“This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes…”
Who hasn’t heard this phrase? We hear it nearly every time we call a company’s customer service line. And even though its expression protects the company; saving it from violating anti-wiretapping laws (among other regulations), have you ever stopped to consider why they believe it’s necessary to record the phone call in the first place — and whether your business can benefit from it too?
Recording interactions with customers can:
- Limit legal liability
- Ensure regulatory compliance
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Solve disputes
- Accelerate employee training
- Retain employees
- Improve performance evaluations and keep employees on task
- Strengthen security and identify risks
- Track marketing initiatives
While the simple act of recording phone calls will help with liability and compliance, actually listening to the recordings is much more beneficial. You’ll be able to gather actionable information that can be used to save money and improve your business.
Limit Legal Liability
Recording phone calls provides a layer of legal protection for both companies and consumers. Documenting verbal requests and authorizations will allow your business to verify contractual compliance, which may help in arbitrating a dispute in the future.
If you have to go to court over a dispute, you can avoid a game of “he said, she said” because you’ll have proof of what your customer service team promised and what the customer agreed to.
Regulatory Compliance
Businesses in all sectors are facing a growing number of regulatory requirements. Many businesses are required to record phone calls just to have an indisputable record of transactions, while others find it to be an effective and affordable way to demonstrate a pattern of compliance with industry-specific privacy regulations.
Improve Customer Satisfaction
It’s easier to keep existing customers than it is to find new ones. When you record phone calls with your customers, you have the chance to review each interaction and determine why they called and what resolution they found satisfactory.
By aggregating data, you can discover the most common complaints and take concrete steps to remedy them. This will significantly decrease your call volume while showing customers that you care about their satisfaction with your products, services and company.
If the issue isn’t something you can fix immediately, you can at least prep your customer service team with appropriate questions and responses that will reduce the length of service calls, improve the experience your customers have when they call you and create happier resolutions for everyone.
Employee Training
You can tell someone how to do their job until you’re blue in the face, but sometimes the most effective training requires you to show examples of what you’re looking for in a quality customer service interaction.
By recording phone calls, you’ll have clear and concise examples of “what” and “what not” to do, which can help new hires retain information and feel prepared when they start tackling calls.
Pairing a new hire with a veteran customer service rep will allow them to learn skills from a mentor who takes the time to show them how to handle an irate customer or answer a tricky question.
Yet you may not have the resources to do this kind of training effectively. And since you have no control over what kind of phone calls come in during a training session, you may miss some important lessons simply because there was no opportunity to address them.
This is where pre-recorded customer service calls become invaluable. You can be certain that each new rep will be exposed to all of your most common “trouble calls” and have a thorough understanding of how they should be handled.
You can even pair examples of calls when a rep performed poorly and where they provided outstanding customer service so your new hire can really hear and feel the difference.
If you have more than one customer service center, the types of calls you receive in each one may vary widely. Establishing a set of “best and worst of” examples for each type of business and geographic area may also be a smart idea.
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Improve Employee Retention and Evaluations
When you record phone calls, you have the opportunity to move away from “scripted” phone calls, which may leave customers feeling underserved, undervalued and dissatisfied.
“Real” calls serve as better tools to train highly efficient and effective employees, since they’ll see that they have room to do their job in their own way while still making the customer feel recognized and satisfied in accordance with your policies.
Pre-recorded phone calls ultimately allow you to train and retain better customer service reps that understand your business, your customers and the results you’re looking to achieve with your service team.
They also allow your managers to effectively evaluate the performance of each rep and provide feedback and additional training that will improve their individual success over time, which will help make them feel like a valued member of the customer service team whose individual performance is noticed and appreciated.
Increase Security
Employees that intentionally or unintentionally divulge confidential information create many security threats. Recording phone calls encourages customer service reps to be more aware of what they say and do while preventing the unauthorized verbal transmission of private information.
In the event of a security violation you will have an undisputable record of the activity, which can help you identify the source of the problem, address or correct it and prevent it from happening in the future.
Measure Marketing Initiatives
While it’s fairly simple to track where leads come from online, tracking the source of a lead through a phone call can be much more difficult. Most times you’ll have to require that your customer service rep ask the caller what prompted them to contact you.
By listening to these recordings, you can determine which marketing initiatives are generating leads for your business and which need to be tweaked or scrapped altogether.
If you’ve hired a marketing company, it can also help you determine which leads they’re generating for you and which ones you’re generating on your own. This can help you determine the performance of the agency and what your future marketing budget should look like. If you haven’t and would like to improve your lead tracking to find out where your best customers are coming from? Contact Optimum7 today.
