9 Ways to Use Call Recordings (Voice & Video) to Improve Customer Service

Is your business aligned with customer needs and perceptions in every aspect of their interactions with different departments? A bumpy customer journey risks losing potential customers as well as decreasing satisfaction, loyalty, and recommendations.

Businesses are shifting their focus from traditional communication strategies to modern digital strategies to improve the customer experience. The use of tools like video chat, co-browsing along with live chat customer service has had a significant impact.

58% of customers say that customer service is a very important factor that affects their choice of a brand. (Microsoft’s State of Global Customer Service Report)

Recording customer service calls can be useful to have a better understanding of customer conversations and how your team is performing.

source: salesforce

Let’s discuss how recording customer service calls benefits the businesses to enhance their customers’ expectations & overall productivity.

The benefits of recording customer service calls (voice & video)

Call recording is a rescue solution that helps to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the customers. You can understand them better by reading between the lines of the conversation. Recording customer support calls helps businesses to gain valuable insights and improve the customer engagement strategy.

1. Improved customer service

One of the crucial aspects of customer-centered businesses is to consistently observe the customer support representatives in action. By recording customer service calls, your team can gain better insights on customer needs and make a better follow-up. 

How recording video calls ensure high-quality customer service?

• Recording customer service calls help call center managers to review them and get a better understanding of how agents handle customer conversations. 
• Learn whether your support representatives have followed the defined protocols or not.
• Figure out specific customer support aspects that can be improved on.
• With call recordings, your managers can save ample time as they do not have to listen to each call in real time.
• You can monitor the calls to find out the loopholes that need to be focused.

You might also want to check out how co-browsing can be used for contact center support.

By using the web-based call center, you can improve your team efficiency and motivate them to handle every conversation at their best. This is how you can deliver a better customer service experience to your customers.

2. Effective coaching of teams

One of the benefits that call recording enables businesses is to provide support teams with feedback as to how they are handling customer conversations. It gives an opportunity for managers to help teams improve their phone etiquette, communication skills, and overall performance.

Call recordings for training can serve two purposes. The first one is to monitor the audio recordings and evaluate performance. And secondly, the recorded calls can be used as learning material. Listening to call recordings can prove beneficial to the call center managers. They can instantly figure out the agents performing well and those who require some additional training.

Tips to use the call recordings for training teams 

• Identify the gaps in terms of training and best practices whether they are followed or not.
• Learn first-hand customer feedback or issues and train your team to handle them better.
• Listening to call recordings one on one with employees will empower managers to identify the skills that need to improve and work upon.
• Based on the recorded audios, you can prepare presentations to teach about the proper way of making and taking calls.

3. Improved sales efficiency

94% of businesses say video conferencing increases productivity.

When visitors land to your website and need sales assistance, one of the best ways to help them in real time is by using voice and video calls. You can effectively shorten your sales cycle by using a video chat solution.

Voice and video call recordings provide better sales assistance. You not only equip your sales team with the right tool but also with the tool that helps to convert the prospects faster. By listening to the recorded calls, you can get to know a few things better:

• Understand the needs of your target audience and match your products or services to their needs.
• Know your customers’ perception of your brand and work to fill up the gaps.
• Learn the strengths and weaknesses of products/services.

Your sales team can use the invaluable information from the recorded calls to enhance the products and services, thereby meeting customer expectations and boosting revenues.

4. Asses individual agent performance 

Improvement is a continuous process and recording the calls helps in this process. Call recording acts as a tool for training customer support staff and improving their performance. The training managers can listen to conversations between the agents and customers and prepare notes to enhance the customer experience.

How agents performance can be assessed individually?

• Employees can listen to their own calls, and find out their shortcomings. Often when you listen to your own calls that you will come to know the mistakes that you have made or that you have to work on your tone to keep it pleasant.
• By recording and monitoring calls you can identify hidden feedback that you find out in the recordings helps to improve the business. 
• Managers can prepare training modules that can help in assessing agent performance and get better results.

Thus, they can determine how the representatives will interact with customers. The recordings also offer a great opportunity to the support team to improve their communication skills and offer tips on how they can handle such scenarios for better outcomes.

5. Higher customer satisfaction

There is a hidden opportunity in every customer call that can help your business to grow new heights. By using the call recording feature, businesses can better understand their customers’ needs. You can track whether or not your customers are satisfied, categorizing the areas that bring results from those that need improvement. 

