When call recording is used in training a sales force, it can be a powerful tool. The most notable feature of the call recording is training staff. It enables businesses to listen to their best salespeople and playback those calls in training sessions. Sales teams can make use of real-life calls to improve their techniques.

Here’s something else that might surprise you: The typical benefits of call recording, such as improving your contact centre team’s performance or gaining better insights into how customers use your products or services to increase revenues, aren’t just for midsized or large businesses.

In San Francisco, some elderly dementia patients have called a local taxicab company for rides. In some cases, the patients are later reported missing. The taxi company has helped police identify and locate the lost patients using the call recordings.

Even entrepreneurs can enhance their customers’ experience and improve productivity by adding a call recording feature to their business phone system.

Top 9 ways business phone recording can help you

Here are nine ways your company can benefit by adding call recording to your business phone system.

1. Capture details you might have missed or forgotten

When talking to customers, it’s vital to listen actively. It may also be important to note what was discussed or promised. But taking notes during the call can prevent you from actively listening.

In addition, sometimes it isn’t easy to make out what a customer is saying. They’re in a noisy environment, talking quickly, or speaking in a heavy accent. Having a record of the call, portions you can play back if necessary, assures you won’t miss something critical.

During playback, you can also take notes to ensure you didn’t forget anything — whether the recording is of a restaurant customer’s to-go order or a discussion about a customer’s insurance policy claim. Plus, during the call, you can be fully present with customers. This helps ensure they feel they’re truly being “heard” — a big part of providing a great customer experience, which can translate into increased revenues.

2. Coach your team more effectively

By recording some calls, you can hear how your team members deal with customers. It’s a fantastic opportunity for managers to help teams improve their communication skills with customers and provide tips on how to sell more effectively or offer better customer service and support. Anyone in your organization, from receptionists to top salespeople, can benefit from the kind of granular coaching and feedback managers can provide from monitoring call recordings.

3. Get to know your customers

Call recordings help your marketing team better understand your company’s customer, or “buyer,” personas.

A buyer persona is a fictionalized representation of your typical or target customers, such as “Mid-20s Urban Professional,” complete with specific characteristics. You can learn more about buyer personas from, where else?, the Buyer Persona Institute.

By listening to customer calls, your marketing team members will learn how well — or poorly — the buyer personas they’ve developed measure up to your actual customers. Having a realistic understanding of buyer personas can, in turn, make your marketing efforts much more effective and impactful — another way to drive revenues.

4. Enhance your product or service

By sharing call recordings with specific team members in product management or R&D, you can help them better understand how customers are using your product, what they like about it, and what could be better. This is invaluable and free information that can translate into products and services that more effectively meet customer expectations and boost revenues.

5. Improve regulatory compliance and reduce associated costs

In some cases, maintaining a database of recorded calls can help your business comply with legal, industry, and service-level compliance guidelines.

Recorded calls can help you resolve disputes or defend against litigation from unhappy customers, too. And in some cases, a voice recording can serve as a verbal contract.

In this sense, call recordings can help your company save money and legal headaches — which is especially important for small businesses. According to a 2014 report on regulatory compliance costs, businesses with fewer than 20 employees pay an average of nearly $11,000 per employee in regulatory expenses vs $7,755 per employee for companies with 500 or more employees.

6. Provide excellent customer service

It’s often said that it costs five to seven times more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones.

To keep customers, you need to provide excellent customer service (among other things). Your customers go through some trouble to contact you. By listening closely to call recordings, you and your team can better understand customers’ pain points — and how to avoid or at least minimize them in the future.

7. Capture customer stories

Customers who call your company will sometimes talk positively about their experience using your product or service — why they chose it, how it’s helped them, and so on. With the customer’s permission, you may be able to translate the content of such calls into a great “customer success story” for your marketing or advertising campaigns.

8. See how your customer service has evolved

By maintaining a database of call recordings, you can compare how your team communicates with customers today vs how you communicated with them, say, six months ago. The differences can show where you’ve improved and where you still need work and how your business is growing in the right direction — which can be highly motivating.

9. Quickly bring a customer service agent up to speed

If you’re a sole proprietor or small business, it may be necessary to bring someone in from time to time to handle customer calls. Maybe you want to disconnect from work while on vacation completely. Or you’re too busy with work to handle customer calls effectively. Even big businesses need to add more contact centre agents at times.
Sharing call recordings with new or temp workers helps bring them up to speed fast on your customers’ needs and frequently asked questions and how to handle them.

Why you may need business call recording

Not every business needs to record customer calls. But the benefits of call recordings can be significant, and the costs are low.

Suppose your company frequently receives calls from customers and you don’t record at least a portion of them. In that case, you could be missing out on easy ways to improve efficiency, enhance the customer experience, and — most importantly — drive revenues.