The Top Ten Uses for Call Recordings

Our panel of experts discuss the best ways to use call recordings in the contact centre.

Call recording is a useful tool to help gain an understanding of what customers are actually asking for, helping organisations make their marketing efforts much more effective.

By listening to customer calls, marketing teams can learn more about their target market and get a comprehensive view of buyer personas.

These insights can then be applied to product development and marketing according to what is in demand and what isn’t, which will lead to constant innovation and a competitive advantage as a result.

1. Identifying Training Needs

When it comes to monitoring advisor performance, call recording is an invaluable tool that can help to identify training needs for the contact centre team, making it simpler to define areas that advisors may need to improve on.

Enda Kenneally

In addition, tools such as Barge, Monitor and Whisper can enable these processes to happen in real time. These tools offer managers special communication functions where they, or team leaders, can discreetly listen in, give advice to help coach new advisors during a conversation, or join a call if required, which aids in advisor training and development.

Without being able to listen in or go back and review calls, supervisors may never fully understand how to help their advisors to provide an excellent customer service.

Thanks to Enda Kenneally at West Unified Communications

2. Resolving Customer Disputes – Especially if Paired With Screen Recording

Take a scenario where a customer is adamant that they gave an advisor specific delivery instructions on the phone that were then not followed by the delivery team. However, the advisor who handled the original call seems sure that they were not given any specific delivery instructions. What do you do?

Jeremy Payne

With call recordings, the dispute can be resolved as the organisation can listen back to the original call and, if the customer did not give the advisor the instructions, the advisor can be assured that they were correct. And the customer can also be sent the recording as proof.

This example is not exclusive to the phone, though, as advisors could be accused of not handling contacts properly on other channels too, such as email, live chat and messaging apps. Therefore, screen recordings can be just as useful for resolving customer disputes.

Thanks to Jeremy Payne at Enghouse Interactive

3. Spotting Compliance Issues

It’s important to ensure that contact centre solutions offer easy access to call recordings, and that they are used efficiently.

John Eng

Companies can use these to identify compliance issues, as well as performance problems, within the business and take corrective action to achieve greater effectiveness and efficiency in their operation.

Furthermore, managers can easily define and demonstrate what great calls sound like in individual or group training sessions.

Thanks to John Eng at NewVoiceMedia

4. Replicating Best Practice

Contact centres need to record calls as it is the best way to train and coach agents on how to handle telephone calls and customer enquiries effectively.  This can generate ROI by improving service and lowering costs by:

Atiq Rehman

• Increasing sales revenue from telephone transactions through improved sales techniques
• Increasing first-time resolution due to improved customer service skills
• Reducing call handling and hold times due to improved product knowledge
• Using recording to identify targeted training, resulting in reduced training costs
• Protecting company liability by proving call content to resolve disputes
• Reducing time taken to bring new recruits up to speed

Thanks to Atiq Rehman at Business Systems

5. Playing Back Calls to Senior Management

Often, the team will sense that there is an issue in another part of the business that is causing a large number of unnecessary calls to enter the contact centre. But to solve this problem, senior management will likely need to be convinced that the problem lies in another department.

The contact centre of a major online retail organisation was able to resolve such an issue when they suspected that there was a repeated logistical problem in one specific geographic area. In this area, customers were repeatedly getting notes saying that they weren’t in when their purchase was supposed to be delivered. However, many of those customers were saying that they were in when the delivery agent called.

By using call recordings in this way, they were able to show that it was not the contact centre telling management that there was a problem, it was the customers.

This led to a number of unnecessary calls entering the contact centre, which were then recorded and played back to senior managers. By using call recordings in this way, they were able to show that it was not the contact centre telling management that there was a problem, it was the customers.

6. Supporting Advisor Training

Playing recordings of good calls during induction training and discussing what the advisor did well is a great way to share best practice. Show recruits what good looks like, so they don’t have to learn as they go.

It is also not a bad idea to share call recordings where advisors have had to handle calls from angry customers, to ensure that they have a good idea of the challenges of the role. This may increase drop-outs from training, but providing this job familiarisation beforehand will likely reduce short-term attrition.

So, share lots of examples with the team and highlight moments where the advisor really did something well, emphasising particular techniques and phrases that they used that elicited a positive response from the customer.

7. Improving Quality Assurance

A key incentive for using call recordings in the contact centre is for call scoring, in which a certain number of random calls per advisor are chosen each month to assess for quality purposes.

However, call recordings can also be used to allow advisors to listen to their own calls. This can be useful when an advisor been set a coaching objective and they want to earmark a call recording to show the analyst that they are improving.

Charlie Mitchell

Listening back to the call recording with the team member will get the advisor actively thinking about their coaching objective, while the analyst has the opportunity to improve morale by recognising their improvement.

Another quality benefit that call recordings bring is that advisors will be able to come to coaches with a call that they feel they didn’t handle well. The coach can than offer advice on how to handle a call of that nature better in the future or reassure the advisor that they did a good job.

Thanks to Charlie Mitchell at Call Centre Helper

8. Observing the Customer Journey

Call recordings in the contact centre serve as a platform for multiple applications, which can all greatly enhance offerings, such as business analytics and quality management.

Leora Borgenicht

For example, omnichannel recording allows for the complete hassle-free customer journey that customers expect. Users can start an interaction via their chosen medium – such as email – and finish via another such as live chat, with more channels in between, if they wish and with no disruption to their path.

By recording customer interactions and listening back, the contact centre can find ways to improve the journey at every customer “touchpoint”, across any channels they use.

Thanks to Leora Borgenicht at NICE

9. Understanding Customer Pain Points

When listening to call recordings, it is important to consider the journey that the customer followed. What number did they dial? What route did they take through the IVR? How long were they waiting? Were they transferred?

Ian Robertson

By linking what is happening in the calls to the call journey, contact centres can understand customer pain points and make improvements where they will have the biggest impact.

While the most value from call recordings comes from pairing the recordings with a speech analytics system, manual root cause analysis can still provide valuable insight.

Thanks to Ian Robertson at The Forum

10. Discovering the Best Words to Use on a Sales Call

Whenever an advisor makes a sale, it can be good practice to record a copy of that interaction and then to listen to it, looking back to see if there were any particular words or phrases that elicited a good response from the customer.

Frank Sherlock

Once identified, make a note of these words and phrases and think about including them in training material for future recruits. Including them in advisor “cheat-sheets”, which can be read in between calls, may also be a good idea, as it helps spread best practice around the contact centre.

To go one step further, call recordings could then be paired with interaction analytics to provide advisors with actionable information that they can use to improve their own performance and quality scores.

Thanks to Frank Sherlock at CallMiner

To find examples of sales language that we would recommend, read our article: The Right Words and Phrases to Use on a Sales Call

Are there any other uses of call recordings that can be of benefit to the contact centre?

Let us know in an email to Call Centre Helper.

Author: Robyn Coppell