Customer calls to cell-phone companies, banks, airlines, insurers or tech-support contact centers are mostly met with the automated declaration: “This call is being recorded for quality assurance purposes.” One wonders what happens to those call recordings. Turns out, call recordings are a goldmine, and more and more businesses are digging into them.
For most modern businesses with call centers, deploying call monitoring software and digital platforms is a key part of the process. 64% of companies incorporate call recording software for compliance audits and 32% of companies are expecting to archive voice call data in the next two to five years.
However, a Mckinsey study shows that only 37% of organizations feel they’re using call monitoring software to create value, revealing significant missed opportunities. That brings us to call recording quality monitoring.
What is call recording quality monitoring?
The only way for organizations to know if its call center agents are taking calls efficiently is to monitor the calls. Call monitoring allows organizations to listen to and evaluate the interaction and information sharing between its staff and customers.
To make this process easier, quicker and more effective, organizations incorporate advanced analytics software applications and digital platforms that automate tasks and generate insights that can be used to enhance business processes.
Call recording monitoring apps may include basic features like search and playback, call duration, caller ID, notes and flags to advanced features such as automated report delivery, speech analysis, and emotion analysis, among others. Departments like customer support, marketing, and sales across industries (health, education, airlines, banking and finance, insurance and mortgage, retail and distribution) often use call monitoring.
It can help organizations do the following:
- Have a backup of important transactions
- Analyze interactions
- Assess the quality of calls
- Gain productivity insights
- Better call handling
- Increase staff efficiency
- Improve customer service
- Develop sales and marketing strategies
- Enhance customer experience
Let’s understand in detail why businesses should care about quality assurance in call centers.
Why is call recording quality monitoring important?
According to a survey by American Express, 78% of customers hold back purchases due to poor service experience. In 2017, Forbes reported that companies lost 62 billion of business due to poor customer service. Surprisingly, 80% of businesses believe that they provide excellent customer service. The truth: only 8% of customers feel the same.
Clearly, businesses cannot afford to slack at their contact center game. Here’s how assessing call recordings can help businesses:
Quality assurance
Businesses that recognize the role of quality assurance in call centers can utilize call monitoring benefits. Managers and superiors can playback calls; analyze calls and grade the agent taking calls. It can help organizations assess the information shared by agents, the tone of voice, capabilities of agents and grade individual calls, too.
Enhance workforce performance
Based on call assessment, managers and superiors could implement training, coaching and improvement programs for contact center agents. Call quality monitoring can also play a key role in large companies that have multiple departments and contact centers and function in silos. The results when shared across departments can bring the different departments to align functions with each other.
Compliance and security purposes
Call recording quality monitoring helps organizations to meet compliance and security policies aligned with the organization and the state they operate in. It can help to identify sensitive information, stop recording such interactions and erase them or gather parts of recordings as proof.
Improve business performance
Call recording monitoring can help businesses identify competition, differentiate themselves from the competition, assess customer perception of company products or services, evaluate customer needs and gaps in the market. Based on these insights, businesses can make meaningful decisions to up their future performance.
How can businesses ensure best practices for quality monitoring?
Apart from following call monitoring parameters and measuring call quality assurance metrics, there are some key practices that can help harness greater value from call recording monitoring.
Involve everyone in the process
Organizations must collect a comprehensive view of call center staff-level and department-level results to avoid operating in silos. Managers, supervisors, and agents should play an active role in the process. Call center quality assurance best practices require everyone to be kept in the loop in order to track its impact on key business objectives across departments. This can help:
- Agents: conduct self-evaluation, learn from insights, compare their performance with their peers.
- Managers: evaluate the performance of individual agents and teams and provide training and help to better the performance.
- Management: track whether quality assurance processes are aligned with business goals.
Transparent and independent assessment
The assessment of individual calls must be free of bias, transparent and independent; only then can the process yield meaningful results that can be used to better the process.
Size matters – monitor all calls
Listening to some calls and ignoring the others would most probably lead to partial or inconsistent results, hence it is essential to monitor all the calls for best results.
Prompt and meaningful insights
Organizations must use the data and information gathered from call monitoring in a prompt manner to collect real-time actionable insights in order to gain a competitive advantage.
Build an ecosystem of partners
Few companies have in-house capabilities to handle structured call monitoring. Organizations must understand their capabilities and limitations. If traditional methods of manual monitoring aren’t sufficient, they must meet outsource call monitoring services to expert partners.
To sum it up
Call centers are the front line and voice of businesses. Call recording quality monitoring is essential to ensure company performance standards. If you’re looking to up your contact center customer support game and improve business performance, a cost-effective, efficient platform, can be incorporated into your company’s operations with ease.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
