Lee Jones

Member Article

Your call may be recorded

We are all familiar with the phrase ’your call may be recorded for training purposes’ but what does this really mean? Lee Jones, COO at Red Box Recorders, the leading independent specialist in voice recording, storage and retrieval looks at the importance of voice recording, its role in improving customer service and how to make sure you buy the right system.

Today’s successful companies are the ones who continuously keep their finger on the pulse of what their customers think. A good voice recording, storage and retrieval solution enables organisations to identify and improve upon inefficiencies in performance and cost. This is done by reducing monitoring and evaluation time, “new agent” training time, repetitive training and agent turnover. There is an improvement in productivity as supervisor performance is enhanced, and targeted training programmes create better agents who are more consistent, perform better and have higher morale.
There is also a direct increase in revenue as experienced agents are retained, providing better customer service that can improve ‘time to market’ for products.

However, with the requirement for higher levels of functionality the technology became smarter but in many cases, considerably more complex and expensive. This has meant that organisations looking to purchase a voice recording system have to juggle the need for a certain level of functionality with the price they are prepared to pay. There are strong cost variables in the market with some solutions appearing cheaper until you add on the life time costs of maintaining and administering the system.

More complex?

In the past voice recording systems have been technology heavy requiring considerable involvement from IT Departments, multiple servers and a host of IT and Microsoft licensing skills. However, the majority of organisations today have ever shrinking IT budgets and available resources that are probably already massively overstretched. If this sounds familiar in your organisation, when you are looking at options, make sure you consider areas such as the database used and IT implications that has, plus how the system stores its audio and data.

Futureproof?

Finally, as with all new investment it is important that any solution you purchase is as future proof as possible. Scalability is a must as your system needs to be able to grow as your organisation grows and enable changes of integration as your telephony and communication systems change. You should also be able to add functionality as and when you require it such as audio analytics, Quality Management and Screen Recording, which will allow you to fulfill requirements from the different functions and operational needs across the organisation, with the same core investment. The recent introduction of the FSA regulations on mobile phone recording is a good example of how a scaleable system is key.

Conclusion

Every customer service centre has unique standards and expectations of how its agents should interact with its customers. There is no doubt that recording and monitoring calls is one of the best ways of capturing interactions and information for the effective training and coaching of staff on call handling skills, operational knowledge and soft skills.

Red Box

The Red Box solution utilises a unique technology offering a single software-based solution that can be implemented modularly, meaning excellent budgetary control, flexibility of deployment and unlimited scalability. It is completely web-based for ease of use and fast roll-out, and its simplicity means that it can be managed by operational personnel rather than the IT specialists. Customers can use their own hardware and operating system to maximise buying power if they prefer, or opt for a full turnkey solution for simplicity of procurement and support.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lizzie Woolley .

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