Every department of your company works diligently to offer customers the first-rate experience they expect from your brand. Customer support is one of the most critical areas, as your support team is the first point of contact for anyone experiencing issues with your product or service. The goodwill you create from stellar sales and targeted marketing can be eroded if your customer support team doesn’t work like a well-oiled machine.
But the data recorded by customer support teams only tells a tiny sliver of the story. How do you check the quality of the calls your support teams are fielding daily? Call recording and call monitoring software is the answer.
Improving Customer Service
The primary use of call recording software is to monitor the service that customer support is offering. You can review service calls to get an idea of how the team is handling interactions with customers.
Besides offering a satisfactory customer experience, support teams must also ensure they give consistent service to all customers. Call recording allows you to check whether agents are following your company’s defined protocols or not. Every customer support call that comes in can be checked for quality assurance.
In parallel with call recording software, tools like call center analytics and intelligent hold queues improve the customer service your team offers.
Agent Training
Live call monitoring is an invaluable tool for training new customer support agents. You can listen to calls as they happen and offer advice and guidance in real-time. New agents are encouraged by an experienced agent, and they set off on their journey following all the correct processes you’ve put in place.
Call recording is used extensively in support team call coaching. You can offer personal coaching tips based on successful and failed conversations. Effective customer support calls can be demonstrated by showing conversation methods that work.
Accountability and Compliance
Not all customer support agents like the use of call recording software, but it offers them protection when disputes arise. Customers can sometimes suggest a support agent said one thing where the notes on the call say otherwise. With call recording software, it’s easy to find the original discussion and prove what was actually said.
Companies in many industries must record calls for data protection and compliance purposes. Regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mean that customers must be informed in advance that their calls are being recorded, depending on the country or state you’re operating in.
It also protects the company from disputes in court because there’s concrete proof of what was said.
Automated Transcription
Services like Gong or Avoma can automatically record and transcribe conversations and meetings. This saves you from having to spend time listening to calls and offers you an instant succinct summary of what was discussed.
You can search through transcripts and get alerts for specific words or phrases, making finding the exact details of a conversation easy and instantaneous. This has a wide range of uses, from data-driven marketing insights to compliance.
Customers don’t like repeating the same information time and again. With call recording, everything that was said can be stored. No matter who the customer talks to the next time, the agent will have a clear understanding of the issue and what has transpired before. This helps your team to work as one cohesive unit, with seamless transitions between agents.
Conversation Intelligence
Conversation intelligence tools like Avoma and Gong can do a lot more than simply transcribe calls. They allow you to analyze aggregate data from all of your calls, and alert you to risks and opportunities across your business. You can gain invaluable information on your customers requests, pain points, and customer support procedures. You can quickly find where the processes used in calls require adjustment.
Early Product Issue Warnings
With every call recorded and tracked in a central system, common product issues or system bugs can be flagged more quickly. Frequent customer complaints can reach the right eyes sooner, allowing for swift action. The fallout from serious issues can be largely avoided.
Similarly, the suggestions and compliments you receive from customers on the things that are working well can be stored to be used in future product planning.
Deep Customer Understanding
Customer support calls offer some of the most important information your business can get. People only call customer support lines when something isn’t quite right for them, so you gain insights into who your customers are, what they want, and how you can offer it.
Call recordings offer valuable nuggets of information, including:
- The concerns customers have about your products or services
- What they like about your products and what might send them elsewhere in the future
- The reasons customers choose to perform unwished actions such as canceling a purchase or subscription
- The terminology customers use
- The best responses to deal with customers’ concerns
This information can be used across your entire business in marketing decisions, sales processes, product design, and future customer success calls.
Better Metrics
Most customer support teams have common key performance indicators (KPIs) such as call answer rates and call length. But without qualitative measurements, these indicators aren’t much more than a general summary.
Call recording software allows you to see more helpful performance metrics and drill down to what matters. Because you have recorded more details on what each call was about, what was discussed, and what the end result was, you get more valuable information.
For example, you can find the optimum call length for a particular type of call, such as a technical support question. You can analyze the average hold time people will wait on calls to understand your abandonment rates better or find bottlenecks in your customer support process where calls are taking longer than expected.
This information can inform how you build and manage your customer support teams, moving agents between tasks to better deal with the challenges the business is facing. Using call recording software with metrics like customer satisfaction can help you quickly find the types of calls that are satisfying to the customer and those which require reexamining.
