Working with phone call recordings in a call center is crucial for supporting the productivity and efficiency of the call center, as well as ensuring the quality of customer service. Whether it’s an in-house call center, an outsourcing call center service, handling inbound calls, or exclusively focusing on outbound sales, companies need to track how effectively agents/operators perform their tasks, adhere to conversation scripts, and follow business ethics standards. Why is call center call recording conducted, what tools are used for phone call recording, and ultimately, how are they evaluated and analyzed? We provide detailed answers to all these questions.
Why is call recording necessary in a call center?
Recording phone conversations in a call center has several important advantages and serves various purposes, including:
Training and staff development
Recordings can be used to train new agents and enhance the skills of existing ones. Managers can analyze recordings, provide constructive feedback, and improve agents’ communication skills.
Quality of service control
Inbound call recording allows call center management to monitor the quality of customer service. Analyzing conversations helps identify strengths and weaknesses in agents and take measures to improve service quality.
Recording outbound contact center calls helps determine the effectiveness of marketing strategies and improve approaches to customer engagement through telemarketing, advertising campaigns, etc. A superior customer experience contributes to a positive business reputation, influencing the decisions of new customers to use the company’s products or services.
Resolution of disputes
Call center recordings can serve as evidence in resolving disputes with customers or even in legal proceedings, helping to avoid misunderstandings and ensuring objectivity in conflict resolution.
Monitoring compliance with company standards and policies
Phone call recordings allow checking whether agents adhere to the company’s established policies and procedures during interactions with customers—a key aspect of successful call center operations.
These standards include ethical norms that contribute to effective and respectful communication with customers, as well as specific procedures for issue resolution and handling inquiries directed to the call center.
Analysis and process improvement
Managers can use phone call recordings to analyze and enhance the working processes within the call center to ensure operational efficiency.
Clearly, call recording in call centers plays a multifaceted role, contributing to employee development, ensuring quality, effective marketing, positive customer relations, dispute resolution, adherence to standards, and continuous process improvement. The question arises: how can continuous recording of agent-customer communications be ensured across all available channels?
Software for call recording and conversation analysis in the call center
In modern contact centers, customer service departments, technical support services, and sales teams generate vast amounts of valuable data during their work. Tracking and analyzing this data help enhance the productivity of the call center and the quality of customer service. To consolidate all communication channels in one place and provide a detailed overview of each agent’s work, engineers at Global Bilgi have created Assurance Quality of Service (AQoS) – a contact center quality management software.
What is Assurance Quality of Service (AQoS)?
AQoS is a program designed to aggregate recordings from all communication channels in the contact center (audio recordings of calls, video screen recordings, chat transcriptions) and assess the quality of customer service. AQoS software is an integral part of the Sirius cloud platform for contact centers. This means that there is no need for additional tools to organize quality control in the call center. If you are using modern VoIP calling software for the call center, the task of call recording is seamlessly addressed through the standard and optional features of virtual PBX and AQoS software.
Improve call center productivity with AQoS
The convenient interface and flexibility of settings will allow you to assign roles for each user in the system, providing the opportunity for supervisors, contact center managers, and quality assurance specialists to evaluate agents. Create automated scorecards with all necessary parameters, combining audio recordings of calls, conversation logs, web chat, or messenger transcriptions with agent desktop recordings in the system to obtain a comprehensive assessment of performance.
Configure an automatic evaluation system based on the necessary parameters by assigning roles for each user in the system. Based on the evaluation of conversation or chat quality and adherence to standards, quality control specialists can assess agents.
You can create automated performance indicator systems with all the necessary parameters, combining call recordings, web chat, or messenger transcripts with recordings of agent desktops in the system to provide a comprehensive overview of efficiency for each project or work direction.
Advantages of call recording and service analytics software in call centers AQoS
Evaluating data and monitoring productivity in a contact center with proper management and agent training is an absolute advantage for both businesses and customers. With quality control software for call centers, you can track your operational efficiency (manage average handling time (AHT), increase answer rates (AR), and service levels (SL), resolve more queries during the first call (FCR), etc.). You will also be able to see how your agents communicate with customers, track their empathy and emotional intelligence, improve CSI, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), and Net Promoter Score (NPS) indicators.
With the automation of quality assurance in the contact center, your team can establish and fine-tune a bonus system to boost motivation and enhance productivity. Each agent’s evaluation will be seamlessly integrated into the report and subsequently computed based on the quota assigned to each specific project. Utilizing call recording and quality assessment software designed for contact centers, such as AQoS from Global Bilgi, streamlines and adds transparency to this process.
How to evaluate call recordings in a contact center?
To assess the quality of customer service based on call recordings or transcripts of communication in web chat or messenger, the contact center must have a service strategy. A customer-centric strategy aims to instill in each contact center employee the fundamental principles of service, such as:
- Responsibility for resolving customer issues
- Competence
- Adaptation to the customer’s level
- Sincerity
- Empathy
- Humanity
Service standards are built on these principles. When evaluating call recordings or agent-customer interactions in the contact center, a quality specialist should pay attention to standards such as:
- Start of the conversation (greetings, addressing the customer)
- Identification of the customer’s problem or need
- Empathetic attitude and active listening
- Adjustment to the customer (pace of speech, mood, values, etc.)
- Politeness and the agent’s speech quality
- Accuracy of information provided
- Time spent keeping the customer on the line
- Conversation conclusion
It should be noted that standards may vary for each individual project. For example, on the outbound call center sales line, service standards may include a thorough knowledge of the product or service, adherence to processes, handling complaints and objections, transaction closure, etc. However, the basic principles of service always remain unchanged.
Systematic analysis of these aspects allows obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the quality of service in the contact center, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of agents, and implementing improvements to enhance overall customer service levels.
Call recording in the contact center: conclusions
Software that records conversations between agents and customers becomes a crucial analytics tool in the contact center. The software provides quality control specialists with invaluable data, helping to enhance departmental efficiency, increase conversion rates, optimize marketing expenses, identify the most effective employees, and make other decisions that contribute to boosting the company’s profits.
