Recording and reviewing past calls is a tried and tested training methodology in contact centres. A financial services company in the UK was able to improve its quality scores by 12.5% (for its Customer Service and Renewal teams) using a recordings-based training strategy. But using call recording for staff training isn’t quite as simple as recording calls, going over each and every conversation, and pointing out the errors. You need a clearly articulated training plan that uses call recording at the right junctures to illustrate and remediate staff performance.
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Start by tagging your calls
Call tagging assigns an identifiable and informative label to every ongoing conversation. By referring to a call tag, you’ll be able to tell what the customer was like, the purpose of the conversation, the overall sentiment, and any unusual bottlenecks. Call tagging lets you look up specific real-world instances to reinforce the impact of your training materials, both demonstrating “ideal” scenarios and highlighting behaviours to avoid.
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Leverage a sophisticated recording service
A basic call recording service is enough for meeting compliance mandates – for example, if you need to prove a conversation trail during a legal dispute. For training purposes, on the other hand, you need a more sophisticated service that helps you classify conversations, monitor random calls to check on performance, support self-conversation relay so that agents can assess themselves, and has custom tagging to meet specific training goals.
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Encourage agents to self-score
Typically, the team leader or supervisor scores contact centre staff on fixed KRAs and this data is used for evaluation, appraisal, training, compensation, and promotions purposes. But apart from this, you should also ask agents to playback their own conversations and self-score based on various parameters. These parameters can be dynamic, reflecting new training targets.
