Call Center Recording: A Detailed Guide

What is call center recording?

Call center recording is the process of recording all inbound and outbound calls made between agents and customers at a call center. It captures the audio, video and screen activity of participants, and can be stored and retrieved for future reference.

Call center call recording can be done by standalone software or a feature within call center software. It plays a vital role in ensuring regulatory compliance, especially in financial, e-commerce and telemarketing industries. Businesses also use call center recording as a part of call center quality assurance for training new agents.

Call recording becomes even more critical to track performance and boost customer satisfaction as more customer conversations become automated and AI-powered.

Importance of leveraging call recording in call centers

Call center recording helps enhance service quality and facilitate faster dispute resolution. Quality analysts and supervisors use recordings to measure and benchmark performance against industry standards. Additionally, in some domains, call center recording is mandatory from a regulatory point of view to enforce caller rights and data privacy. Let's discuss these benefits one by one below.

1. Improved agent training: As you'd know, agent attrition is a burning problem in call centers, with the average agent turnover rate hovering around 38%. With more than a third of the call center agents being replaced by new faces every year, training the new agents is an ongoing activity.

   
   Call recordings of successful conversations help new agents quickly learn how to greet customers, end calls, ask leading questions and pacify disgruntled customers. Likewise, recordings/transcripts of unsuccessful or escalated calls are hands-on training on what not to do on customer calls.

   Dive Deeper: A Detailed Guide on Call Center Agent Training

2. Quality control: Call center recordings surface areas where agents struggle or falter during interactions. They also give insights into the team's adherence to company protocols and the overall quality of service offered. These insights drive process improvements and facilitate targeted training of agents to ensure high-quality, memorable support experiences.
   

3. Legal and compliance purposes: Miscommunication between customers and businesses can lead to costly and ugly lawsuits. In such instances, call center recordings can be instrumental in establishing evidence. Additionally, storing transcripts of all inbound and outbound calls for several industries, such as financial services, telemarketing, and government services is mandatory.
   

4. Track call center metrics: Call center recordings help track key metrics such as first call resolution (FCR), average speed of answer, customer satisfaction, conversion rate, etc. Analyzing the metrics over a period of time will help you track and evaluate the efficiency and progress of your call center.
   Read further: 10 Important Call Center KPIs to Track

5. Granular customer insights: Call center recordings are a treasure trove of customer data. They provide insights into customer behavior and customer expectations. AI-powered call center solutions help you analyze the large amount of unstructured data in call recordings. For example, word clouds from call center recordings reveal common grievances, popular features and key competitors.

Top 10 components of call center recording software

As organizations increasingly rely on call center recording software to improve customer interactions, boost agent performance and ensure compliance, understanding the key components of this technology is vital. This section will explore the top 10 crucial components of a comprehensive call center recording software.

1. Call transcription

Real-time transcription of calls into text format is a critical component of call center recording software. This feature converts the audio track into written words stored as plain text. It can be used for conversational analytics, keyword spotting, word cloud creation and sentiment analysis.

2. Storage

This feature offers a secure repository for call recordings and transcripts, enabling easy organization of files. Choose between local and cloud-based storage options and ensure scalability of storage limits when selecting call recording software.

3. Search and retrieval

The call recording software should allow users to search recordings based on date, tags, caller or keyword. This saves time and makes going through calls for data analysis quicker and easier.

4. Audio, video and screen recording

In call centers, particularly in the IT industry, agents and customers frequently share screens to troubleshoot issues faster. Call recording software that captures screen activity and videos of participants is critical to tracking the quality of service in such cases. It also facilitates accurate follow-up actions for unresolved queries.

5. Sentiment analysis

Call center sentiment analysis categorizes calls based on customer sentiment by actively tracking keywords that express satisfaction (e.g., "nice," "grateful," "solved") or frustration (e.g., "cheat," "unhappy," "never"). It also helps evaluate agent performance by tracking the number of calls that elicited positive or negative responses.

6. Speech and text analytics

Speech analytics, especially AI-powered, swiftly analyze customer calls and assess factors like speech pace, emotional tone and customer satisfaction. Beyond that, they extend to text analytics on call transcripts and text-based interactions, aiding in identifying keyword patterns, competitor mentions and agent behavior.

7. Call recording annotation

This feature allows users to add notes or comments to recorded calls to highlight important moments or issues. You can also edit or delete the annotations.

8. Call tagging

This feature allows you to add tags to call recordings to sort them. It also enables you to add tags such as ‘urgent’ or ‘critical’ to prioritize calls that require quick resolution.

9. Compliance and security

Call center recordings may contain sensitive information such as customer credit card numbers, medical information and contact numbers. Securing the call recordings to protect personally identifying information (PII) is critical and mandatory according to regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR and PCI.

Other regulations such as FedRAMP, mandate security measures such as end-to-end encryption, access controls and authentication for recording and storing call transcripts. Securing call recordings helps comply with regulations and drives customer trust.

10. Reporting

The reporting feature helps you get daily or weekly reports measuring the call center agent performance metrics, sentiment analysis and other details such as performance metrics, word clouds, SLA violations and customer disposition. You can also create reports that provide a statistical summary of metrics such as average handle time, customer satisfaction scores and contact quality. You can share these reports with other relevant users via email.

