Okay, maybe you don’t need a flight recorder in your business . . .
Perhaps you don’t even need call recording (also known as call logging). However, many businesses achieve valuable benefits from recording customer calls. Typically, at the forefront of these are employee training and maintaining call quality. But there can be other, perhaps surprising benefits to call recording.
And, call recording systems aren’t just for mid-sized or large businesses, but can be an economical addition for businesses of any size.
Here are several ways your company may benefit by adding call recording to your business phone system:
Capture details that may have been missed or forgotten
When talking to customers, it’s vital to actively listen. It may also be important to take notes of what was discussed or promised. But taking notes during the call can prevent you from actively listening.
In addition, sometimes it’s difficult to make out what a customer is saying. They’re in a noisy environment, talking quickly, or speaking in a heavy accent. You can, and should ask for clarification when needed. But having a record of the call, portions of which you can play back multiple times if necessary, provides some assurance that you won’t miss something critical.
You can also take notes during playback to ensure you didn’t forget anything — whether the recording is of a restaurant customer’s take-out order or a discussion about a customer’s insurance policy claim. Plus, during the call, you can be fully present with customers. This helps ensure they feel they’re truly being “heard” — a big part of providing a great customer experience, which can translate into increased revenues.
Coach your team more effectively
By recording some calls, your call center administration can hear how your team members are dealing with customers. It’s a fantastic opportunity for managers to help teams improve their telephone skills with customers, and to provide tips on how to sell more effectively or how to offer better customer service and support. Anyone in your organization, including receptionists and top sales people, can benefit from the kind of specific coaching and feedback that managers can provide as a result of monitoring call recordings. You can provide feedback to your staff based on their individual calls or select typical examples to be used for training purposes.
Get to know your customers
Call recordings help your marketing team better understand your company’s customer, or prospect. By listening to customer calls, your marketing team members will gain a more realistic understanding of your buyers and, in turn, make your marketing efforts much more effective to help drive revenues.
Enhance your product or service
By sharing call recordings with specific team members, you can help them better understand how customers are using your product, what they like about it, and what could be improved. All of this is invaluable information that can be translated into products and services that more effectively meet customer expectations and boost revenues.
Improve regulatory compliance and reduce associated costs
In some cases, maintaining a database of recorded calls can help your business comply with legal, industry, and service-level compliance guidelines.
Recorded calls can help you with dispute resolution, risk management, or defend against litigation from unhappy customers. And in some cases, a voice recording may serve as a verbal contract.
Provide great customer service
It’s often said that it costs five-to-seven times more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. Providing excellent customer service is one way to keep customers. Your customer goes to some trouble to contact you. Maybe they had to look up your phone number, and then they were placed on hold. By listening closely to call recordings, you can gain an understanding of customers’ pain points, and how to possibly avoid or minimize them in the future.
Capture customer stories
Customers who call your company will sometimes talk positively about their experience using your product or service: why they chose it, how it’s helped them, and so on. With the customer’s permission, you may be able to translate the content of such calls into a great “customer success story” for your marketing or advertising campaigns.
Determine how your customer service has evolved
By maintaining a database of call recordings, you can compare how your team communicates with customers today vs. how you communicated with them in the past. The differences can show where you’ve improved and where you still need work.
Quickly bring a customer service representative up to speed
If you’re a small business, it may be necessary to bring someone in from time to time to handle customer calls. Maybe you want to completely disconnect from business while on vacation. Or you’re too busy with work to handle customer calls effectively. Even big businesses need to add more contact center agents at times.
Increase profitability
Bottom line enhancement is perhaps the most important business-related aspect of call recording. With its ability to enhance training, call recording improves efficiency, and ultimately, the profit-making capacity in a business. In addition to training, the software generates reports which can be analyzed to offer vital business metrics. Through the analysis, management is able to identify areas that need improvement in order to enhance the customer experience, and inherently, improve profitability.
Furthermore, the analysis can reveal revenues generated from calls, and such knowledge can then be used to make strategic decisions regarding how to enhance the average earnings from each call.
Contact us now for a complimentary consultation on how call recording may work for you:
Toll free (800) 898-3336
