The Aftermath of Using Call Center Call Recording Software: Improved Agent Performance and a Better Customer Experience

Almost half of companies with a strong coaching culture reported revenue above their peer group in a study by the Human Capital Institute and the International Coach Federation. And those same companies IDed 61% of their employees as highly engaged – a huge feat when employee engagement typically sits around 33%.

When it comes to contact center performance, leaders know coaching is important. Whether you’re trying to remedy inconsistent agent behaviors or identify and systemize best practices, coaching brings healthier business results and better supported, more satisfied agents.

As a manager, though, you know it’s easy to let coaching slip on your priority list. Traditional coaching methods suck up your time. Putting together days of training materials and leave-behind resources is no easy feat.

And it’s also not that effective.

Your agents want training that’s personalized and relevant to them. And they want it more often. The vast majority of your employees – 89% – want on-the-spot training they can quickly apply to their roles. And 85% want training that fits with their schedule, not that takes them away from their daily work. Plus, 80% believe frequent training is more important than formal, time-intensive training.

Your contact center agents beg for better coaching, all the while you beg for more time to coach.

So, how do you fix broken coaching methods?

Use call recordings and transcriptions paired with in-line training to solve your most crucial coaching problems.

Here’s why you should make the switch to more digestible training methods, and how call recordings and transcriptions help get you there.

Quickly uncover recurring issues so you can fix your CX and AX.

Let’s say you manage a team of 20 agents, and you’ve noticed a problematic trend—a spike in how many discounts your agents hand out when customers call in. Now, a discount here and there to satiate a fuming customer isn’t a huge worry. But if there’s a clear trend popping up in your data, then there’s likely a larger issue at play.

To figure out what’s going on (whether, for example, it’s a single, discount-happy agent, or a team-wide epidemic) takes a lot of time without the right tools. From pulling and listening to calls, to dissecting agent performance, to preparing for (and engaging in) coaching conversations…it’s like you have to stop working on all your other projects to get the details you need.

It doesn’t have to be this hard, though. If your contact center platform is capable of speech-to-text transcription in addition to call recordings, the process of zeroing in on the problem is significantly streamlined. If you know what you’re looking for (in this case, the how and why behind the spike in discounts), you can simply search the transcripts for the word “discount,” filter the call recordings, and see not only who has been giving out the discounts, but also how often, and why.

You get a much quicker path to the actionable insight you need, so you can address the issue and work through any changes with your agents.

Plus, in-line training tools let you leave comments, feedback, and questions right alongside the transcription. You can provide specific guidance to your agent, down to the specific second on a call, to help them adjust their approach for the next interaction.

Replicate your best agents.

Best practices, as instructive as they can be, are not universal. Rather than having to rely on industry-standard best practices, pairing call recording software with speech-to-text transcription empowers you, as a manager, to develop their own contact center best practices—based on what really works with their unique customers and culture.

Notice one agent having much more success than his or her colleagues? See what’s making that agent so effective by listening to (or reading the transcriptions of) that agent’s interactions. The X-factor could be the agent’s language, tone, both…or something else entirely.

By devoting a little time to studying what works, you can establish specific and scalable best practices. And more agents can perform like your best agents.

Want to double-down on improving agent performance? Get your call center manager playbook: a how-to guide to better call center coaching.

Get valuable insight about your customer and agent experience.

Call transcriptions and recordings give you valuable insight into the voice of your customers. Outside of customer surveys, if you’re not reviewing calls and skimming through transcriptions, the only way to evaluate your customer sentiment is to do a gut-check.

You can use bots (like our action bots) to sift through information in your recordings and transcriptions for important insights. Say you want to see how many of your customers are at-risk to churn. You can set up a trigger for the word “cancel” during interactions. Then, any time a customer says the word “cancel” on a call with your agent, your contact center platform will trigger a bot to pull the interaction and send it to you for review.

Automating the admin side of coaching gives you more time to dive in on what happened in the conversation before and after your customer uttered the word “cancel”. Was the customer heated from the start of the call? Or, did things escalate as they chatted with your agent? Did your agent successfully talk them down from their tipping point? Or, did your agent freeze up and not know how to handle the situation?

Call recordings and transcriptions let you see what’s causing pain in your customer journey. And, they let you see where you need to step in and help your agents. If an agent freezes up during an interaction, you know their experience is suffering and you need to jump in and coach through tough situations. If your agent helped your customer steer clear of ditching you for the competition, they deserve some praise.

Having more insight into your agent-customer interactions helps you adjust and ramp coaching on the fly to keep customers happy.

Now that you know how the right tools can help you coach, learn 29 tactics to help you coach more efficiently, so your agents deliver a standout experience with every interaction.

We originally published this post on July 25, 2017, and we updated it with new insight on July 11, 2019.