SoftSwitch

There are lots of reasons why recording your calls can be good for your business.
An increasing number of companies are recognising the benefits of recording calls regardless of business size. Historically, call recording has been a high end application for call centres and financial institutions such as brokers where high-value transactions or a high volume of business is key.

SoftSwitch USB technology is breaking new ground, delivering fully digital high quality call recording for individuals and businesses at a price affordable for all. With low cost PC mass storage, archive of calls and user friendly call retrieval software, the question should be 'Why shouldn't I record every call?'

There are four fundamental reasons why an organisation may wish to record their telephone calls:

1. Improve customer service
2. Record transactions of value
3. Comply with industry regulations
4. Increase security & avoid abuse

Some industries are required by legislation to record their telephone calls (such as certain financial institutions or premium rate services), others may be transacting a high value of business over the telephone and wish to record these transactions for playback in the case a customer dispute occurs. Whatever your primary purpose, there are always secondary spin-off benefits. We have listed some of the primary reasons and benefits for each of the four main applications below:

Improving Customer Service
A large number of companies have a team of individuals whose primary purpose is to deal with customers over the telephone. Often the telephone is the only communications exposure a customer has with an organisation. It is also true that individuals within any one organisation often vary greatly in their effectiveness when dealing with customers, this effectiveness translates to revenue, margin and profits.

The great benefit of recording calls in a customer service situation is to allow the sharing of the telephone experience across the customer services team. It may be that one particular team member has a better closure ratio or is better at up-selling than the others. It may be that one team member has better empathy with a customer complaint and therefore convinces that customer to stay or even buy more as a result of being satisfied. There are many varied situations where positive sharing of best practice is very beneficial.

Call Recording is also a superb tool to allow a supervisor to review the performance of a team member and to listen to specific calls with a view to grading or offering assistance and advice for further improvement. Often telephone-based staff are on some sort of commission structure, so the concept of self or supervisor related improvement is to the benefit of both parties if more, higher margin sales are made as a result.

Call Recording can be critical for new employees, especially as there is often a pressure to complete induction training quickly and get them on the phones.

Call Recording can be seen as 'Big Brother', team members will undoubtedly change some aspects of their telephone behaviour as a result of implementing call recording and you may even see an increase in productivity to cover the investment for this reason alone, but it's also important to respect staff privacy and their expectations to privacy, so we recommend that you inform your staff why you are implementing a recording system (emphasise the benefits to them) and allow staff to be able to make or take the occasional personal call (dependant upon your own policy) on a telephone that is not recorded.

Recording Transactions
We may not all appreciate it, but most of us undertake important high-value transactions over the telephone. It may vary from a simple in principal gentlemen's agreement, the giving of professional advice or the formal placement of an order using our credit card.

You may wish to recall conversations for any of the following reasons:

Confirmation - You simply wish to go over the detail discussed again before formally documenting an arrangement. We can't be expected to remember or take notes on everything when we're engaged in conversation. Call recording is ideal to step back through the conversation to make sure our documentation covers the 'spirit' of theagreement and that we haven't missed anything out.

Dispute Resolution - We all have experiences where we made a verbal telephone order and didn't get exactly what we asked for. Most of us unfortunately know someone who will always seek compensation in every situation and will often be successful due to the 'Customer is always right' principal. Recording the transaction allows rapid identification & replay of the original order, if your organisation was in the wrong, you need to know and sort the cause before it happens again. If you were right, you simply need to prove you performed as requested and avoid expensive compensation and loss of reputation, either way your company benefits and you may well find that just in dispute resolution alone, your call recording solution is financially justified.

Sharing Calls With Colleagues - If you've just finished a fantastic call with your biggest customer and you want to share the positive experience & detail with your colleagues, recording and emailing the call in a wav format is a superb way of getting their attention and excitement.
You may also simply wish to pass on a message without writing it down, in which case, record the message and email it!.

Industry Regulations Compliance
This application is very specific to certain industries that are mandated by their governing bodies to record calls. It may be a legal obligation or part of a voluntary code of practice for respected industry affiliates.

A growing number of financial services industries are mandated to record calls. Medical and legal advice lines are also primary targets due to the high levels of compensation involved where 'professional advice' given is reported to be at fault. Insurers who provide professional indemnity insurance may insist calls are recorded in order to lower insurance premiums.

Premium rate telephone services are regulated in many countries as the caller needs to be aware of the growing cost of extended calls and generally cannot be seen to be encouraged to stay on the call for an extended period.

Most businesses where mandated find positive reasons for the equipment once implemented.

Increase Security & Avoid Abuse
In these times of increased security, the telephone isoften the communication medium threats are made, this is simply because the threatening party can remain virtually anonymous and distant from the person or organisation they are trying to affect.

Large commercial organisations are becoming the target for security alerts as the threatening party may simply be seeking to disrupt normal lives and generate inconvenience.

There is also an increasing trend of public workers (such as teachers, benefit workers etc.) being verbally abused by callers who feel they are being unfairly treated or simply don't agree with the conclusions your organisation may have reached concerning them. In addition, staff can be harassed by outside callers or even internally by other staff and it is becoming the employers obligation to protect employees from malicious calls.

Recording calls in this situation has two benefits, it allows the abused employee to highlight the level of severity of the call and also may help prove who the caller was, or that the call was genuine abuse and not harmless banter.