Call recording: when compliance becomes an opportunity

Everyone that uses call centers of any kind of company often runs into a standard prompt sounding like: “This call is recorded for your own protection” or something similar. Most often than not, call recording appears as a result of legislation that companies have to comply with. It started with “sensitive” industry sectors such as banking and insurance, but it increasingly expands to include various other types of contact centers also.

A lot of companies, as a result, tend to view call recording as an obligation, and a costly one too. Compliance with regulations incurs costs related to both the technological products needed as well as the human resources required. These regulations can also come from different sources also (state, organizations etc). And since the costs of non-compliance tend to be far higher, almost all companies opt to adhere to the regulatory frameworks and record all calls.

However, all this recorded material is usually dumped into oblivion, as soon as the regulations allow. By doing this, many companies waste a very good opportunity to extract important information from such data. While small companies with few customers have a level of intimacy and direct contact that makes getting feedback quite easy, large corporations cannot afford such luxury. The vast majority of interactions is funneled through the contact center and recorded on appropriate loggers. These logged calls can (and should) be analyzed to provide information for every customer interaction. Information that can be gathered this way includes agent performance, customer satisfaction and possible preferences, quality of products and services and even free material for market analysis/research. All these can be analyzed and used to provide competitive advantage.

This type of information can be gathered quite effectively with the usage of speech analytics (or audio mining) suites. Speech analytics is a rather complex solution that combines a variety of information such as who the speakers are, what keywords they used, and speakers’ communication historical data and so on. There are several techniques that are widely used for recognition and subsequent classification of data, with various degrees of accuracy and processing requirements.

These solutions are usually offered as complementary products by vendors that sell voice and speech related hardware and software. An example of available speech analytics product is Nuance Care Analytics. Recently NICE systems, a leading vendor of call logger systems among other things, announced a real-time speech analytics product.