f agents are seen to be having difficulty finding the right information on the screen for example, a decision can be made as to whether it is smarter to provide further training for agents or redesign the screen instead.

Having every single customer call recorded can provide a wealth of information about what customers are calling about and lots of other valuable insights. But how do you easily find the information you need from so many calls recorded over a period of time? Some vendors now provide features that look through all the recordings and search for certain words or phrases. SO fro example if you are trying to find the customers that called and were frustrated or angry, you can ask the

George Orwell’s vision of a world where Big Brother is watching and listening to everything we do seems to becoming more and more a reality as technology enables all sorts of people and organizations to monitor the activity of others. Although this may be disturbing in some aspects, for a business trying to keep tabs on what staff are doing and how well they are doing their job, these new technologies are a godsend.

One of the most cost intensive operations in businesses today is the contact centre. Despite the introduction of much automation of customer transactions, there is still a significant requirement to have people at the other end of a phone to respond to customers needs. The cost is primarily wages of those contact centre staff, but in addition there are significant investments required in IT systems such as CRM which the contact centre agents use as they interact with their clients. Clients are also demanding higher levels of customer services, and organizations that don’t provide it often pay the cost in lost business. The quality of interactions customers have with the contact centre is one important way that they evaluate the business they are dealing with and its worthiness to continue to have them as a customer.

One technology that is proving very useful for contact centres is transaction recording systems. These systems record all or a sampling of phone calls into a contact centre and archives these as digital files for later retrieval and review. Recording of calls goes back many years, and was originally done using magnetic reel to reel tapes for storage before someone came up with the bright idea of .wav files. Recording was originally done for legal compliance reasons, such as for financial transactions where a record of the transaction was required to be stored for several years. More recently recording of calls has been carried out as part of a training and quality assurance exercise.

Training and quality assurance are now the primary business reason for recording calls. Contact Centre managers and supervisors are able to listen to individual agents as they talk to customers and evaluate the quality and professionalism of the call, including the greeting, handling difficult customers, closing sales, politeness and so on. Many systems provide specially designed software tools for scoring agents and even assigning training modules for specific agent weaknesses.

Another fairly recent innovation was to include recording of the agents computer screen along with the actual audio from the call. This way supervisors can watch what an agent is doing on the screen while they are talking to a customer. This provides the added advantage of being able to not only evaluate the effectiveness of agents but also the useability of the desktop applications. If agents are seen to be having difficulty finding the right information on the screen for example, a decision can be made as to whether it is smarter to provide further training for agents or redesign the screen instead.

Having every single customer call recorded can provide a wealth of information about what customers are calling about and lots of other valuable insights. But how do you easily find the information you need from so many calls recorded over a period of time? Some vendors now provide features that look through all the recordings and search for certain words or phrases. SO fro example if you are trying to find the customers that called and were frustrated or angry, you can ask the

rimarily wages of those contact centre staff, but in addition there are significant investments required in IT systems such as CRM which the contact centre agents use as they interact with their clients. Clients are also demanding higher levels of customer services, and organizations that don’t provide it often pay the cost in lost business. The quality of interactions customers have with the contact centre is one important way that they evaluate the business they are dealing with and its worthiness to continue to have them as a customer.

One technology that is proving very useful for contact centres is transaction recording systems. These systems record all or a sampling of phone calls into a contact centre and archives these as digital files for later retrieval and review. Recording of calls goes back many years, and was originally done using magnetic reel to reel tapes for storage before someone came up with the bright idea of .wav files. Recording was originally done for legal compliance reasons, such as for financial transactions where a record of the transaction was required to be stored for several years. More recently recording of calls has been carried out as part of a training and quality assurance exercise.

Training and quality assurance are now the primary business reason for recording calls. Contact Centre managers and supervisors are able to listen to individual agents as they talk to customers and evaluate the quality and professionalism of the call, including the greeting, handling difficult customers, closing sales, politeness and so on. Many systems provide specially designed software tools for scoring agents and even assigning training modules for specific agent weaknesses.

Another fairly recent innovation was to include recording of the agents computer screen along with the actual audio from the call. This way supervisors can watch what an agent is doing on the screen while they are talking to a customer. This provides the added advantage of being able to not only evaluate the effectiveness of agents but also the useability of the desktop applications. If agents are seen to be having difficulty finding the right information on the screen for example, a decision can be made as to whether it is smarter to provide further training for agents or redesign the screen instead.

