If you’re wondering “how does call recording and analytics improve customer services”, you’re not alone. With so many remote workers and branches spread all over the world, it’s hard to offer an omnichannel experience of a high standard without robust monitoring. And modern technologies can make this even easier than ever before. Today, we’ll explore call recording and analytics in a new light to explain how you can use them to boost customer experience.

Where call recording & analytics sit

Before the internet era, call centres, contact centres, customer support and sales functions linked in via a PBX system for telephony and recording. It may have had some basic analytics at the time, but now internet-enabled and cloud services offer so much more. Cloud PBX is an IP-based telephone solution that is accessed via the internet. One of the main advantages for businesses of all sizes is that it can improve customer interaction and foster new business. Many businesses use it because it provides secure and reliable phone service. It also utilises the cloud to store important data, as opposed to storing it on a hard drive.

Why customer service matters

Neil Patel gives us these key stats:

â--     $289 is the average value of every lost business relationship in the U.S. per year

â--     71% of consumers ended a business relationship due to a poor customer service experience

â--     61% of customers take their business to a competitor after a poor customer service experience

â--     The financial sector lost $44 BILLION because of bad customer service! »tweet«

â--     Bad service consists of confusing automated self-service, long waits, poor attention, and inexperienced representatives

 

Even if you’re not in the financial sector, the potential losses are enormous. And you can see how the last one is all about call centres. Making automated services easier, reducing the wait times, encouraging appropriate agent call mannerisms and properly training our teams enables huge gains in CX. So, it looks to be that improving your contact centre function might have the biggest impact on customer satisfaction overall. But how can you do that quickly and with the largest ROI? Simple – make use of robust call recording and analytics to improve your CX by identifying and plugging these gaps.

How call recording & analytics improve customer services

Customer service is greatly improved when you have access to the raw data to feed reports to make accurate decisions. In short, this covers a few core areas:

Compliance

Depending on what sector you operate in, you may need to keep call recordings for a certain amount of time. This could vary from a few months to a few years. And even if it isn’t a requirement, you might want to keep them in case of a customer dispute or for employee training purposes. A cloud VOIP solution allows you to do this easily and without using space on your own internal storage. Talk to your configuration partner about how many records you need to retain and how you’d like them organised for best access. You’ll close disputes faster when you can easily access, listen to, and make assessments with your call recordings.

Performance management

To coach and improve your teams, you need access to raw recordings and important statistical data. By using both, your management team can identify opportunities for growth. CX Today explains that random call recordings let you collect a sample set of clips for each agent across the month – giving you visibility into the average performance without occupying too much storage. Keeping track of call length, hold time, time to first answer and other core stats can see what agents are helping customers more quickly and why. Then you need to reward your star performers – publicly. This will help your other agents know what is expected and what they can attain with peak performance. If any are falling behind, creating a coaching programme with manager 1-2-1s, side by side call training, post-call reviews and more can help.

Speech analytics

If you want to automate more of your customer service and still have happy clients, you need to know what they’re asking about. And getting this information anecdotally or from call resolution logging can be unreliable at best. Consider using a recording solution that can glean important data by listening to multiple calls simultaneously. With this addition to your call centre analytics data, an agent’s follow-up with existing customers can include potential opportunities to align their needs as they were expressed in previous reach outs. Speech-to-phrase recognition can identify common themes in an average call to talk time. Is there a significant portion of your customers that would prefer a new way to make bill payments? A cloud-based AI can search through several calls at once and unify these calls in the lowest amount of time, improving your call work time. You can also combine this with sentiment analytics across your social media inputs to create a unified picture of the customer experience across all touchpoints.

KPI monitoring

According to IR companies who apply analytics can reduce average customer handle time by up to 40%. Additionally, analytics can help increase self-service containment rates by 5 to 20%, cut employee costs by up to $5 million, and boost the conversion rate on service-to-sales calls by nearly 50%- with the bonus of improving customer experience and employee engagement. You’ll want to keep track of first call resolutions, hold time, answer rate, recontact rate, call duration and other core metrics to pull the right levers to enhance your customer satisfaction. Remember, just monitoring something is not enough. You need to build these metrics into your performance reviews for maximum effectiveness. This will help you reward top performers and coach those that are falling behind.

Quality assurance

If KPIs are the hard numerical stats, the QA function looks at the softer side of customer service. Call recordings are your most important tool in this regard. First, they can help you review if the customer query was understood by the agent. Then you could see if the agent reacted with empathy and understanding. Next, you’ll review if the agent accessed the right resources to help solve the customer request. If they didn’t, you’ll note if the call was escalated to the right department or if any follow-on procedures were followed. Additionally, you can check the tone throughout to see if it aligns with brand values, TOV and other guidance. Any missteps provide an excellent training opportunity. That’s because a call recording is not subjective. It’s not an opinion, it’s a real record of the agent’s job performance.

Remote access

As we mentioned earlier, today’s workforce is spread all over. In fact, according to FindStack by 2028, 73% of all departments are expected to have remote workers. And you can be sure this will include your contact centre, sales, and other PBX-related functions. So, having call recording and analytics quickly accessible 24/7 means you can better respond to disputes and ongoing customer service issues. It allows management to jump into calls as they are ongoing, take calls from remote (even personal mobile) devices, receive notifications about abnormal call behaviour and get reports on trending call reasons in real-time. The result is a faster and more agile customer service function that can adapt to both the changing workplace and live customer support issues with the same software toolkit. Talk to your implementation partner about what quick-views and remote access reporting are the most useful for your environment.

Security & resilience

In many fields, you need to ensure security. Medical, legal and government functions require robust access restriction and encryption. You can get both with a modern VOIP. It will be necessary to control access to recordings, probably on a graduated basis. Most Cloud PBX systems provide this facility. Plus, data could be intercepted or stolen between the client and Cloud PBX sites. Again, most systems provide this facility, but sometimes third-party software based on VPN access is needed. Additionally, cloud-based systems are more stable. According to McKinsey, “Organisations increasingly underestimate the challenge of network resilience when they think about workforce management”"and the impact of outages on customer satisfaction. The typical company faces up to five major outages each year, and 25 to 30 site or queue disruptions.” So, not only can ensuring security enhance the customer experience but making sure that your contact methods are always on can positively impact CX too.

Summary

In conclusion, improving your customer service function through call recording and analytics is easier than ever thanks to new cloud-based solutions. Meet the security, resilience, remote access, QA, KPI, performance management and other goals of your business without the stress of internal PBX management. And with any cloud-based solution, it updates and scales with you to be fit for purpose today and tomorrow. If you’d like to start your cloud PBX journey, talk to our helpful team of telephony experts today.