As virtually every organization across the globe has probably noticed by now, today’s customers are empowered. They have easy access to more competing businesses than ever, and more opportunity for public recourse than ever before when things don’t go their way, and they’re aware of that. This is officially the age of the customer, and businesses are just trying to stay alive in it.
According to the Microsoft Global Customer Service Report from 2016, 60% of customers have ceased their relationship with a brand over a single bad customer service experience. With the telephone commonly cited as the most frustrating customer service channel, many organizations are understandably looking for a way to improve the customer service experience on it.
This call may be recorded for customer experience improvement purposes
Call recording software is just what it sounds like: an easy way for an organization to record all VoIP calls. Recording is handled at a centralized location, allowing for recording at virtual or remote sites with no set-up or administration at those sites necessary.
Leading call recording software offer a range of modalities to allow organizations to use the call recording strategy that suits them best – passive VoIP, active VoIP and SIP trunk recording as well as standard SIPREC support. Leading call recording software will also easily integrate with products and systems from all leading IP telephony vendors and offer excellent reliability, scalability, compression and capacity, making it easy and convenient to get started on improving the customer experience. Here are five customer experience benefits this software offers.
#1 – Better training for customer service agents
Customer service isn’t easy, and getting into it can be beyond overwhelming. Not only do new agents need to learn about the company they’re providing support for as well as products and services, they have to learn not just what to say but how to say it.
Nothing helps incoming agents learn how to interact with customers like listening to other agents actually do just that. Providing agents in training with real-life recordings of excellent interactions as well as interactions where common issues occurred will give them an invaluable preview of their jobs and arm them with necessary knowledge and a grasp of the problem solving options available to them. It might be impossible to fully prepare new agents for everything they’re going to encounter in their work, but giving them access to a selection of recorded customer interactions is about as close as it gets.
#2 – Better coaching for customer service agents
The metrics and KPIs provided by performance management software are incredible, but for the full story of what actually goes on in any given customer service interaction over the phone, you have to go to the recording. Call recordings provide managers with the opportunity to gather important information on everything from an agent’s tone of voice, volume, clarity and speed of speech to their problem solving, ability to offer solutions and ability to stay courteous when dealing with an irate customer. This enables managers to provide the most specific feedback and coaching possible.
Relatedly, allowing agents to hear themselves on calls makes for truly effective learning opportunities. Call recordings are objective and present agents with a clear and honest picture of their performance and communication skills, helping to constructively improve both.
#3 – Better performance from agents
The above two points certainly contribute to helping agents achieve a better customer service performance. But do you know what will really inspire them to provide customers with an optimal customer experience? Knowing their calls are being recorded. Accountability will do it every time.
Further, if agents are provided with the ability to listen to their own recorded calls during their own working time, not just during coaching sessions or performance evaluations, they can forget about trying to scribble notes or accurately type in all relevant information. Instead they can focus on active listening and interaction, knowing any details they need to double-check later will be available in the recording.
#4 – Reduced customer pain points
In this time of Twitter DMs and virtual assistants ready for instant interaction in messenger apps, it takes some pretty significant effort for a customer to call a business’s customer service. They need to look up the number and find a convenient time to call and communicate their issues to one of your agents. It isn’t lifting cinder blocks, no, but these customers are investing time and effort into interacting with your brand, and they need to be rewarded with excellent – not to mention efficient – customer service.
What call recordings can do is let you know beyond a doubt what customer pain points are when it comes to your customer service. Was it hard to find the number? Did they have to wait on hold? Were they escalated to another agent, forcing them to rehash their entire conversation? It’s one thing to know a metric like time to first contact, but it’s a whole other thing to hear direct from customers on call recordings that waiting X number of minutes is Y number of minutes too long. Call recordings spell out those pain points, plain and simple.
#5 – Better understanding of customer needs when it comes to products or services
How customers enjoy the products or services provided by a company plays a significant role in shaping the customer experience. Want to know what customers love about your products and services? How they’re using those products and services? What they don’t like? What could be improved? Call recordings will have all that information and more, just waiting to be shared with research and development or product management teams.
Phoning it in
With so many channels now available for customer service, it’s more important than ever that an organization’s telephone customer experience is top-notch. Fair or not (and it isn’t, really) customer service conducted over the phone will be compared with customer service conducted via self-service options and other channels designed for instant response and artificial intelligence-powered personalization, so frontline agents as well as their managers need to be given the tools necessary to succeed.