It’s no small secret that one of the biggest make or break aspects of business today is customer service. When a customer calls in, they’re already in severe distress for one reason or another. More often than not, if you don’t provide excellent customer service, you’re going to lose a customer. The same applies to outbound calls: your customer is generously allowing you some of their time, so you’d better not waste it. Beyond the more obvious uses of call recording software as a customer service tool, it also integrates well with marketing and sales solutions. Lead analysis and reporting can help businesses amend their marketing initiatives for more effective training and feedback, increased sales, and a better ROI.

Unsurprisingly, one of the leading drives behind communications technology in the past 20 years has been to improve the channels through which customer service and support are handled. A lot of technical research has gone into improving customer support and lead evaluation technology in any way possible.

Do you need a call recorder for your business? In some industries, it’s a regulatory requirement. If that doesn’t apply to your business but you make B2B or B2C phone calls, the answer is still a solid yes—but don’t just take our word for it. Let us show you the many benefits and advantages of call recording software for all businesses and illustrate why you should invest in this technology.

Benefits of Call Recording Software:

1. Improve Training:

One of the biggest advantages to call recording is improved training. Most call centers, as well as other telephone-based industries (sales, etc.) often employ scripts and flowcharts for their employees to follow when engaging a customer. While these are very helpful, listening to and analyzing successful calls is far more relatable and conveys information in a far more concrete way. They can also teach agents how to proceed when customers take the calls off-track.

The truth is, most people learn best from witnessing a job being done. Recording calls can allow you to capture the best and worst examples of situations which an agent may encounter in order to teach them how to do things the right way. This is field training in its purest form and can be very effective. In this way, call recording software can directly improve sales strategies and marketing messages.

2. Informed Performance Reviews:

In a similar vein to training, performance reviews an important way to troubleshoot weak areas in a particular agent’s approach and style. Sure, customer satisfaction surveys go a long way towards helping with this, but these surveys often go unanswered—and they may do more to highlight a customer’s feelings about your product rather than your agent.

Recording a call, however, offers an immutable and very real look into a particular agent’s approach to any given situation. It also reveals how customers respond to a particular set of stimuli. This can provide some crucial analytics for A/B testing when it comes to new strategies, regulations, and best practices for how all agents should handle customer situations in the future.

Call recording software offers you the ability to assess your agents’ performance in routine and out-of-the-ordinary situations. With recordings, you can provide your teams with concrete examples of what works and what doesn’t.

3. Boost Customer Satisfaction:

Following along with performance reviews and the testing mentioned previously, this is a great way to evaluate current strategies and how customers react to a particular form of input, response, and climate.

The logistics and analytics provided by this kind of information can be crucial to successful lead gen in the future. None of this is reflected in surveys, nor is it reflected in reviews or any other sort of cold, clinical data. Call recording software can therefore give your marketing team a clear insight into lead quality and help them redefine marketing strategies and metrics for better sales strategies. In other words, this is a window into a very real form of data that otherwise could not be acquired.

This does require some manual labor, with people sitting and listening to these conversations, and evaluating variables such as tone, context, and so forth. However, no amount of sophisticated AI and algorithms will ever be able to handle such a thing as well as a listening human being.

4. Maintain PCI Compliance:

Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standards apply to all organizations that accept, transmit, or store any cardholder data. In the past, call recording could make it difficult to comply with PCI regulations—if a customer’s credit card payment information was captured by your recording software, you may have been violating the regulations. However, modern call recording software can actually help you maintain PCI compliance in a few different ways.

The first option is to have your agents tag calls in which customers provide their payment details. The recording can then be retrieved and the details can be masked by overlaying them with white noise or some other sound. However, masking the details takes time and effort and is prone to human error.

Alternatively, agents may be able to pause the recording when the customer gives their payment details. However, this option also has room for error: will the agents always remember to pause the recording—and to resume it again? What if they abuse this feature? You must also consider the consequences of cutting out a portion of the recording and investigate whether this method fully complies with the regulations you’re bound to.

Fortunately many of today’s call recording products offer a simple solution by allowing customers to enter their credit card numbers using their phone’s touch tone keypad. This feature uses dual tone multi frequency (DTMF) masking so the call center agent cannot hear or see the customer’s credit card information. This easy automated approach to PCI compliance is yet another factor that boosts the ROI of call recording software.

5. Reduce Liability:

Finally, implementing call recording software is indeed an excellent way to reduce various legal liabilities which your legal department, accounting department, and upper management might otherwise lose sleep over. It helps spot user errors on behalf of customers, as well as various misconceptions conveyed by agents who simply don’t realize that they are spreading false, incorrect information.

This is also an excellent chance to spot a lack of information, so that you can tell agents to provide these details from the get-go and an opportunity to find out if they need to get more information from the client than they normally do when a conversation begins. This can reduce a lot of problems, not unlike how PCI compliance is very surprisingly benefited by call recording.

As you can see, access to this kind of candid information provides a lot of passive data that can be absolutely crucial to reducing such pitfalls in the future.

Why Does Your Business Need Call Recording Software?

Regardless of whether your problems are in quality assurance, training, various forms of compliance, satisfaction, or liabilities, you will benefit from a change. Most businesses have problems somewhere along the line and they can be solved by call recording software. Even if you think you don’t have room for improvement, the valuable information from customer journey tracking alone means that the software practically pays for itself right out of the gate.

In the end, even if there aren’t any obvious problems with your call center, your business, or your customer service approach, problems will arise somewhere and you need to be prepared. If you don’t already have suitable call recording software in place when this occurs, the problem might get out of hand.

Even if your call center is meeting your current criteria for quality and success, you will very quickly discover that there is room for improvement and more than enough reason to raise the bar. As we have seen, this technology is indispensable to planning your business’s core marketing strategies, and to ascertaining whether your approaches work or if they need to be modified for greater returns.