One of the key features of a business VoIP system is call recording. Along with allowing you to monitor inbound and outbound calls, you can also record them. Recording VoIP calls provides an excellent means of staff training and coaching, helping to hone your customer service, and to embed a culture of continual learning and quality assurance in your workplace.
In the past, the concept of call recording has attracted some controversy, with concerns about it being too intrusive. However, it is now an accepted part of business culture, because it has such value as a practical means as a learning tool.
Obviously, call recording must be legal and ethical, and it should be a means of engaging staff and building trust by helping them improve their performance.
Learning at Work
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, CIPD, points out that learning supports organisational strategy and performance, and builds skills in the workplace.
Learning adds enormous value to a business, to the extent that it can be intrinsic to continuing productivity and profitability. With this in mind, the question is then, what are the best methods for helping employees learn?
Coaching, mentoring and training help improve employee performance. Recording calls using a VoIP telephone system then becomes a resource and a tool to enact these methods.
What Calls Should You Record?
While VoIP fall features give you the means to record calls, applying this in a way that will be positive, productive and meaningful to staff is vitally important.
Firstly, resist only recording bad calls. Criticism needs to be constructive if it is to work in a coaching context, so focusing on the negative is likely start things off to on the wrong foot.
Using bad calls as a basis for learning will make employees associate coaching with negative criticism of their performance, and is then going to be less effective in embedding lasting change.
Also, avoid recording calls as part of a percentage scoring scheme. This risks becoming simply a subjective internal measure that leads to self-congratulation on the part of management.
Instead, focus on how calls are related to the customer experience; whether they meet the required standard; and what employees can learn from them.
Use calls that are successful and calls that are not. Both have their uses as resources for training and coaching.
How is Coaching Different to Training?
The fundamental difference between coaching and training is that coaching is about enhancing knowledge, while training is about transferring knowledge. Training is about giving people the essential skills to do a task or set of tasks; while coaching is about refining those skills and is more about development than purely learning-focused. Recording calls can work for both these processes.
Creating a Learning Framework
Recorded calls provide real-life examples of people performing their roles in the workplace; whether these are answering enquiries, dealing with complaints, making sales calls, placing orders or other business-essential tasks.
The value is in the fact these calls are not a theoretical exercise or lesson, and employees can immediately relate to the fact that they are listening to real situations, and often to recordings where they themselves are involved.
One framework is to work on a one-on-one basis. To play an agent’s call back to them, then to discuss it together, looking at what the agent feels went well, what didn’t, and how they might make changes. It is also an opportunity to discuss the customer’s experience. Playing a call back to someone is a highly effective way of helping them learn from their own experience, as a training tool.
Where there are recorded examples of archetypical ‘good’ or ‘bad’ calls , these can work well in a more formal training environment. This helps trainee call operators and agents get an immediate feel for what their roles will entail.
Positive Development
The risk with some training is that if it does not draw on concrete examples, it can come across as being too superficial. Call recordings can help you and your employees assess and analyse performance, and support your encouragement of them. Consistently well-performing agents can, in turn, become coaches and mentors for others, drawing on recorded calls as a resource to do this.
Often, customer service goes wrong when people make simple mistakes, and do not realise that they are making them. Hearing themselves can provide a huge amount of insight, and help them fix any ongoing mistakes or bad habits, and in so doing, refine their performance.
Call recording focuses on the experience and ability of the employee in their role, but it allows them to see themselves from an outside perspective, so they are not simply hearing or reacting to external criticism or instruction. This is why call recording is such a potentially positive tool for learning and development.
VoIP and Call Recording
VoIP call features make recording inbound and outbound calls a straightforward process. Call recording can be a valuable learning tool for employees. However, you must ensure your call recording is compliant with regulations, and that it is going to support your business or organisation and the people in it positively.
To discover more about the business benefits of VoIP, including call recording features, please contact us on 03300 881 182, email sales@vipvoip.co.uk, or complete our online enquiry form, and we’ll be in touch as soon as possible.