A deep understanding of customer interactions can significantly improve business operations by ensuring a healthy balance between quality and efficiency. Call center managers need to develop recording and analyzing strategies to seamlessly juggle their administrative and managerial tasks while also fitfully serving customers to continue bringing in business

Customers can always benefit from better communications, customer support services, and improved sales engagement actions. But call recording and monitoring strategies are also subject to quality control and best practices to ensure a smooth flow of operations. Read on to get familiar with these practices.

Six Call Recording And Call Monitoring Practices To Follow

Let's dive straight into some of the best, expert-recommended call monitoring practices.

1.  Look for the tech stack to cover all bases

Though call center solutions are widespread and very diverse, there isn't a one-size-fits-all. So choosing the right stack is crucial to driving smooth business operations and sales engagement. Call center managers already have a lot on their plates, thus choosing features that cover all the bases and cut the work out for them is essential.

Additional characteristics to consider while choosing call monitoring software include system integrations, intuitive dashboards, and better security. But, again, it's about getting a solution that can assist your employees in doing their jobs more efficiently, work with your CRM, scale with your company's growth, and be accessed from anywhere.

Here are the call monitoring and recording features that call center managers need for optimal efficiency:

Choose a Salesforce CTI With Automatic Recording Capabilities

A CTI or Computer Telephony Integration enables desktop services by establishing an interactive interface between telephones and computer systems like Salesforce. Specifically designed for high volumes of calls, CTIs help centralize and keep a record of all incoming and outcoming calls in Salesforce. Desktop features call centers can benefit from are Call Control, Power Dialing, Click to Dial, Screen Pop, Call Reporting, among others.

Ask for Live Call Monitoring and Coaching features.

Analyzing the best and worst of calls can help you determine your ideal customer service call, continuously tweak it and lead your team in the right direction. It's imperative to look for a tool that enables listening to calls in real-time, monitoring agents, and even helping them throughout the call.

With these features, team leaders may 'whisper' alternate terms or phrases during live call monitoring to better address a customer's demands. If the agent is unable to progress the call or if it is clear that the issue should be escalated, supervisors can also directly 'barge in' the conversation. This can be useful during sales calls to guarantee sales are closed.

2. Leverage Analytics And Reporting For Agent Assessment

Call recording and monitoring are meant to improve the efficiency of your business procedures significantly. As a call center manager, it is imperative to monitor your agents and to do so in real-time irrespective of your location is even better.

Centralizing all information in Salesforce helps managers keep a close eye on all the essential metrics in the reporting module. It also enables them to evaluate conversation techniques and processes behind successful and unsuccessful outcomes , which proves critical in detecting inefficiencies and potential improvements. It's always a good idea to gauge the overall efficiency of your call center and comprehend the call transfer numbers to identify the improvement areas.

Use Real-time Speech Analytics

Being able to analyze speech while phone calls are taking place helps identify calls when an issue arises.

Speech analytics software - such as Salesforce Einstein Call Coaching- can detect how agents are talking about the products they're selling, how prospects are responding, which objections come up and how they're handled. Trending keywords such as competitors' names can reveal actionable insights to provide scripted suggestions to the problem or alert supervisors to intervene and help resolve the situation before it escalates.

Conversation Intelligence

The conversation intelligence (CI) platform helps you transcribe, record, and analyze sales calls efficiently. Through gauging sales calls, the software allows you to identify topics and keywords of conversation to help you quickly highlight the points in the sales calls and further assess the valuable insights gathered from the call recording.

Businesses can also leverage CI software to take notes on critical conversations with prospective clients, identify non-compliant or difficult topics during the conversation, train new sales reps on best practices, and much more. The insights from transcription and analysis of sales calls can help you improve your overall sales marketing efforts.

There are different Conversation Intelligence platforms such as Einstein Call Coaching, Gong.io, Chorus, Mojdo, or Pickle. For instance, Salesforce’s Einstein Call Coaching is a robust conversation intelligence platform that combines marketing knowledge with machine learning to find and act on conversion opportunities that wouldn't otherwise be detected.

Using CI is the quickest approach to establish relevance and improve your chances of converting each and every visitor. Furthermore, the platform empowers internal sales managers to develop stronger teams and get strategic and AI-powered insights from all your sales to call via a new channel, "Voice."

These AI, and machine learning-powered platforms provide you with precise trends and insights from sales calls. It takes the rich conversation fabric and breaks it into crucial moments to make it easier for you to understand. Never before have sales reps and managers analyzed their customer calls conversations like this at speed and scale.

The AI-powered tools allow you to build customized predictions and recommendations with clicks and insert Predictive Insights into any record or application. Even, you can operationalize AI by incorporating it into your business workflows and processes.

All in all, these conversational intelligence tools enable you to facilitate your team members with built-in Intelligence to boost productivity, interact and connect with empathy, and scale customer experiences seamlessly.

