Call Recording System: A Comprehensive Guide For Choosing And Using One

Choose The Right Call Recording System for Your Inbound and Outbound Teams

What better way to listen to your customers than through the phone conversations they have with you? When a customer calls the call center, only one agent listens to them and responds to their queries. While this effectively resolves the customer’s concerns, it is a missed opportunity to understand the needs of your customer groups.

What if you could record these conversations, leverage insights and use them to optimise your business outcomes? That’s exactly what a call recording system delivers. 

What is a Call Recording System?

As the name suggests, a call recording system records every phone conversation your customer has with you, whether inbound or outbound. With these call recordings backed up to the cloud, you can search, playback, download and share them anytime.

Why do Businesses need a Call Recording System?

A call recording system can serve various purposes across record-keeping, improving customer experience and making data-driven decisions. Let’s look at them one by one. 

• Customer Experience: Are customers happy with your services or not? By recording and listening to customer concerns, you can get qualitative feedback on your services, identify recurring problems, spot ineffective solutions etc.
  
• Compliance: Regulatory authorities are increasingly demanding compliance. Especially in industries like BFSI, compliance is critical. For example, SEBI has mandated that stockbrokers record their customer conversations. You need call recording. 
• Quality assurance: While you can set standards for service delivery, ensuring your agents meet those standards is an entirely different ballgame. Call recordings can help you identify keywords, tone, speed etc. You can glean insights on what works and what doesn’t. 
• Training: You can use call recordings to conduct performance reviews, give feedback and design training interventions. You can also use recordings of your top performers as benchmarks, drawing the most relevant examples for coaching. 
• Dispute Resolution: It is not uncommon for customers to claim that they have been promised something. For example, if a customer claims that an agent offered them a 90% discount, you can always listen to the call recording to know the truth before deciding. Call recordings also come in handy in case of legal proceedings.

You know you need a call recording system, but how to set up and manage it? Here’s how.

How to Choose the Right Call Recording System?

Whether your call centre provider can record your calls or not is the simple first step. But a positive answer to that is not enough to make a decision. Here are more things to consider.

1. Define your needs: What do you want to record?

Before everything else, clearly outline your business needs for call recording.

• Do you need all calls recorded or just incoming or outgoing calls?
• Do you need all agent’s calls to be recorded? For instance, you might not need marketing calls on record, but recording customer service calls might be necessary.
• Do you need high-quality recordings?
• In what format do you need the audio — MP3, MP3 HQ etc.?

List all your needs and check if your provider offers them all. 

2. Automate: Who is responsible for recording these calls?

Imagine your agents manually pressing a button to record calls every single time. This is not only tedious, your agents can easily miss pressing the button or even deliberately avoid recording difficult conversations. The consequences of not recording calls can be disastrous.

Choose a call recording system that automatically records all calls and stores them for later use. This saves a world of hassle.

3. Decide archival duration: How long do you want to keep the recordings?

Some industries are legally mandated to maintain call recordings for a specific period. For instance, banks need to store recordings of customer conversations as long as required according to the statute of limitations, while stockbrokers must store theirs for three years. (Source: SEBI) Even if your industry doesn’t have legal requirements, you might want to maintain call recordings for extended periods to leverage their potential to its maximum. 

So, choose a provider who enables you to store call recordings securely. 

4. Enable easy access: How do the teams listen to these call recordings?

When a team member needs to listen to a call recording, they must be able to do so without wasting time. For this, you need your call recordings to be sorted by date, time, agent, inbound/outbound, department etc.

Choose a provider that offers you a user-friendly dashboard from which you can quickly find the exact recording you are looking for.

5. Control access: Who can access/use your call recordings? 

Since call recordings can contain sensitive information, you need to carefully evaluate who gets to manage, administer and listen to these recordings. For instance, sales managers might need call recordings of their team for performance review. On the other hand, training managers might need the entire sales organisation’s recordings for learning design.

Choose a provider who can enable access control based on each user type.

6. Prioritise security and privacy: Can you redact crucial information?

Through the course of a conversation, customers might have to share important information. For instance, the customer’s registered address or last three transactions are often used to authenticate users. Making these available to everyone on the team might be a security/privacy violation.

Choose a call recording system provider that can identify sensitive data and redact them with a beep sound or white noise.

7. Storage: Where do you keep them in the long term?

Storing and maintaining call recordings can be a significant investment over the long term. Especially when the volume of calls increases, adding storage capacity to your on-prem data centre can result in huge capital expenditure. Businesses choose automatic cloud sync of call recordings for lower CapEx, better disaster recovery, ease of customisation etc.

Whichever way you go, choose a call recording system provider who can facilitate a convenient transfer of call recordings to your data centre.

Exotel’s Call Recording Software for Businesses

At Exotel, we’ve considered all these questions and more while designing the Call Recording Software for Businesses. 

• Automatically records inbound and outbound calls
• Stores them for 180 days
• Allows controlled access to your teams
• Offers an easy-to-use dashboard for convenient access
• Includes speech analytics to identify and redact sensitive information
• Enables cloud sync for archiving

See how Exotel’s call recording system can help you. Speak to an Exotel agent today or book a demo now.