8 mins read
When a consumer connects to your organisation, their first point of contact is your customer service representatives. Your agents play an important role in the development and maintenance of customer loyalty. Needless to say, this calls for constant agent assessment and training to ensure that your clients experience the very best. Consistent improvement in your customer service will not only set you apart from your competitors but also beneficial to your rapport with your consumers.
So, how can one accomplish agent assessment effectively and efficiently? The answer is calling recordings. Call recording refers to recording inbound and outbound calls to an organisation to be used for documentation and later analysis. Analysis of call records can provide a company with valuable data and eventually enhance customer experience (CX) and brand quality.
First, let’s delve into the two basic features and advantages of opting for call recording solutions:
1. Easy installation: As businesses increasingly adopt cloud solutions, many features that can be obtained from cloud telephony service providers are often bundled to be used cohesively. A call recording feature can be enabled while utilising IVR. IVR or Interactive Voice Response allows your organisation to reroute incoming calls to preferred agents, while call recording maintains documentation of the communication.
2. Documentation: Call recording software ensures that your company has complete documentation of the customer service department. This data can be used in several ways—legal backup, appraisals, strategizing and planning for the future.
How to use the call recording feature to better agent performance?
Your customer service representatives, as mentioned earlier, provide the first impression of how your company communicates with its clients. Call recording solutions become an essential feature to advance agent interaction and appease consumers. There are many ways to utilise this feature to your advantage:
- Quality training
They say one must learn from history not to repeat the same mistakes. The call recording feature allows you to do just that. Using records or transcripts of previous interactions between your agent and client, you can pinpoint exactly what has worked and what has failed. These can be used as case studies to further train the agents to adapt successful tactics and dispose of failed methods of communication.
Call records provide more realistic data as compared to any other hypothetical scenario. Your agents will readily be able to relate to the content that provides an accurate representation of their typical calls. The data allows you to study not only the agent’s responses but also the consumer’s behaviour.
- Individual growth
Every agent is unique in their strengths and weaknesses. Studying records will empower you to understand the particulars of the same. You can analyse the details of the call recording and individually help your representatives improve upon lacking skills. This also holds accountability as physical proof. Once you review the records with your employee, they can be accurately trained for their next assignment.
- Accountability and monitoring
Cloud telephony solution allows you to monitor your employees in real-time. However, how do you manage to supervise every single call when you have numerous employees? If you wish to reexamine the work of your agents to create a complete picture of their daily work, you will have to depend on call recording solutions. Call recordings will provide you with statistics of every ongoing call—duration of the call, location of the caller, frequency of communication, details of the conversation, and call history of individual agents—that can be reviewed endlessly in the future. This allows you to hold your slacking agents responsible for their actions and award the better-performing ones.
- Material for further reference
Some conversations may even call for notes to be taken due to details of requests or queries. Agents dealing with high-priority clients or complex queries may need to review said data again to appropriately carry out further actions. However, many external factors can affect the quality of a call between the agent and the customer—bad network, unclear communication on the consumer’s side, interruptions and ambient sounds.
In these situations, the call recording feature allows your agents to go through the footage after the call, pausing and playing as per their convenience.
Legal evidence
Legal threats can be seriously damaging to a brand image. Additionally, cases taken to court can be extended for years and years before any judgement. Hence, it is vital to have core evidence of any communication with a consumer. The call recording feature enables you to store documents of all interactions.
Call recordings have been admissible in court as evidence (not to be confused with call tapping). In case you find yourself in a legal battle with a client, you can use these documents to support your defense or claim (in case you wish to take a matter to court). This is an important backup to have, especially considering the money and time that is spent on these matters.
On a much smaller scale, you can use data from call recording solutions as proof if a customer claims something unfair from you.
How to use call recording solutions to improve customer satisfaction?
As the world moves away from a product-focused market and prioritises service, it is paramount that your business provides the highest quality customer service. You can use call recording solutions to accomplish the same:
- Improve products
Your company might receive hundreds of calls per day. If you look at these calls simultaneously, you will be able to thread out a pattern in consumer behaviour. You will be able to narrow down the favourable and unfavourable products. Using the call recording feature, you can study all the calls you receive and understand the feedback of your consumers as a whole.
This information is essential as it gives you the particulars of what your consumers like and dislike. Using this data, you can work on your products and strategise a sales plan to push profitable products and pull back and improve the least preferred ones.
- Improve interaction
Yes, the first impression is a marker of what will be your consumer’s initial thoughts about the organisation. However, it is the consistency, or rather improvement, in customer service that they will notice the most. Using the data collected by the call recording, you can emphasise on what the consumer seeks.
You can categorise whether your customer is satisfied or not, and further study the information to understand what could be done to improve this experience. Call recording solutions give you regular information on the communications and you can use the same to mark the improvement or decrement in consumer satisfaction. Once you begin working on what the consumers want, your customer experience will rise equally. High customer satisfaction leads to impenetrable loyalty.
Note: While call recording features do provide a gamut of benefits for any organisation, it is necessary to follow certain ethical and legal restrictions posed by the country. It is good practice to inform your customers that the call is being recorded. You must have heard this statement before—” Your call will be recorded for quality and training purposes”. There are laws surrounding data storage and pausing live conversation that must be followed while using a call recording software.
Conclusion
Call recording solutions are an integral and undeniably beneficial feature of any organisation investing in cloud solutions. The advantages are visible in internal functions as well as external performance. The call recording feature allows your company to maintain high-quality agent work operations by using the data to train, monitor and support your employees. Customer experience is also improved by understanding and improving according to the consumer’s needs. Call recording solutions may be a simple concept, but as they say, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
