Last Updated on January 8, 2016

Call recording is the best modern tool in quality control. When used well, call recording can help you evaluate your employees accurately, identify strengths and weaknesses, coach effectively, and improve your customer service. As a tool, call recording can enable detailed performance analysis and bring your customer service to new levels. This can make a big difference in your customer satisfaction. It can also be an empowering tool for your employees, making them a part of the evaluation and improvement process. Below, you’ll find an outline of how call recording can help you, as a manager, to improve your employees’ performance and some tips on how best to use it.

All the information you need

In order to evaluate and support your employees, the first thing you need is information. Call recording provides you with all the information you might need. You don’t have to guess about an employee’s customer service, because you can hear it yourself. Call recording makes each phone conversation with a customer accessible to you. You can then use those recordings to serve your business in multiple ways. If you want to get a picture of your overall customer service, you may choose to listen to a random selection of calls. These can provide you with a representative snapshot. If you wish to evaluate a single employee, you can listen to some or all of his or her calls. Call recording enables you to focus in on details when necessary. Because it records everything that occurs over the phone, you have almost limitless information to work with.

Quickly generate reports

Of course, all the information in the world won’t do much for you unless you know how to analyze it. Versadial’s call recording software comes with a quality control module that will help you evaluate calls and turn information into progress reports. You can create custom forms that suit your business and generate reports for individual employees. These quality control forms and reports make it easy to assess your employees. You can then use the reports as a basis for feedback and training.

Take a coaching approach

Call recording is the most effective when you view it as a learning tool for evaluation and improvement, rather than a sign of success or failure. Employees generally do not respond well to “gotcha” types of evaluation. Instead, you should work together with your employees to develop their skills and customer service. Your evaluation reports from recorded calls should serve as a starting point, rather than a final score. As a manager, you likely have insight into customer service calls that your employee doesn’t have. By providing constructive feedback based on details of your employee’s performance, you can help the employee make significant improvement. Call recording works so well as a learning tool because it grounds feedback in real, accessible job performance. You can connect your feedback with details from the call. You may even choose to reenact difficult calls, coaching employees on how to improve their customer service.

Incorporate the positive and the negative

One of the benefits of call recording is that it allows you to easily revisit problematic calls. If you have a customer complaint, you can immediately listen to and evaluate that call. Keep in mind, however, that you can also use call recording to pinpoint positive job performance. When conducting employee evaluations, pay attention to the employee’s strengths in addition to his or her weaknesses. It can be especially helpful to compare good and bad calls and play them back for the employee. Point out how one call was effective and how the other was problematic. In this way, the employee is able to learn from himself in addition to you.

Invite self-assessment

Call recording is unique as a form of evaluation in that it enables employees to evaluate their own performance. In a meeting with an employee, you may wish to play back a call and invite the employee to provide feedback. Ask what he or she thought went well and what could have been improved. You may even ask the employee to fill out a report on the call. Then compare notes. Explain your own feedback on the call and take note of any differences between your feedback and the employee’s. Listening to a recorded call provides an employee with a unique opportunity to reflect on her own performance from an outside perspective. This can be a great learning experience. You can also coach an employee to assess her own strengths and weaknesses, which can help to build long-term growth.

 

Last Updated on January 8, 2016