Every call coming into your business is important. In today’s market, when customers happen to have become supremely good at buying choices and competition is fierce, how your business deals with customers’ calls can be the difference between getting and retaining a caller’s business, or losing them to one of your competitors.

In this environment, monitoring how effectively your employees deal with your callers is vital.  And not just for customer satisfaction, but for some industries this will be mandated for all purposes.  The most effective way of doing this is by using call recording.

1. Dispute resolution

Recordings are clearly important where a telephone conversation takes the place of a completed and agreed transaction. But calls relating to claims also give rise to disputes. The Insurance Ombudsman Bureau has already stressed the importance of firms recording critical telephone transactions.

Call recording allows you to monitor communications, investigate events, and securely share the results with internal and external parties quickly and easily. Documenting your customer conversations will allow you to search across voice, filtering by dates, user, device or media type to draw important information when required.

2. Demonstrate compliance

The main types of failure and wrongdoing that resulted in fines worth a total of $150bn for 10 US and European banks between 2009 and 2015 have been traced by Corlytics, an analytics firm. These compliance issues range from rigging foreign exchange rates and money laundering to product mis-selling.

Call recording solutions enable you to demonstrate compliance (and therefore reduce allegations risks) because it:

• Provides a clear audit trail of the actions that lead up to a transaction
• Save money, as well as legal headaches
• Rapidly resolve disputes and allow to investigate fraud

And, compliance alone isn’t the whole story.

3. Analytics for improving customer service

The customer is king. Powerful, angry customers could spur big changes. Already, they are dumping customer-unfriendly businesses, as soon as alternatives come along.

Call recording combined with analytics tools enables you to automatically discover and analyze words, phrases spoken during calls to reveal rising trends and areas of opportunity or concern. This can help you:

• Reduce churn by discovering the root cause of customer dissatisfaction and call volumes that would otherwise remain hidden
• Enhance performance with insights to reduce costs, improve products, processes and customer experience
• Improve quality monitoring by reviewing large samples and specific call types

4. Staff performance monitoring

Most companies have a set script that employees follow. The question on everyone’s lips now is: how many of your employees are actually following best practice?

Call recording solutions with the appropriate functions give management the ability to  actively monitor staff and offers a better understanding of what areas need improving. Again, by listening to live recorded calls, you can implement quality control, and ensure internal processes are always being followed.

Take back control

Banks know what regulators want to hear: that they have a call recording solution in place. Many of the benefits of call recording are not yet obvious. But given the financial chaos unleashed in 2009, call recording ensures easy compliance and transparency in the financial markets, preventing another collapse.