We have all become accustomed to the message:
“This call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance and training purposes”
For some, it may seem like a strategy to help monitor and assess the effectiveness of a support agent (maybe, even the customer). However, leveraging call recordings for quality assurance and agent training is just the tip of the spear, there is a great deal more to it than that. But, the question is, how much more?
Here are six ways call recordings can provide a tremendous amount of insights into helping shape and enhance not only your contact centre, but your product, brand, and ability to market, message, and create a truly unique customer experience (CX).
1 – Improve and Innovate Products and Services
Your customer support team are on the front lines, managing all sorts of conversations with your customers. But, because they’re focused on assisting customers in real-time, it’s not always easy for team members to pull out common threads regarding what you are doing well, and what needs work. Having a means by which to capture and review call recordings enables you to identify common challenges and pain points. That’s important information to have when you want to improve current offerings, assess the effectiveness of your agents, or introduce new products.
2 – Deliver a Standardised Customer Experience
No two customer conversations are the same, yet your team needs to have a standardised approach for interacting with customers, providing solutions, resolving disputes, and handling complaints. If one customer who received an apology learns that others in the same situation received a full refund, that could potentially turn into a negative experience for the customer, and damaged the reputation for your organisation. Customer service call recordings provide you with the opportunity to review how your team handles specific situations and the chance to take steps to standardise the process, when necessary.
3 – Refine Customer Personas
Buyer personas, also known as customer personas, enable you to better understand your customer base(s) and create marketing assets that use language that will resonate. Fine-tuning customer personas is an ongoing process – you should be updating them continuously, as more information comes to light. Your call recordings offer a wealth of knowledge for refining customer personas. Your marketing team can review these recordings to gain greater insight and a more comprehensive understanding of your customer base and tailor messaging for specific customers in a way that matches their needs exactly.
4 – Maintain Detailed Records
Call recordings eliminate “he said/she said” confusion and disagreement. By recording and storing your customer calls, you have an exact record of what was discussed during any customer interaction. If a conflict arises, you can simply return to those recordings to gain clarity on the issue and, in many cases, use it as evidence to support your agent’s, your own, or your organisation’s, perspective or actions.
5 – Enhance Customer Service Team Prep and Training (for you and your team)
Support agents are oftentimes the primary face and voice of your business and brand, so you need to ensure they are well trained, professional and consistent. Call recordings can be your team’s “game tape” providing them with a real-world view into various customer scenarios. Training should include play-back of flawlessly executed service, service that fell flat, and everything in-between. Knowledge is power, and knowing what can go wrong, can help your agents to improve.
A survey from Harris Interactive found that customers thought representatives failed to answer questions 50% of the time. Hearing firsthand the various customer questions and complaints can help you to write a comprehensive script that further prepares your agents to help guide customers towards successful resolutions.
6 – Recognise and Reward Great Work
You have a few tools in your arsenal—such as ratings, reviews and surveys—to help you identify star performers on your customer service team. But call recordings are another great way to discover who is knocking the ball out of the park. Recognising and rewarding these top performers sets the bar high, gives other team members someone to learn from and emulate, and boosts engagement and morale on your team.
This is not only the right thing to do from an HR standpoint, but a smart investment for your business. A study from Gallup showed that employees who believed they were adequately recognised for their work felt valued, and were far more motivated and productive. Alternatively, employees who believed that their hard work went unnoticed were twice as likely to quit their jobs in the next year.
Customer Service – Your Not So Secret Weapon
When fully leveraged, call recordings can truly be the secret to invaluable product and customer insights that drive enhanced customer experiences, as well as boosted call centre employee morale. The key is to employ technologies and methodologies that allow you to do so easily and cost effectively.
Guest Blog by Anand Janefalkar, CEO & Founder at UJET
As Founder and CEO of UJET, Inc., Anand Janefalkar has 15 years of experience in the technology industry and has served as a technical advisor for various startups in the Bay Area. Before founding UJET, he served as Senior Engineering Manager at Jawbone, and also previously contributed to multiple high-profile projects at Motorola.
