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“Calls may be recorded for quality assurance or training purposes.”
If you’ve called a utility company, insurer, bank, TV provider or a host of other organizations, it’s a very familiar phrase. For the best-run contact centers, however, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s possible for contact centers. This post will dig deeper into the topic.
Call recording
Historically, call recording and its associated storage was complex and expensive. That’s changed today, where call recording software is typically integrated into contact center applications, and the cost of storing calls has dropped to the level where many companies now simply record every call coming into – and going out of – their organizations.
Call recording offers a wide range of opportunities. In the case of a dispute, for example, you have evidence—just replay exactly what happened to learn who said what. You can also use good calls and poor calls to train contact center agents on best practices and how to handle difficult situations.
Two other approaches can also help develop contact center staff to help increase professionalism and enhance the golden ‘first call resolution’ rates that all contact centers strive for.
Screen recording
First, screen recording is a relatively new technology that brings the benefits of call recording to new multimedia channels that many contact centers now have in their portfolios.
With screen recording in place, it doesn’t matter which channel a customer choses to make contact—the system records the interaction, making it available for training, dispute resolution and even to help better understand the customer journey.
Imagine your agent is filling in an on-screen form to process a customer order. You can examine keying errors or long delays after the event so that the form can be modified to minimize the chance of this happening in future.
A real-life example we’ve come across is where a particular form was causing keying errors, long delays and bad customer service. On reviewing the screen recordings, the company made a small tweak to the form to remove a free-form entry field and replace it with a drop-down box, which eliminated all the errors and delays.
Quality management
Companies are also increasingly using quality management solutions in contact centers, allowing real-time agent coaching and development, regardless of whether the agent is office-based or remote.
Supervisors can add text annotations directly to calls during live monitoring, capturing their observations in real-time.
Integrated instant messaging lets supervisors unobtrusively coach agents, enhancing call handling skills and improving overall call center performance.
Systems log all annotations and coaching sessions in context with the voice recording, making it easy to reconstruct contact center scenarios.
Depending on the system, you may also be able to produce customizable agent evaluation forms with extensive quality reporting—for both the agent and supervisor. Then you can compare their results as part of a proactive personnel development process. This helps identify training needs and highlight top performing individuals and groups.
Raising the bar for contact centers
In summary, organizations can use the latest call recording and quality management solutions to get a competitive edge by ensuring they can quickly resolve any dispute and develop well-trained staff to deliver an optimal customer experience and journey every time.
