How To Leverage Call Recordings To Improve The Customer Experience

In the many dealings you have with companies every day, you’ve surely heard the phrase,  “This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes…” That’s because call recording is a valuable tool for call centers. 

To be successful in business, you should always strive to enhance the customer journey. Call recordings play a beneficial role in supporting your sales and support teams and their efforts to improve the customer experience. 

How can you leverage call recordings to improve the customer experience? The answer lies in having a set purpose in mind for how you want to use your recordings, as well as an easily-manageable system for storing, accessing, and disposing of your past recordings. 

What Is a Call Recording?

Within a call center, call recording refers to the process of automatically recording incoming calls or outgoing calls to obtain a record of conversations between customers and sales or support agents. Call recordings are beneficial, because you can store and review them at any time. Whatever your business needs are, you can put these audio recordings to good use later on to improve the customer experience and streamline processes for sales and support agents, helping them fulfill their roles more efficiently. 

Recordings are perhaps most effective when used in conjunction with cloud calling software. Cloud calling software works with other business tools, like AI and transcription software, to increase the value of your call recordings. For example, sophisticated machine learning algorithms have the capability to transcribe every call, so you can make actionable decisions to improve your call center’s productivity, affirm the call quality in your call center, and give you an early heads up on any problems before they escalate, without having to listen to calls individually.

Why Would a Business Record a Phone Call?

On the customer’s end, it doesn’t always make immediate sense why a company would be recording their conversations. Behind the scenes, there are lots of reasons why it makes good sense for businesses to record calls using a cloud-based phone system.

Here are some of the benefits which companies get from using recordings:

• Supervisors or quality analysts use them to evaluate calls and learn whether sales and support agents are following the proper workflows, providing accurate information, gathering the necessary details during calls, and building rapport with customers. 
• Call recordings are highly useful for call center training purposes and for identifying topics to target for refresher training. 
• Call recorder software can rate your sales and support agents’ performance and give them quality scores, so you can view individual progress over time and address any training gaps.
• Recording apps are useful for gathering information to help your company improve the customer experience, like common customer issues or pain points.
• If sales or support agents miss or forget information on inbound calls or outgoing calls, a call recording app lets you monitor this, so you can develop more efficient knowledge bases for agents to work from. 
• Marketing departments find recordings extremely valuable for assessing the success of new product launches.
• Marketers often use recordings to identify call drivers and consumer trends. 
• Reviewing recordings gives teams and management insight into how customers are using your products, and what they like or don’t like about them. 
• When you’re using distributed teams, all team members have access to the recordings (provided they’re stored on a cloud-based phone system). 

Overall, call recordings help you improve efficiency, enhance the customer experience, and boost your revenue. 

How Long Do Companies Keep Call Recordings?

There is no short and fast answer to how long companies should keep recorded calls. However, there are some important requirements you need to keep in mind when storing your recordings. 

For example, the Federal Electronic Protection Act outlines the laws for recording phone conversations in the United States. The Act requires companies to inform callers and obtain their consent prior to recording incoming calls or outgoing phone conversations. It’s crucial to understand the law and comply with it to avoid penalties for violations if you plan on using recorded conversations in your sales or support contact centers.

In addition to federal laws, your company may also be subject to state or international requirements, so it’s important to be aware of all the legalities in the regions where your company operates. Certain industries also have specific mandates when it comes to keeping audio files for a certain length of time for business purposes. For example, in the financial industry, call recordings have to be kept for at least five years before you’re legally allowed to delete them. 

Things work a bit differently in the European Union. Businesses can only keep calls long enough to achieve the original purpose for recording the call, which varies from case to case. Companies who store call recordings are also required to store them securely, provide proof of appropriate security measures if asked, and routinely provide a risk analysis of security threats. 

Benefits of a Phone System With a Call Recording Feature

No matter what industry you’re in or the size of your company, you’ll quickly realize that there are many benefits to having a phone system that offers a VoIP call recording feature. The specific benefits vary depending on your business needs, but every business can take advantage of these 4 benefits when they use a call log that stores voice call recordings:

• Call recordings improve customer service. Imagine the time it would take to listen to thousands of phone calls as they come into your call center and try to assess whether sales or support agents are handling them well. An automatic call recorder allows your company to ensure high-quality customer interactions and gives you the added benefit of identifying issues, so you can fix them before they grow into larger problems. Sales or support agents that are aware you’re recording their calls will also typically perform their best, because they won’t know which calls are being reviewed. 
• Actual audio recordings help sales and support agents recognize the elements of good calls and bad calls. Recordings are great tools for coaching purposes and role-playing. They’re just as good for helping sales agents out with fine-tuning the best sales strategies. 
• Call recordings lend transparency in the event of litigation. When you use recordings, there’s no worry over “He said, she said”. It’s impossible for your sales and support agents to remember every detail of their conversations, and there’s an even greater chance of missed information when sales and support agents have to input data manually. In the event of a dispute, you want to make sure every detail is correct and accounted for, and recordings never lie.
• Call recordings give you insight into customers’ preferred products and services. It’s not uncommon for customers to call and ask whether you have a specific product or service. Even if you don’t offer it, it’s an important detail that should be passed on to the appropriate people within the company, like productive development heads, so you can be aware of emerging market opportunities and capitalize on them.

In addition, call recordings help you to reward your customers with a consistently high standard of customer service, and reward your sales and support agents when they perform well serving customers.  

How Call Recordings Can Improve Team Performance

If you’re looking for ways to improve the performance of your sales support teams, there’s no better tool than call recordings. 

Aircall’s call recording feature comes with many useful integrations which you can use to track, analyze, and improve overall performance in your sales and support call centers.

For Sales

Sales representatives learn a lot from listening to effective sales pitches on outbound calls, making them a valuable tool for training purposes. 

Once new sales agents start handling live calls, call playbacks of customer calls will help managers give them objective performance reviews, so they can constantly improve.

Rather than listening to recordings individually, Aircall’s feature lets you transcribe calls and extract valuable insights from a large volume of calls using machine learning tools, saving managers time and resources when carrying out these performance reviews.

In addition to Aircall, other effective sales software programs with AI and transcription features include:

• Avoma
• Modjo
• Chorus.ai
• ExecVision
• Wingman

For Support

For your support team, automatic recordings give you crucial data which you can use to inform your decisions about how to decrease hold times, increase first-call resolution rates, and solve customer problems better and faster. 

When you receive complaints from customers, recordings can be a valuable resource to learn from the experience and make improvements to ensure a better customer experience in the future. 

With recordings, you can also set up regular performance reviews with your support agents, so you can continually work with them to perform better. If a support agent is struggling, you’ll be able to listen to conversations in real-time and assist them on the spot using Aircall’s call whispering feature, or you can review the transcription of their call and conduct follow-up training once the call finishes.

Other effective customer support software programs with AI and transcription features include:

• Fireflies
• Gaston
• Enthu
• Gong
• Refract

Leveraging recordings is one of the most direct and effective ways to improve the customer experience, both from a sales and support perspective. Happy customers are loyal customers, and when you use call recordings to ensure a positive customer experience, there’s a higher likelihood that you’ll convert your satisfied customers into long-term followers of your brand, or even advocates who help bring new customers to your business, too.