Learn More: 22 Essential Features of Call Center Software 

Types of call center recording

The three types of call recording options available in most solutions are on-demand call recording, automatic call recording and random call recording. We look at each of these types briefly in this section.

On-demand call recording

On-demand call recording allows managers or agents to decide which calls to record. Manual intervention (usually clicking the record button) is needed to initiate the call recording. You can turn on the call recording option before or at any time during the call. This type of call recording is helpful if you want to record specific calls only. Some use cases of on-demand call recording are:

• Internal business calls: You may not want all calls recorded between a supervisor and the agents. In such instances, discretion can be used to record only critical calls, or that can be used for training purposes.

• Industries/geographies where recording every call is not mandatory: For many industries, such as healthcare and financial services, it is mandatory to record customer calls. But it isn't a priority requirement for several others, like manufacturing. The same is the case for different countries/states. Wherever there is no stringent requirement to store call recordings, it would be beneficial to adopt on-demand recording to get the much-needed data for CX analysis.

Automatic call recording

This records all incoming and outgoing business calls. You do not need to take any manual steps to trigger recording. Automatic call recording suits industries such as financial services and healthcare with strict call recording regulations. Businesses that want to monitor agent performance, track call sentiments and get detailed insights to improve customer experience should opt for this type of call recording.

In this method, the call recording software records a fixed percentage or number of calls as determined by the manager. The software randomly selects a call sample from all calls made during the day. This process aids in analyzing call center performance trends at a lower cost and reduces your data storage requirements. However, not every call recording software supports this type of recording. Most solutions commonly offer only automatic and/or on-demand call recording.

How to implement call recording software in a call center

Along with the usual technical considerations involved in implementing software, there are also some ethical and regulatory considerations to follow when implementing call recording software.

While it may seem trivial, you must follow them to ensure compliance with regulations. It is also vital for gaining customer trust and maintaining your brand reputation.

Here is how to ensure trustworthiness and legal protection when implementing call center call recording software.

1. Be transparent and get the customer’s consent: While all countries may not require you to get the caller’s consent to record the call, it is always a best practice to do so. An interactive voice response (IVR) or a script the agent reads at the start of the call helps inform the caller about the recording.

2. Consider the kind of consent needed (one party/all-party): In some countries/states, you may need to get the consent of only one person/party involved in the call to record it. In some states like Florida and California, you must get the consent of all the parties involved in the call to record it. Be sure to implement the right type of consent depending on where your business and customers are located.

3. Secure your call recordings: Keeping call recording files secure is critical to avoid legal repercussions and prevent damage to your brand image. Protect your data warehouses from unauthorized access using authorization and authentication techniques. All call recordings must be encrypted and protected with passwords and authentication tools.

4. Check compliance with requisite data privacy laws: Periodically assess if your call recording and storage processes align with the industry regulations (e.g. HIPAA for the healthcare industry, Dodd-Frank for banks, etc.) You must comply with data protection and retention rules for call recordings. Violating these laws can result in fines of up to €20,000,000 or 4% of a company’s revenue as per GDPR.

5. Train your agents on call recording ethics and violations: Train your agents on call center recording best practices such as not sharing customer details with third parties, not keeping personal records of customer calls, not recording sensitive details such as credit card numbers, etc. Your agents are the best resource you have to build customer trust.

Best call center recording software for 2024

There are a variety of call recording software available in the market if you're looking at implementing a new solution or replacing your existing one. Some popular call center recording software include:

Sprinklr

Sprinklr offers a full-featured AI-powered solution for modern call centers and contact centers, with advanced features to enhance the caller experience and operational efficiency.

Key features: Audio and video call recording and guided workflows to assist agents, single-participant and both-participant recording, video call transcripts and call analytics.

Pricing: Check out the details here.

RingCentral

It is a cloud-based call center recording system that supports the recording of audio, video and phone interactions.

Key features: One-click on-demand call recording feature, options to download or playback the recorded calls for up to 90 days, APIs for integration with other call center applications and AI-powered video meetings.

Pricing: Starts from $25/user/month

Talkdesk

Talkdesk is an AI-based call center solution that offers omnichannel engagement and call recording features.

Key features: Customer experience analytics, omnichannel engagement, customer self-service tools and encrypted audio and screen recording supported from different phone lines.

Pricing: Starts from $75/user/month

Nice CXone

It is a cloud-based customer experience management and call recording software that leverages AI to optimize customer service.

Key features: Voice transcription, real-time sentiment analysis, omnichannel recording and centralized call center recording management.

Pricing: Available on demand

Ready to improve call center agent performance and compliance with Sprinklr?

Call center recording is essential to meet compliance and legal requirements. Additionally, it helps gather valuable customer experience insights. It can also track agent performance as the recordings can identify percentage adherence to call guidelines and SOPs. You can train agents further or redesign your SOPs based on the insights gathered.

Sprinklr's AI-powered contact center as a service solution helps to manage inbound customer communications. Its AI technology supports efficient call routing and capacity management, thus reducing customer wait times.

It offers call recording, quality management, IVR, omnichannel routing and conversational analytics features. Request a demo to find out how Sprinklr can maximize the efficiency of your call center.