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Financial transactions
conducted by telephone and
emergency services are just
two of the sectors where the
need to record telephone
calls is mandatory but ask
business managers what they think of
call recording and you’ll get a fairly
standard response: it’s for big call centres
that record calls because they have to by
law; it’s not for us.
In reality however, this is far from the
case. Why?
Firstly, the range of uses to which
call recording is now being applied has
expanded greatly. Users can now opt
for solutions that record 100% of calls –
essential in businesses that need to
record calls for legal or compliance
reasons.
The functionality of call recording
solutions today goes beyond the simple
recording of calls. You can now
automatically analyse what is going on
in those calls: from assessing the
effectiveness of call handling scripts, to
identifying customer service trends or
spotting product mentions in calls.
Secondly, until recently call
recording solutions for the small to
medium-sized enterprise (SME) market
have been limited. However, highly costeffective
entry points to the technology
and applications, without any functional
compromise are now available.
Call recording has therefore become
a strategic business tool, enabling
organisations of all shapes and sizes to
address their regulatory and business
demands. Just take a moment to think
how your business could benefit by
analysing the interactions and
transactions that go on every day
between your staff, customers and
partners.
Imagine also being able to integrate
call recording capabilities with call
cost analysis and management
information tools, to see just how much
time and money each of your customers
is costing you |
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| Emergency services: call recording is
mandatory. |
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in support and then
measure that against their sales
turnover. Alternatively, use this feature
to monitor the success of outbound
sales and marketing campaigns. |
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| Call Recording Benefits: |
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| • Agents’ performance monitoring |
• Regulation and code of practice compliance |
| • Campaign and promotion
evaluation |
• Record transactions |
| • Training support |
• Provide help desk replay reference |
| • Improved customer service |
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Ease of Use |
| There are a variety of products on the market for the smaller business from single line/single phone attachments to devices that record calls to a PC hard drive or CD-ROM. For larger companies or where applications are more sophisticated there are solutions from a number of vendors. |
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For call recording, one of the key
requirements is that the solution has to
be easy to use without the necessity to
constantly refer to an instruction book.
The retrieval of the recorded calls has
to be fast and simple too, with the
ability to search for relevant data such
as telephone numbers, account IDs and
the like. Lesser featured recording solutions often provide the functionality to record a call, but this is the easy part. If they only offer the ability to search by date and time, or channel or extension number, then the user may find themselves taking hours to locate an important and relevant conversation. Additionally, it must be possible to access recordings from the
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| Call Recording can be as simple as this
for small organisations |
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user’s PC, and this access should be made available to all relevant users.
This is something to look out for when investigating a recording system,
since many of them appear to be
inexpensive up front, but when multiple
call replay licences are added to the
package, the user is faced with the
decision to either increase dramatically
their spend or restrict access to the
recorded calls.
Another key element of an SMEfriendly
recording solution is that the
system management aspect must be
practically next to zero, i.e. the system
should be able to run itself. By
providing a large capacity of on-line
recording storage and efficient
compression techniques, the need to
change and store DVDs or tapes should
be a thing of the past in most SME
applications. |
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Call Recording in a
Nutshell |
What is it? The ability to record telephone
conversations for later playback and
analysis. This encompasses
recording both ends of a telephone
call for incoming, outgoing,
internal and conference calls.
Conversations are recorded
to a storage medium,
often a hard disc on a
local PC, or network
device. Key features
would include a fast
search facility to
track down
recordings for playback
– this is essential for
practical use and the
more sophisticated
systems would
additionally use text to
speech recognition to
search out the recordings. Voice
recording files are often recorded in
Windows wav file format that makes
them easier to use in an organisation.
Why have it?The biggest user of call recording
systems in recent years is the call
centre market. Here there are two
significant drivers. Firstly, call
recordings can be used to train call
centre agents. Recordings can be
played back and measured against a
training score sheet (an application
often built in to many call recording
systems). Secondly, where call centres
are conducting financial transactions
there is a need to verify agreements
made over the phone in the case of a
later dispute. |
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| Call Recording
can be used to
great effect for
staff training in
the call centre. |
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Other Considerations: |
If you have an IP PBX system and are
making calls using voice over IP (VoIP)
make sure the system you choose is
capable of recording IP-based
conversations as well as ‘regular’ calls. |
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Pricing: |
Simple, easy to use call recording
applications for small and SOHO
organisations range from around £250
to £2,000. Thereafter, they scale up
quite quickly as the number of users
rise and the degree of sophistication
follows. Most high vendors have
adopted a modular strategy meaning
that the basic call recording, retrieval
and playback is supplied as a more
cost-effective ‘platform’ upon which
further application options can be
built. This is useful for budgeting
purposes. |
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| Applications: |
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| Call Centre Applications |
| The modern call centre is often a
pressure cooker for staff,
management and callers alike.
Targets to achieve, client or
management reports to produce,
and above all – the need to
provide an excellent customer
experience. Quite a task.
Call recording can help in a
number of ways but let’s just
consider three key areas: |
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| Staff or Agent Training |
| Call recording provides an
invaluable tool for management
and agent alike. Best practice
examples of call handling by
experienced agents can be used
to train new or lesser skilled
personnel. Agents can identify
where in a call they ‘lost the
business or customer confidence’,
and practice how to overcome
these issues. |
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| Verification of Financial
Transactions |
| In any dispute it is helpful to have
evidence of exactly what occurred
– who said what to whom and
when. In a call centre where
goods and services are traded,
call recording can provide the
back up necessary for both the
agent and the caller, to verify
financial transactions and resolve
disputes. |
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| Improved Staff Retention |
Abuse within the modern call and
contact centre is a common
occurrence, and is a key factor in
staff churn. Call recording cannot
stop this from happening but it
can ensure that it acts as a big
brother to your agents, monitoring
the occasions when they are
harassed. If an agent experiences
difficulties with a customer, the
recorded call could be used at a
later time for legal purposes and
for further counselling and
training of the agent.
Being able not only to hear the
call record, but also track the
entire progress of the call
throughout a call centre will
provide the management
information required to help
businesses improve productivity. |
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| BUYING TIPS: |
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Ask for a demonstration – see how
easy it is to use. All the smart money
goes in to making call retrieval and
playback easy so find out how you
track calls from Doncaster six weeks
ago on a Friday afternoon before tea
break taken by Charlie in the call
centre.
Ask for a reference site – customers
of a similar size and functionality to
your own business. Don’t be afraid to
speak to them and ask questions.
If your business is growing then
make sure that the system you buy
today has the capacity to expand to
meet your future needs.
Check out not only how and where
calls are recorded but also how they
are archived. Using tapes should be
avoided, most will record to hard
drives so ask if anyone on the network
can play them back – with security
clearance of course. |
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