Call recording technologies are found in more than just large call centers

When people think of call recording or quality monitoring, they usually associate it with call centers, customer service centers, etc -- Dozens or hundreds of people taking thousands of calls. We also have quite a few customers running Virtual Observer in much smaller customer service centers where the call volume is much lower, yet the importance of the calls is just as high.

In one telling example, a convenience store chain has a small center with three to four service agents answering the incoming calls from store managers at the individual stores. These calls are equally as important to the business as customer service calls may be to other businesses. The calls are recorded to prevent and resolve disputes, and in one particular recorded interaction, the resulting call yielded an investigation which solved the theft of store credit cards. Read more about this convenience store's call recording implementation.

What's the most frequent use for call recording: quality assurance or liability / verification?

We asked this question to a diverse group of call center professionals. Among the responses:

"My company does not use call recording software; however, we often find the need to partner with entities that do supply such capabilities for our customer base. We sell solutions that provide E911 support for Enterprise customers. Being that a 911 call more then likely is some sort of emergency, most customers have strict requirements for call recording. In these cases, I would assume the need will be much more for liability protection, though I could also see need to review 911 calls from a training perspective." - e911 solution provider

"Most catalog companies I’ve spoken to are heavily into sales and customer service, so training seems to be the most important issue." - Call Recording Sales Executive

"Some are recording sales confirmations for high ticket items but for the most part they capture unique identifiers as a means of certifying the purchase." - Call Center Consultant

"I’ve found that most catalog centers I’ve reached out to have expressed a need for employee development vs. legal/liability recording," - Regional Sales Manager, Call Center Recording Solutions

"Depends on the industry, of course. For catalog companies, it's definitely QA" - Call Center Software Programmer

"It would seem to me that certain e-commerce industries, such as catalog companies, would definitely start out call recording to help meet their quality initiatives, but I could see more and more of them starting to record all calls for liability reasons and dispute resolution. They definitely need to encrypt calls if they are accepting credit card orders over the phone." - Marketing Executive

5 critical reasons for implementing a call logger in a small business

These are in no particular order...

* Verification purposes - capturing every call means you'll be able to go back and play calls where customers placed orders or made billing adjustments.

* Dispute resolution - call logging maintains peace of mind as "he said, she said" conflicts are easily investigated and resolved.

* Training purposes - even if you only have 3 agents, and it's not a "real" call center, capturing every call and being able to go back and evaluate process mistakes can improve the bottom line over time, as your agents begin to increase upsells and prevent cancellations.

* History - you can build a nice repository of customer communications from which you can go back in time and investigate why a customer left - or, for training purposes (positive mindset!), you can see why the customer upgraded.

* Storage Space is cheap! - storing all your calls is less of a space issue than it was even a few years ago.