This Call May Be Recorded – For More Reasons Than You Think!
Using Call Recording for Employee Management, Strategy, Operations and Legal Safety
You’ve all heard it: you’re put on a brief hold and a recorded message warns you: “this call may be recorded for quality assurance and training purposes.” At this point, many of us just tune it out, as it’s become a standard practice on most phone calls between consumers and businesses.
But as a business owner, are you utilizing call recording? And if so – are you just using it for training and QA? Those are two phenomenal reasons to opt for regular call recordings, but they’re not the only reasons. Especially for sales-driven companies that rely on high call volumes, call recordings can be invaluable for client relationships, employee management and keeping compliant.
Call Recording – What is it?
Call recording is exactly what it sounds like: the option to record inbound or outbound calls, and then save those recordings. For the sake of this primer, we’ve identified 4 key areas where call recordings can help your business. Employee management, strategy, operations, legal and compliance.
1. Quality Checks & Training
Be Sure of What’s Going on: Employee Management
Let’s start with the most commonly recognized application of call recordings for the average person who uses phones: quality assurance and training.
Quality Assurance is essentially checking in periodically that the standards you expect out of your employees is being met. When you record your calls, you have the opportunity to go back and find out if your training is actually being implemented. Customer service is a bedrock of sales, and as a manager or owner, you can actually hear those customer interactions happening. Quality checking your calls can become a regular business practice.
For the sake of QA, Call Recordings can help highlight exemplary conversations or impressive sales or you can suss out the weak spots in your employee’s calls, and use the recordings to address mistakes and areas in need of improvement. Both types of calls – the best and the weakest – can be used in training future employees. Hearing real-world calls is invaluable in getting an employee ready for their first time.
And if your employees feel wary of their calls being recorded? Remind them that the practice doesn’t have to be about a lack of trust or taking punitive measures – it can also be an opportunity to praise how an agent handled a difficult situation, or a way to give feedback on rude or aggressive customers. Employee management is about supporting your team – let Call Recording be a part of your training playbook!
2. High Level Analysis & Strategy
Call Breakdowns: What’s Working, and What Isn’t
Some companies will have weekly meetings to go over successful and unsuccessful calls, letting the team point out what could have gone better in the sale, or identify where the call started to head towards a win. Think of your call recordings as game footage – it’s not about shaming your employees, but rather giving them the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and watch their wins. You know it’s not luck – it’s skill, persistence and practice. Figure out the winning combo of your best calls using Call Recordings.
3. Operations & Detail Confirmation
Organize and Double-Check: Confirm Details
Call Recordings hold all the details of your call. After you end a call, it’s easy to re-listen to confirm numbers, details, timelines, and anything else that’s important (and easy to mis-remember!). Beyond that, it lets your agents keep calls moving forward at the pace they prefer, because they have the confidence of knowing the call is recorded and stored for them to review later. Don’t waste time on granular notes – jot down what you need, but know everything is saved.
Call recordings can also be downloaded and sent to a VA to capture the data or put it into a future agenda or summary. Operationally, call recordings are literally part of your records. Use them to your advantage!
4. Legal & Compliance
Better Safe Than Sorry!: Deny Disputes and Keep Compliant
Last but not least, your call recordings can save you legal headaches and money. We’ve had clients tell us that a call recording helped solve a dispute over what deal was struck on a call. A customer may insist the terms are one thing, while you’re sure you would never have agreed to that. Before getting entrenched in an argument, a Call Recording could quickly be pulled up and offer the definitive account of what was agreed upon.
smrtPhone had a different client tell us that call recordings led them to find out an agent was engaging in behavior that was not legal, and could have gotten his company into serious trouble. They were able to swiftly end the employment relationship and prevent the behavior from going on any longer.
We hope your company never faces legal disputes, but that is sometimes the reality, especially at sales-based or investment businesses. Why not record your calls and have them as back-up, even if you don’t have time to listen to every one? Better safe than sorry!
How Do I Start Call Recording?
If you’ve decided that Call Recording will help your business, the next step is to figure out the best way to do it. Obviously, we’re biased, but we believe that smrtPhone has the simplest, cheapest and most integrated way to implement Call Recording.
Outbound, inbound, power dialing campaign calls, or a combination – it’s so easy to listen to your recorded calls. They’re always in your call logs, and available to play back right from your Web App, or they can be downloaded to your computer. Each smrtDialer Campaign has its own list of recordings, found connected to the Campaign in smrtDialer. Using Salesforce, Podio, or InvestorFuse? Your recorded calls will also automatically be linked from in your respective CRM! We want your call recordings to be available wherever makes the most sense for you.
With smrtPhone, Call Recording storage is cheap and transparently priced: .0010/recorded minute, charged monthly. Deleting past recordings helps you be in control of this monthly fee (hot tip: download and delete unneeded recordings to avoid the monthly cost!).
Read more on Call Recording here, and if you have more questions, our chat is always real people so head to smrtphone.io to talk to someone about how to get Call Recording started for your business.
