Sure, business call recording feels like a burdensome legal obligation. Still, it contains numerous hidden benefits that smart companies take advantage of to keep their customers happy and sell more products. When a business is legally required to record its calls, the wise choice is to offset the cost of call recording with revenue saving and generating opportunities that call recording provides.

It’s important to note that taking advantage of business recording requires a well-designed call recording platform. This article will go over the benefits of business call recording to help you determine which platform to invest in or switch to.

Benefit 1: Compliance Call Recording

Let’s just get this one out of the way. Compliance call recording is a legal requirement in many different industries. Whether your operation is financial, medical, insurance, a public utility, or e-commerce, the bottom line is that failing to record your calls compliantly is very costly.

Think of your business call recordings as dashcam videos. When necessary, your call recordings become a critical and legally binding source of data. Call recordings can help settle customer disputes and can even be used to protect your company in court.

However, each industry has its own set of compliance regulations for how, when, and where calls can be recorded. Your company may be subject to stipulations about how and where call recordings are stored as well. The good news is that this is the limit of inconvenience call recording will cause you, and what remains after are benefits.

Benefit 2: Hearing the Voice of the Customer

Call recordings are overflowing with valuable data, but these treasures went unnoticed for years because we didn’t have the technology to extract the intelligence. Until speech-to-text (STT) transcription and voice analytics, only 2% of calls recorded were ever analyzed.

This is still the case, so if you’re looking for an advantage over your competitors, investing in a call recording platform with robust analytics capabilities will give you a distinct edge.

Analyzing calls by targeting keywords and phrases can paint a detailed picture of your customer satisfaction. Searching for terms like “frustrated”, “doesn’t work”, “too expensive”, and “unhappy” can show you areas that need improvement in your organization. Likewise, searching for positive terms can show you where your business plan is succeeding and how well your agents are performing.

Perhaps the greatest part of this benefit is automation. We are no longer constrained to having human beings search 2% of our call volume to guesstimate how customers are feeling. A proper analytics platform will scan your entire call volume, picking out the data you’re most interested in.

Business Call Recording and Speech Analytics

Speech Analytics are in high demand and widespread use at this point. Technologies like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri make 24-hour use of advanced speech recognition capabilities. It’s now cost-effective and easy to deploy speech analytics on your call recordings.

Many call recording platforms offer analytics capabilities along with speech-to-text transcription functions. It’s easy to see how using speech Analytics to test how frequently groups of keywords and phrases are mentioned in your call recordings is an enormous benefit to your customer service department.

For example, using speech analytics to recognize keywords related to your customers’ most common complaints, feature requests, and support issues can help you get ahead in multiple categories.

Benefit 3: Agent Training

Some benefits enhance workforce capability and efficiency. Your business call recording platform may have a call scoring feature that allows you to implement a grading system. The more flexible that system is, the more deeply you can delve into the effectiveness of your Workforce.

Call scoring is typically done with a questionnaire, where a supervisor listens back to a call and answers a series of questions. The score averages of an agent or department can tell you where you need to apply more training and attention.

It also illuminates areas of concern in your company workflow by revealing inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the procedure (long hold times, agent preparedness, etc). Using a business call recorder that can capture your agent’s screen can be particularly revealing when identifying slowdowns (software problems, open browser windows, etc).

Scoring gives supervisors reliable metrics for measuring call center performance. Your business call recordings become functional litmus tests and call scoring will progressively track the results of that testing.

Benefit 4: PCI Redaction

Any business that takes a credit card over the phone is required to protect customer data. Credit card numbers are the top target of many cybercriminals, and they’ll search for these numbers any place they exist. If your company network is infiltrated, it’s critical to perform PCI redaction on all of your call recordings and transcripts.

Redaction removes credit card numbers so that even if the data is exposed, it can’t be used. Many call recording platforms use speech analysis to identify credit card numbers in-call audio files and speech-to-text transcripts.

Redaction is a critical action, especially for smaller companies. When a large multinational bank gets fined for PCI non-compliance, they can typically shrug it off. However, these fines can end a small to medium-sized business because they come from multiple parties and, depending on the size of the data breach, can cost millions of dollars.

PCI redaction in business call recording can typically be performed manually, where the agent pauses the recording while the card number is being spoken. Some highly advanced platforms can automatically recognize and redact PCI data.

Benefit 5: Customer Research

Your call center is one of the best sources of customer research available. It’s the meeting place for your company and the people who use your products and services. Every call center manager knows that customers express themselves, often with no filter, all day long to your agents. Business call recorders with analytics capabilities can organize these expressions into a powerful body of customer research that grows and changes over time.

Tasking your analytics engine to recognize keywords and phrases like the names of your competitors, emerging technologies, price complaints, and churn helps your company formulate plans to move forward and to shut down cancellations before they happen.

Conclusion

Business call recording is far more than a legal burden that every company must submit to. It’s packed with crucial data that gives you a definitive edge over your competition. If you’re looking to deploy or upgrade a business call recorder, take the time to list every benefit you want out of it and research carefully to make sure that the platform you choose delivers every option you seek.