3. Define Your Ideal Call

Your agents should have a clear vision of which boxes they must tick to make a flawless customer service call. This involves getting the script right, using appropriate tone or language, and giving prominence to first contact resolution.

Remember, the best call center scripts are conversational and flow naturally to engage the customer on the other end without being demanding or tedious. In addition, your scripts should establish the standard for quality in customer service and sales.

• The perfect call:
• Has A Straightforward Tone – The start of the conversation sets the tone for the rest of the call
• Builds Connection – Empathy is key to connecting with their consumers and establishing good rapport or relationships
• Quickly Responds To Resolution Requests – Provide your input to the caller for any issue or request, whether you're troubleshooting a product over the phone or transferring a call to the appropriate person‍
• Has A Closing Statement – At the end of the call, it's always better to ask the caller if there is any other query or issue that needs to be resolved.

Choose recordings of ideal service calls that display all these characteristics and let your agents use them as models to base their work on. It may also be a good idea to use the best past calls during revision and training sessions. This is where call recording comes into play.

4. Employ Call Recording And Monitoring For Every Call

Call recording and monitoring shouldn't be a once-in-a-year event. Instead, it must become a permanent fixture of your service improvement strategies.

The good news is that most customers still prefer to call instead of chat, message or email anytime they want a complex issue fixed. When agents are encouraged by better-performing feedback, they get to experience a myriad of situations without actually risking new customers.

This also gives managers of a cloud call center sufficient data to derive valuable conclusions. Although it is impossible to carefully monitor all customer interactions, choosing a random call sample will not give reliable data or a picture of an agent's performance.

It's also a good idea to use a speech analytics system to monitor call quality, and improve your service level. It can also help to rank calls according to their importance and priority. For instance, calls taken by inexperienced agents, calls catering to high-value prospects and VIP customers, calls from consumers in need of assistance, or calls from disgruntled customers who haven't had a good enough experience.

Establish A Call Monitoring Task Force

To achieve monitoring efficiency there must be a good balance between trust and control. Putting together a call monitoring task force, while supervising the overall call center performance through Salesforce reports and dashboards, can give you back time and resources you need to concentrate on your revenue-generating activities.

The call monitoring task force should include agents chosen to implement processes and make decisions on the acting manager's behalf. Schedule various training sessions with them, update performance scorecards and resources, and put incentive schemes in place. Recruit agents who have delivered excellent results but rotate them so that others who have improved their overall scores can also join and give their input.

5. Prioritize Achieving Customer Service Metrics

Call center managers who are too engrossed in the numbers may be losing opportunities to provide excellent customer service. While it's critical to monitor agent performance, all metrics created are not equal.

Average handling time (AHT) is how long it takes an agent and a customer to interact. A low rate is viewed positively by data-driven individuals: it means that more calls were connected.

By devoting more time and effort to the customers' inquiries, agents with the higher rate of AHTs might be providing a more memorable customer experience. Therefore, instead of focusing solely on the number, it is better to pay attention to the interaction or engagement quality.

Agents who prioritize customer service and strive for first-call responses might help the organization achieve better long-term results. Of course, metrics are vital, but a fantastic customer experience is equally important.

6. Involve Agents In Training And Assessments

An essential facet of call quality monitoring is getting feedback from your agents. Their everyday interactions with clients can give you some valuable insights into improving voice practices. For example, your agents could play a role in script decisions because they know what works and what doesn't. Also, solicit their feedback in creating a phrase bank for lines and locutions that work well in tense situations.

Deploying your agents to monitor their own calls creates a work atmosphere that encourages professional development and education. Agents who get a chance to reflect on their previous contacts can improve their communication skills and identify areas for growth.

To help enhance their interpersonal skills and to help them gain extra confidence with every customer encounter, provide your staff with training sessions, self-assessment evaluation sheets, and learning tools.

Key Takeaways

Call monitoring and recording can help managers and supervisors improve the way their team works - and, more significantly, enhance customer experience. In 2021, best practices involve selecting a Salesforce CTI with automatic call recording, live monitoring and coaching features. As records are generated, analytics should be used to assess and improve your team’s performance and involve agents in training. Real-time speech analytics is a great way to gather valuable insights. 

In order to ensure a proper implementation of these best practices, many call centers have successfully put together a monitoring task force. These teams help define what the ideal call should look like by tracking every call and its outcomes, while managers can focus on prioritizing customer satisfaction. 

Using Salesforce for this purpose gives the opportunity to keep track of all call outcomes, enter a virtuous improvement cycle and get real-time insights on the overall call center performance. Recording and monitoring calls won’t do it on its own, if managers don’t use them for training and updating their teams. Make practical and operational scripts for the agents, emphasize quality, encourage self-assessment, and empower your supervisors with call monitoring features on software like Salesforce. Implement these measures to help your team improve their approach and performance by engaging with customers. 

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