The New Interaction Analytics: Call Recording
Graduates to the Next Level
Studies by organizations such as ContactBabel and Research and Markets show
that there is an increasing drive among contact center organizations to improve
upon customer satisfaction and experience, even outperforming other areas such
as increasing sales or decreasing costs. Interaction recording and monitoring are
critical tools in addressing the customer experience challenge.
Today’s interaction recording solutions go beyond simple recording of the customer
conversation, and bring the larger contact center into the game, with the ability
to contribute at several levels of the business through applying the technologies in
different ways. Interaction recording is
shown to play a significant role in quality
assurance, agent training, regulatory
compliance, understanding customers
and needs, and measuring satisfaction.
So what makes Interaction Recording
solutions different from call recording?
For starters, they incorporate the
agent screens with the voice element,
providing a video component that
can be synced to the audio. Capturing
what is happening on the agent screen
during the conversation and recording
the after-call work segment can help identify areas for workflow improvement to
increase agent efficiency and decrease call handling time. Screen recording also
allows centers to capture multichannel interactions, such as email and chat, which
would be lost in an audio-recording-only environment.
From a quality management perspective, supervisors do not have to listen to
live calls, but can choose from recordings to review at a later time, freeing them
for other tasks and reducing costs. By using a recording solution with integrated
Quality Scoring features, agent interactions can be reviewed and scored against
user-created evaluation criteria. The scorecard results can be used to determine
adherence with best practices and workflows, or to identify trends among agent
performance that can help indicate where training is required or where process
changes may help increase customer service levels or first-call resolutions.
Recordings can also play an important role in customer dispute resolution, providing
exactly what has been said by customer and agent in order to deal with the matter
accurately. In industries where recording is a legal requirement, and even in areas
where it is not required, interaction recording is a valuable tool to protect against
an increasingly litigious world and to show compliance with legislative regulations
and guidelines.
While the majority of contact centers use interaction recording for quality
assurance, agent training, and compliance, some companies take a more analytic
approach. More sophisticated Interaction Analytics solutions allow organizations to
understand not only what has happened, but why it happened, or to learn more
about the interaction and the customer which can be used for future strategy
planning. When all interactions are recorded and analyzed, it can contribute to
the creation of a performance management program. Interaction analysis can
also be a vital part of a wider process optimization strategy, to identify good and
bad practices and process bottlenecks, or even to gather customer intelligence
which can be applied to marketing and sales efforts.
For example, interaction recording and speech analytics are often used in tandem.
With automated analytics tools, contact centers can review a much larger
number of recordings than a supervisor can review manually, providing a more
holistic view rather than a small sample. Speech analytics can search recordings
for specific words and phrases automatically and can also pick up on customer
sentiment, offering an even more complete method of gaining intelligence on
your customers and your marketplace.
(Continued on back)
Letter from the CEO
New Challenges for
a Growing Marketplace
Emerging opportunities are creating
a renewal in the contact center
James K Noble, Jr
industry. A Research and Markets*
report shows that the number of outbound seats
grew by 12% in 2013, and predicts that the market
will maintain an annual growth rate of 5%+ through
2018. As companies focus on improving customer
engagement, the contact center becomes a
vital strategic core, rather than an operational
requirement. Traditional contact tools and methods
are evolving to meet the new demand for multichannel, multi-function solutions.
While each organization has unique goals and
processes, we are finding common trends that are
affecting organizations across the industry:
Compliance: While regulatory compliance
creates a range of impact points for contact
centers, TCPA is currently in the bulls-eye. TCPA
lawsuits are rising at a spectacular pace. Through
the end of Q3 2014, TCPA cases were up nearly
30% from 2013, which itself saw a 70% rise in new
suits. In August 2014, Capital One was part of the
largest proposed cash settlement in TCPA history
– $75.5 million, which was more than double the
amount of the prior record-holding settlement.
Growing Communications Channels: Modern
consumers are moving away from voice as the
only contact channel. The availability of email,
SMS/text messaging, and chat options are
allowing proactive customer care and outbound
notifications to mature, givin g companies new
ways to communicate with consumers who are
open to receiving their messages. Proactive
customer care is quickly becoming an essential
component of customer engagement strategies.
The Cloud: It’s omnipresent, and the contact
center solutions market is not immune. Cloud
solutions offer a number of advantages –
eliminating capital investment, reducing start-up
costs, increasing flexibility and innovation, and so
on. As the range of cloud functionality available
expands, so does the number of companies who
are transitioning to the environment, including
large enterprises, small businesses, sales groups,
collectors, seasonal teams, and more.
As Noble Systems closes out our 25th anniversary
year, we are meeting these new challenges with
the same can-do approach that our clients have
come to expect. This means working with users to
understand their strategic and operational needs
and provide functional solutions. Now more than
ever, Noble is committed to offering a broad range
of solutions and services to help you unify your
contact technology platform and strengthen your
customer communications programs.
*www.researchandmarkets.com