Call recording and QM in commercial contact centres

Commercial contact centres are under increasing pressure to deliver improvements in customer service whilst at the same time reducing operational costs and raising revenue. Contact-centre interactions represent “moments of truth” between companies and their clients. New call recording and speech analytics technologies will expand the measurement and control of customer service into almost all corporate areas.

Based on the content of recorded calls and screen activities, today’s call recording and monitoring systems can reveal the potential for improvement in contact centre operations including processes, marketing, sales activities, time of reaction and problem analysis. As a result, campaigns become more efficient, and costs of ownership are significantly reduced.

While standard contact centre software can provide some of these improvements, by routing calls to the correct answer point and providing metric reporting and hard data on such topics as time to answer, hold time and length of call, they do not provide the ability to monitor the quality and consistency of the interaction and to report/act on this aspect of the contact centre.

Although methods such as manual assessment forms, live monitoring through the call distribution (ACD) software and mystery shoppers are used in many centres, these have limited scope, they can be inconsistent, and interactions are not recorded in a form that can be used for future reference or training purposes.

The benefits of call recording and speech analytics

Call recording can be used to record ALL the contact centre interactions and quality management software can allow a sample of these calls to be assessed against a pre-defined standard. The scheduling of the calls to be assessed can also be flexible allowing the contact centre managers to focus on key areas, such as new starters, problem customers/agents and up-selling and cross-selling skills. Assessment results can be used to provide targeted training for individual agents and comprehensive reporting to senior management. Call recording can also be used to aid dispute resolution by actually identifying who said what to whom and when.

Systems can also be enhanced by the addition of speech analytics to help identify the most interesting, critical and useful interactions among an otherwise unmanageable number of conversations. This brings a number of key benefits:

Using the targeted data decisions can be made about individual agents’ training needs and educational material can be delivered in a fast and cost-effective manner directly to the agent´s desktop, allowing timely improvement of skills and qualifications.
Supervisors can use authentic voice files for instant coaching.
Remarks or additional advice can be added to recorded calls and provided to agents.
“Best/worst practice“ examples may be created by trainers or supervisors and rapidly distributed.
If an agent encounters a problem they can contact the supervisor in real time without the customer‘s knowledge. Supervisors may respond with instant messages (via the chat window) or even take control of the agent’s PC.
Agents can evaluate themselves or fellow agents. This capability double-checks the supervisor’s opinion and motivates agents through increased involvement in the evaluation process.