4 Ways To Use Call Recordings for Better Contact Center Performance

According to a recent survey by Contact Babel of contact center professionals, over 90% of businesses record their calls, but only 34% are analyzing them with a speech analytics solution. Even with 21% saying they were looking to implement a solution this year, this is leaving a lot of customer and agent insight data wasting away.Below are four ways that your call recordings can be used to better your agents, customers and company to contact center performance.

1. Quality Monitoring Processes

One of the most common uses of call recordings is for quality monitoring purposes. However, traditional quality assurance (QA) processes, some in the form of manual checklists, only manage to use about 1-2% of agents’ monthly calls for that purpose. This means that all the wealth of data hidden in those recordings remains overlooked, making it virtually impossible for managers to get a true sense of the quality of performance of each individual agent.

To utilize your call recordings in the most efficient way you can, use tools such as speech analytics to automatically analyse and score 100% of recordings. This will enable you to deliver automated performance feedback to agents and supervisors, and necessary insights to manage any quality assurance processes more efficiently. By utilizing recordings in this way, companies can categorize their calls and search for trends in customer behavior (e.g. uncovering the root cause of customer complaints and eliminate the source), ultimately raising the quality of service provided to customers. In my opinion, if call recordings are used for QA purposes then it is a very high risk strategy to base QA decisions on anything less that 100% of calls

2. Identifying customer trends and sales opportunities

Your call recordings can be used to identify customer trends or sales opportunities. To perform trend analysis, you need to be able to analyse and score 100% of your call recordings. You can then identify and correlate desired outcomes of the calls, such as driving successful sales, with certain agent behaviors, skills or language used. Therefore, if you analyse your call recordings with speech analytics you can identify different ways of making a sale and select the one with the best outcome to create an optimum path. Agents testing this path can be scored against adherence to the desired script or their ability to identify language which indicates a willingness to buy

3. Ensuring compliance

Failing to comply with regulations can be incredibly costly – both to your company’s bottom line and reputation. Call recordings can help drive the right kind of compliant behavior. But manual sampling of recorded calls provides little to no prevention of non-compliant behavior or protection against litigation. This presents a huge risk to the call center. Instead you should consider utilizing your call recordings in a way that will enhance your continuous monitoring capabilities by tracking every conversation to ensure that the right compliance procedures are in place.

Speech analytics or interaction analytics across channels can help by analyzing and scoring every single agent interaction, either during or after the call, as opposed to traditional, random compliance checks. The result is lower cost and effort in call center quality monitoring. This can drive better compliance adherence, streamline auditing and, ultimately, reduce/eliminate possible fines or lawsuits for non-compliance

4. Improving coaching and training

Call recordings contain a huge amount of information that can be incredibly useful for coaching and training purposes. However, this insight is often not fully utilized as the manual process of listening to agent calls is very time consuming. This manual approach is also not fair because agent performance is being assessed based on a very thin slice of their calls. As a result, it is often not possible to arrive at a fair assessment of an agent’s coaching and training needs.

To overcome these weaknesses and use your call recordings to drive smarter training and coaching, you can use call analytics to identify individual coaching and training needs. This analysis can also provide agents with actionable information they can use to improve their own performance and quality scores. Because the insight is based on 100% of their calls, it will produce much fairer performance feedback. As a result, agents are more likely to embrace the coaching and training because they can see how it will help their performance. This positive mindset can help to create a culture of self-improvement and continuous improvement.