Are You Maximising the Potential of Call Recording?

Helen Billingham, of Enghouse Interactive, stresses that call recording should be integrated and improved.

Most contact centres now have access to call recordings, but are they being utilised in the most effective ways within your business?

Use as part of an integrated approach to deliver a joined-up customer service strategy

Back in 2011, analyst Gartner projected that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human. One of the by-products of that ongoing shift to self-service interaction is that it changes the way call recording can be used to support customer service goals. With more interactions today handled in part by a robot, chatbot or some other form of AI, and in part by a human operator, businesses need a joined-up strategy.

They need to ‘take a step back’ and think about the whole process, the typical complaints and resolutions, and the kinds of regulations that need to be complied with, and then put a holistic approach in place that addresses all these typical business scenarios, in which call recording is just one element of a coordinated methodology.

Rather than just recording the voice element of the interaction, businesses need a complete 360-degree view of the entire end-to-end interaction, irrespective of which channels the interaction took as it navigated its way from the start to the finish. And that may mean they need to implement screen recording, real-time speech analytics and performance metrics, for example, to run alongside call recording. Equally, it may mean training chatbots as well as human agents in order to improve the overall customer service delivered.

Align quality management tools to streamline customer service

Call recording solutions are generally of more value to businesses today when deployed as part of an integrated package of customer interaction tools. Integrating call and screen recording can be especially valuable in resolving internal disputes while also enhancing customer engagement.

Take a scenario where a customer service agent offers a customer a £5,000 loan at an interest rate of 5%, only to find when their manager later reviews the call recording that it should have been 8%.

If call recording is used in isolation, then the typical outcome of this mistake will be negative. The business will either have lent money at a rate it did not want to and will probably end up losing money on the deal, or alternatively if the customer offer is withdrawn, the business will have alienated and possibly lost a customer. Either way, the agent will be blamed for the mistake.

If the business runs screen recording in parallel with call recording, though, it can be shown that the problem was not the agent making a mistake but rather that the data source that the agent was referencing was incorrect. The agent is vindicated and the problem can be quickly addressed, reducing the likelihood of further mistakes being made by others in the future.

Layer on intelligence over call recordings to streamline the customer interaction

By using the latest real-time speech analytics technologies, businesses can effectively add a whole layer of intelligence on top of a call recording. This allows the conversation to be monitored in real time and allows any issues with the interaction to be spotted. The approach immediately alerts the agent if relevant information has not been provided or has been provided incorrectly, helping to ensure compliance. It also supports a quality interaction by monitoring the clarity of speech, checking for cross-talking and even assessing the stress levels on the call.

Once again, it illustrates the point that call recording is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of tools for customer engagement. If it is looked at holistically as part of an integrated offering with layers of intelligent technology added, businesses can build a much richer picture of their customer engagement and use that to enhance their compliance, dispute resolution, agent training and whole customer service approach.