives interviewed rated the contact center's
strategic importance as 'critical' to their enterprise. Most customer
interactions take place through the contact center, and they can be defining
moments for both customers and companies. By one estimate, some 90 percent
of contact centers employ some form of monitoring program to ensure that
agents are providing quality service, and recording technology is the
cornerstone of many of these programs. Usually, these programs involve a
familiar three-step process of recording agent/customer interactions,
reviewing and evaluating those interactions and then coaching and training
agents based on those results.
Today, contact centers can benefit from new solutions that combine
traditional recording and quality monitoring platforms with workforce
relationship management software. Workforce relationship management software
provides a comprehensive set of tools for optimizing agent performance in
the contact center, including modules for agent recruiting and screening,
learning management and training, and agent assessments. The software works
in concert with the contact center's quality monitoring system and links the
contact center's recruiting, training and assessment programs through a
common competency model.
Competency models have been widely used in
business by human resources professionals for decades, but they have only
recently been applied to contact center quality programs. In essence,
competency models help contact centers formally recognize and articulate the
competencies that are important to an agent's success on the job, and
systematically apply these competencies to their recruiting, training and
assessment programs. They create a shared understanding of the knowledge,
skills and abilities agents need to achieve success on the job. The agent's
role, responsibilities and tasks are clearly identified, along with the
specific competencies needed to perform each task effectively.
A contact center competency model assumes that in order to do the job well
(perform the tasks within a certain expected level of operational
performance), the agent must have certain competencies (developed to a
specific level of proficiency). For example, an inbound customer service
representative in the lost-card division of a credit card company might be
required to perform these types of tasks when taking calls: customer
screening, case management and back-office administration. To perform those
tasks, the agent would need to have certain competencies: communications
skills (or more specifically, the ability to handle stressed customers);
empathy (the ability to empathize with the customer and his or her
predicament); process knowledge (to explain the company's process for
handling lost cards and what that means to the customer); and system
knowledge (to effectively use and update the systems for lost-card
inquiries).
Once the competency model is established and validated, it can be applied to
a contact center's recruiting, training and assessment programs, using the
combined technologies of recording and workforce relationship management.
This enables contact centers to prescreen and recruit agents based on
specific competencies that are required for the job, monitor recorded
agent/customer interactions and assess agents based on core competencies
that they use in handling these calls, and provide focused training to
agents based on their individual areas of weakness (competency gaps)
identified through the monitoring and assessment process. Ensuring that
agents have the skills, knowledge and abilities to succeed on the job
ultimately translates into improved agent performance and better customer
service.
Harnessing Customer Intelligence
The average contact center handles hundreds, if
not thousands, of calls each day. Hidden in these recorded customer
interactions is a treasure trove of information about what customers are
thinking, doing or planning to do. The challenge for the contact center is
finding these hidden nuggets of information in a virtual mountain of
recordings and then getting that information into the hands of individuals
within the organization who have the power to effect change. Imagine being able to identify business practices that negatively impact customer satisfaction or retention, or
being able to salvage a long-time customer who (because of one bad
experience) was about to defect to a competitor, or being able to locate
information in your voice recordings that would help your marketing
organization better understand what customers want. Phonetic search engines,
available on some recording platforms, empower contact centers to do just
that. Phonetic search engines convert selected audio (voice recordings) into
searchable phonetic tracks. Once the recordings are indexed, numerous
searches can be performed simply by typing in different key words or
phrases. For example, you might search for calls from customers who are
likely to defect using key words like 'problem' or 'cancel' or phrases like
'not satisfied.' You can retrieve these recordings, listen to them and
perhaps even identify the customer (by viewing customer data captured in the
call record or the recorded data screens from the agent's desktop) so that
appropriate action can be taken.
Phonetic searching can also be used to ensure that agents are following
scripts correctly (by identifying the presence of key words in a script). It
can also be leveraged to determine whether agents are taking advantage of
upsell opportunities, by referencing key phrases like: 'Are you aware that
we offer...?' It can even be used as a marketing tool to identify new
features or services customers desire by searching for strings of words such
as: 'Do you have...?' or 'I would like'' Phonetic search engines can help
contact centers derive intelligence from recorded customer interactions so
that information can be shared with individuals within the organization who
have the power to effect change ' for instance, C-level marketing
personnel, product development executives, even the CEO.
Ensuring Legal Compliance
Whether inbound or outbound, doing business over the phone can be risky
business these days. Failure to comply with any
number of state or federal regulations can result in significant fines and
even legal actions against your company. If you are not recording calls, you
may not be adequately protecting your contact center and your company from
this potential liability.
If your contact center's function is primarily to sell goods and services
over the phone, or if you have a low threshold for risk, a full-time
recording solution that records 100 percent of the calls, 100 percent of the
time, is the ideal solution. However, today's recording technology is also
flexible enough to record only certain types of calls or portions of calls
relative to specific types of transactions. For example, agents can
selectively start and stop recording simply by clicking on an icon on their
desktop, or hitting a pre-programmed function key on their keyboard.
Alternatively, some systems enable you to set up recording triggers to
initiate recording, based on specific applications and activity on your
agents' desktops. These selective recording capabilities can help ensure
that your contact center is complying with key stipulations of the TSR
(Telemarketing Sales Rule) involving 'free to pay' conversion offers, novel
payment methods and calls that involve upselling.
Training is also critical for ensuring compliance. It is not enough for
contact center management to be versed in the latest telemarketing
regulations. Agents need to know what the regulations are as well, and how
to follow them. Understanding the relevant regulations should be a key
competency, against which agents are monitored, measured and ultimately
trained (should it be determined that they lack that knowledge).
In the context of new regulations, training is important not only for
compliance, but for enhancing agent performance and business results. With
tens of millions of Americans now signed up for the national 'do-not-call'
list, agents need to learn how to employ upselling and cross-selling to
maximize the value of each and every calling opportunity, both on inbound
and outbound calls. Cross-selling and upselling require a whole new set of
skills, knowledge and abilities. Workforce relationship management combined
with monitoring can help contact centers hire, train and assess agents with
an eye toward building a contact center equipped to succeed in this brave
new world.
So with so many reasons to record, will the familiar phrase 'This call may
be recorded for quality assurance' be replaced by a new mantra anytime soon?
Don't bet on it. But one thing is certain; contact centers not only have
more reasons than ever today to record, they have better technology to do
it.
John Kaiser is vice president of marketing, Communications Recording
Systems, for Dictaphone .
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