Having every single customer call recorded can provide a wealth of information about what customers are calling about and lots of other valuable insights. But how do you easily find the information you need from so many calls recorded over a period of time? Some vendors now provide features that look through all the recordings and search for certain words or phrases. SO fro example if you are trying to find the customers that called and were frustrated or angry, you can ask the

contact centre and archives these as digital files for later retrieval and review. Recording of calls goes back many years, and was originally done using magnetic reel to reel tapes for storage before someone came up with the bright idea of .wav files. Recording was originally done for legal compliance reasons, such as for financial transactions where a record of the transaction was required to be stored for several years. More recently recording of calls has been carried out as part of a training and quality assurance exercise.

Training and quality assurance are now the primary business reason for recording calls. Contact Centre managers and supervisors are able to listen to individual agents as they talk to customers and evaluate the quality and professionalism of the call, including the greeting, handling difficult customers, closing sales, politeness and so on. Many systems provide specially designed software tools for scoring agents and even assigning training modules for specific agent weaknesses.

Another fairly recent innovation was to include recording of the agents computer screen along with the actual audio from the call. This way supervisors can watch what an agent is doing on the screen while they are talking to a customer. This provides the added advantage of being able to not only evaluate the effectiveness of agents but also the useability of the desktop applications. If agents are seen to be having difficulty finding the right information on the screen for example, a decision can be made as to whether it is smarter to provide further training for agents or redesign the screen instead.

Having every single customer call recorded can provide a wealth of information about what customers are calling about and lots of other valuable insights. But how do you easily find the information you need from so many calls recorded over a period of time? Some vendors now provide features that look through all the recordings and search for certain words or phrases. SO fro example if you are trying to find the customers that called and were frustrated or angry, you can ask the

s they talk to customers and evaluate the quality and professionalism of the call, including the greeting, handling difficult customers, closing sales, politeness and so on. Many systems provide specially designed software tools for scoring agents and even assigning training modules for specific agent weaknesses.

Another fairly recent innovation was to include recording of the agents computer screen along with the actual audio from the call. This way supervisors can watch what an agent is doing on the screen while they are talking to a customer. This provides the added advantage of being able to not only evaluate the effectiveness of agents but also the useability of the desktop applications. If agents are seen to be having difficulty finding the right information on the screen for example, a decision can be made as to whether it is smarter to provide further training for agents or redesign the screen instead.

Having every single customer call recorded can provide a wealth of information about what customers are calling about and lots of other valuable insights. But how do you easily find the information you need from so many calls recorded over a period of time? Some vendors now provide features that look through all the recordings and search for certain words or phrases. SO fro example if you are trying to find the customers that called and were frustrated or angry, you can ask the

f agents are seen to be having difficulty finding the right information on the screen for example, a decision can be made as to whether it is smarter to provide further training for agents or redesign the screen instead.

Having every single customer call recorded can provide a wealth of information about what customers are calling about and lots of other valuable insights. But how do you easily find the information you need from so many calls recorded over a period of time? Some vendors now provide features that look through all the recordings and search for certain words or phrases. SO fro example if you are trying to find the customers that called and were frustrated or angry, you can ask the system to search for words such as “frustrated”, or swear words and so on. One system I have seen in use at several call centres even transcribes all calls into text so you can read the content of the calls and understand the context of the identified problem calls.

Data Mining is also a valuable time saving tool that is available on some call recording platforms. The value of data mining is that it automatically surfaces actionable trends without wading through lots of reports or screens full of KPIs. Suppose for example you wanted to find out why the average handle time (AHT) in your call centre was increasing. A good data mining product will show the correlation of all call metrics that are directly and most significantly impacting AHT, visually showing you by how much you can improve and providing a list of prioritised calls that help you realize what you need to impact AHT. All this is done automatically by the system generating hundreds and thousands of “reports” and presenting to you only the ones that have significant impact in that specific metric (like AHT).

As a side point if you are operating on an IP based call centre platform or are planning on a migration to IP, the introduction of call recording will be easier than for non-IP platforms. Call recording systems have traditionally tapped into the calls coming into a call centre by physical connection to either the telephone lines or else the agents phones. With an IP based system the call recording system can just receive the audio from the calls over the LAN because that is how the calls are transported within an IP based call centre. This actually saves you money because there is less hardware required.

If you are running a contact centre with anything over a few agents I would strongly encourage you to consider call recording if you haven’t done so already. It has the potential to make your job as a manager much easier and the introduction of this “Big Brother” technology could make a significant impact on the quality of service being provided to your customers over time.