• Voice and video call recordings help in monitoring the quality of support delivered to customers when they reach out with a query or an issue. 
• Listening to the recorded calls helps you to identify where exactly things went out of the track and understand the context to deliver better customer support.

When you observe the calls on a continuous basis, you can introduce better customer service training tips for your employees and boost customer satisfaction.

6. Comprehensive client records history

Tracking every minute detail of a conversation is close to impossible. Guess what! with call recording for customer service, it is practically possible. Analyzing the call history of customers will enable you to know more and understand them so that you can offer better customer service.

Irrespective of the significance of the calls, you can practically note all the details of customer calls and identify any kind of nuance of the conversations. 

The frequency & length of calls, location, call history and any other information extracted from the database of recorded calls will help you in better understanding the breakdown of your call volume and develop a more focused sales process.

7. Improve regulatory compliance

Businesses, big or small have the potential to face lawsuits. A simple miscommunication can lead to a potential lawsuit. By recording calls, your company will be able to diffuse many such scenarios.

Businesses need to follow the principles and methods to safeguard the information shared during the conversations. The call center recording feature empowers businesses to comply with legal, industry, and service-level compliance guidelines. 

Recording customer service calls helps in the following ways:

• Possible business protection during legal disputes
• Retrieve missed details and prevent litigation

It helps businesses to resolve disputes and fight against lawsuits from unhappy customers. As call recording protects your company from the legal hassle and saves cost, it has become all the more important for small businesses.

8. Capture missed or forgotten details

Actively listening to the customers while interacting with them is very important. At times, it is crucial to pen down notes of what was discussed or promised during the call so that it does not slip out of mind. Also sometimes it becomes difficult for agents to make out what the customer is saying due to an improper network, different accent or noisy environment. 

This is where the recording of customer service calls come in. With call recordings you will be able to carry out the below things:

• You will never miss any critical details shared by the customer. 
• It helps you to take notes during playback
• You can be fully engaged with the customers when the real call is taking place so that they feel they are truly being heard.

The above benefits help your business to deliver a great customer experience and enhance business growth.

9. Manage your reputation by resolving disputes

Resolving business disputes is a great benefit that you get from recording your voice or video chat customer service interactions. With the recording benefit, you will have a solid proof about – who, what, when, & whom. In some cases, a recorded call can also serve as a verbal contract between you and the customer. 

For example, if a customer claims that he was promised a replacement of the product due to some issue, a recorded copy of the conversation helps to verify the claim and deliver a satisfactory support to the customers.

Having an authentic record of customer interactions makes it easy for businesses to maintain their image and deal practically against unwarranted claims. It helps to keep the conversations completely professional.

Call recording best practices 

Call recordings are one of the key aspects to be followed to deliver better customer support. In order to do so, you need to follow some best practices.

• Keep customers informed – Transparency is a vital ingredient for successful customer support. Your customers must be aware of the fact that the call is being recorded. You can mention the purpose of recording – could be for internal training purposes or process enhancement.
• Be presentable (especially in video calls) – The way you present yourself creates the first impression. So, it becomes very important that you should be professionally dressed and choose a good location for conversation.
• Never miss out on the etiquette – Whether video or voice recordings, etiquette is very important. You should be polite, positive and patient at the same time and actively listen to the customers. 

Customer service call recording laws 

Recording customer service calls may be a legal requirement for some businesses. Irrespective of the reason, all the calls should be recorded in compliance with the local laws of each party involved. You are supposed to be aware of all the jurisdiction laws that vary state and country wise. The main thing to be known is where you are calling from and where the call is being received. 

Customer service call recording laws can be broken down into two categories: 

• One-party consent – It means at least one of the person in the call must have consent to be recorded. When you are the person speaking and recording the call, this meets the criteria for one-party consent. If the call is being recorded by the other person, he is supposed to ask for consent from at least one person prior to recording.
• Two-party consent – It is also known as “all-party consent”. It means everyone involved in the call must give their consent to be recorded. The person who is speaking and recording the call needs to inform others that the call is being recorded to fulfill the criteria for two-party consent.

Final thoughts

Voice and video calls have become a trend to deliver effective online sales and support. Hence as a business, you need to make sure your team is delivering good customer experience and support when they talk to customers on your website or portal.

Recording customer service calls gives you a  fair idea about:

• Where the customers’ conversations are heading on and gain valuable insights on improving communication. Also, you can use the insights to improve the product and services.
• Your team performance and what are the key areas you can focus to improve for better results. The recorded calls provide details on specific behavioral aspects of the support agents that can be improved.