Contact Babel’s recent survey of contact center professionals revealed that recording calls are a common practice for over 90% of businesses. However, only 34% of these businesses analyze the recorded calls with a speech analytics solution. Despite 21% expressing plans to implement a solution this year, a significant amount of valuable customer and agent insight data remains untapped. This article highlights four strategies to leverage call recordings for enhancing agent performance, customer satisfaction, and overall contact center efficiency.

Challenges Recording Calls for Training

Contact centers have a legal obligation under the Data Protection Act to inform agents that calls are being recorded and may be used for training. Overcoming this obligation is easily achieved by notifying agents during recruitment or induction.

A more significant challenge lies in selecting calls for training from the large volume of recorded ones. Julia Whiteley, the people and development director at Gasbox DMG, an outsourced contact center, suggests that to overcome this challenge, trainers – whether dedicated coaches or team leaders – need sufficient time to sift through call recordings. This will enable the creation of a diverse sample for different individuals, encompassing various types of calls and different times of the day.

Both agents and trainers should be provided with enough time to thoroughly review these recordings and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.

Importance of Call Recording

#1 Quality Monitoring

Quality monitoring is one of the most common applications of call recordings. However, the current traditional quality assurance (QA) processes, often relying on manual checklists, only analyze a small fraction (approximately 1-2%) of agents’ monthly calls. Consequently, a vast amount of valuable data within those recordings goes unnoticed, making it difficult for managers to evaluate individual agent performance accurately.

To harness the full potential of call recordings effectively, consider efficient speech analytics tools for automatic analysis and scoring of 100% of the recordings. This approach enables you to automatically provide performance feedback to agents and supervisors, as well as gain valuable insights to optimize quality assurance processes.

By leveraging recordings in this manner, companies can categorize calls and identify trends in customer behavior. This allows for the identification of root causes of customer complaints and their elimination, ultimately elevating the overall quality of service provided. Using call recordings solely for QA purposes presents a high-risk strategy. It is imperative to base QA decisions on a comprehensive dataset containing 100% of calls.

#2 Provide Flexible Access to Call Recording Tools

If your employees work from home a significant portion of the time or answer calls outside the office, it’s wise to choose phone recording for business. You don’t have to completely switch to the iPhone call recorder app if you have other methods for recording calls. However, it is good when an employee always has an iPhone phone recorder at hand and can turn on recording calls. All you need is to view the iCall App Store and get acquainted with the application. This is one of the most powerful and user-friendly call recorders on the market, plus it has a free trial version.

#3 Identifying Sales Opportunities

You can utilize your call recordings to detect customer trends and uncover sales opportunities. To conduct trend analysis, it is necessary to analyze and score 100% of your call recordings. By identifying and correlating desired outcomes of the calls, such as successful sales, with specific agent behaviors, skills, or language utilized, you can determine various methods of closing a sale. Then, selecting the approach with the most favorable outcome allows you to develop an optimal strategy. Agents who test this approach can be evaluated based on their adherence to the desired script or their ability to identify language indicative of a willingness to make a purchase.

#4 Take a Coaching Approach

Viewing call recording as a learning tool for evaluation and improvement, rather than a measure of success or failure, is the most effective approach. “Gotcha” types of evaluation usually result in negative employee responses. Instead, collaborate with your employees in developing their skills and customer service. Evaluation reports from recorded calls should serve as a starting point, not a final score.

#5 Invite Self-Assessment

Call recording has a distinctive advantage as an evaluation tool since it allows employees to assess their own performance. During a meeting, you can playback a call and encourage the employee to provide feedback. Ask for their thoughts on what went well and what could be improved. Additionally, you can request the employee to submit a call report.

#6 Ensuring Compliance

Not adhering to regulations can result in significant costs for your company’s bottom line and reputation. Call recordings can effectively promote compliant behavior. However, relying solely on manual sampling of recorded calls offers limited prevention of non-compliant behavior and inadequate protection against litigation. This exposes the call center to significant risk. Instead, it is advisable to utilize call recordings to bolster continuous monitoring capabilities by tracking every conversation to ensure proper compliance procedures are in place.

Conclusion

Always remember that call recordings are a large part of the information about the work of your call center, but they are not everything. All records should not be used to put pressure on employees and point out their mistakes. This is a chance to show opportunities for improving the situation and possible solutions to conflicts.