Customer satisfaction has never been more of a moving target than in the past two years. Still, in many ways, the challenges of a distributed workforce have taught businesses that change can be good, especially when it comes to call recording.
What will 2022’s customers expect from your business, and how will you meet demand? Let’s look at where we are and how we think you’ll be keeping your customers talking about you in 2022.
Heading Toward a Hybrid Workforce
We’ve definitively shifted from solely using on-site call centers to a hybrid model that combines remote and on-site employees. At one time, multi-tenant operations meant a network of brick-and-mortar locations that serviced the customers of a single company.
But business call recording has changed with the dispersed workforce, every employee’s home is now an office. In many instances, the employee’s mobile device alone counts as a node in the company’s multi-tenant network.
And this is likely to continue, but by no means is it a full-scale shift to at-home work. Many major corporations have signaled that back-to-office dates are coming for their workforces. Remote work may peak in the next few years and ease its way into a normalized hybrid state (if that makes any sense). Major corporations like Apple and Google are already signaling return-to-office dates.
The Hybrid Workforce is Permanent
Continuity of service was perhaps one of the most significant challenges that the past few years have thrown at us. Recently a friend told me that every time he gets a call from his bank, his Caller ID shows a different state. I explained to him that his bank probably has a dispersed workforce and that he’s speaking to agents sitting in their homes all around the country.
This made perfect sense to him when he started to tell me how difficult it was to work with different agents. Every single call regarding his issue required him to provide an enormous amount of information, far past identifying himself with his account.
Service continuity continues to be a primary objective, especially when roughly 50% of employees continue to work from home. 2022 will show us our first real test of the permanent hybrid workforce. The nucleus of continuity for the hybrid company continues to be Unified Communications. Cloud-based UC platforms were already gaining market share before 2019, back when they were an exciting new option.
But UC is now the blood pumping through the veins of call centers spread from offices to homes, apartments, and even automobiles. Where the cloud was strong, it is now a titan. Where mobile employees were once a handful of lucky folks at the office, they’re now half of the majority.
Benefits of Call Recording in the Cloud
Not all companies have risen to a high standard of service continuity, but trends in technology tell us that 2022 will be the year CX technology catches up in this area. Call recording has moved into the cloud, and the results of that shift can be used as a predictive model for other customer service areas.
Whether your operation is multi-tenant because it’s made up of a bunch of brick-and-mortar call centers spread around the world or its dispersed employees working from hundreds of locations remotely, the cloud has ushered in a unified standard of call recording. That’s because Cloud call recording captures customer interaction audio from wherever it occurs and stores it in the cloud fabric. Typically, this means that the application used to monitor and analyze these interactions is driven in the cloud, available to administrators no matter where they reside, and infinitely more secure than on-premises.
CX Platforms Catch Up in the Cloud
The cloud call recording workflow we just looked at, where the customer interaction is captured, stored, and available in the cloud, is becoming the new standard for CX and many other platforms. Many organizations diligently sought evergreen methods to keep their company workstations up to date with their operating systems, custom software, and security needs.
Cloud computing is the most critical and integral component in this modern workflow. Having a cloud-driven application run your CX platform and your call recording operation produces a unifying experience that makes customer data available anywhere your agents are.
Setting Higher Customer Satisfaction through Analytics
Since we’re talking about call recording and CX, let’s get to the goal of those things: satisfied customers. The trend toward using analytics to improve customer service is by no means a new one, but the past two years have caused companies to invest more capital and research into analytics more than ever before.
As a result, word recognition is more accurate than it ever has been, and the technology went mainstream with technologies like Siri and Alexa. Speech-To-Text transcription (STT) is the bridge between customer recordings and sheer analytical power. Transcriptions are the driving force inside analytics and machine learning, and the more accurate they are, the greater our understanding of the customer experience.
The Company, Meet Your Agents
To perform at their best, your agents need your guidance, and you need an unbiased assessment of what’s occurring on their calls. A critical area where analytics helps us is in understanding the agent experience. Just like your customers, your employees have good and bad days, sometimes they need to know more about your product, and sometimes they get distracted on a call. To keep customer satisfaction high, your support operation needs visibility.
A recent study concluded that almost three-quarters of all employees use company-issued devices to stream entertainment. Supervisors have to know as much as possible about their workforce; the good, the bad, the binge-watching. Reconstructing both sides of a customer interaction used to be difficult.
Yes, we had both sides of the call, but we couldn’t see what the agent was doing. Agent screen capture has been an increasing trend, and it’s expected to increase as platforms like Microsoft Teams continue to dominate customer interactions.
Combining analytics with a visual reconstruction of the agent side of interaction is so revealing that supervisors can’t afford to work without it, especially in large operations. And there’s much more to learn about your employee experience than what shows they love.
Screen recording reveals bottlenecks in your customer process, software issues that slow your agents down, and on-screen distractions like websites, email alerts, and so on. Analytics and call transcripts can also help you find agents who often transfer calls or subject customers to long hold times.
The Company, Meet Your Customers… All of them
In 2022, we will likely see a steady uptick in sentiment analysis. Whereas we used to only analyze 2 to 3% of our recorded customer calls, cloud applications and accurate transcripts have redesigned our entire method of customer analysis. Our ability to scale satisfaction analytics has increased exponentially, quite literally speaking.
Analytics allows us to deeply organize an enormous call volume with a high level of accuracy through automation. The data we extract from customer interactions is far more honest and relevant than data found in post-transaction surveys and cold calls. Agents find that their hands are freer to deal with customers, less bogged down with procedure.
Customers have feelings, and they are typically unafraid to share them with you. Scanning your transcripts for customer sentiment is typically an ongoing process that gets refined as you teach your analytics platform to know what to look for. When customers are happy, they’ll say things like, “great, thanks, I really appreciate it”.
When they’re not happy, well, that list of phrases we can leave to the imagination. When a technical issue is at hand, phrases like “I’m having a problem” and “it’s not working” can easily be said. You get the point; careful customizing what your analytics engine looks for is the key to sentiment analysis.
Measuring how speech is rendered is also on the rise. Some platforms analyze speech for pitch, cadence, and volume while measuring those attributes against the language. This is how machine learning benefits our operations now and certainly more as the technology evolves. Leveraging this technology opens the door to understanding everyone who calls your company, not just some fraction of random sampling.
Interested in learning more about how call recording can benefit your company now and in the future? Reach out to CallCabinet at callcabinet.com today.
Main photo by Oliur
