Contact centers are hub of any business' customer service operation. Most contact centers, from small centers to multi-location enterprises, recognize the value in implementing call center technology to help automate their everyday processes. One such process is the ongoing improvement of agent performance.

Typically, prior to a technology investment, call centers have agents on the phones, fielding questions, following scripts, and listening to advice from coaches who try to listen to a group of agents and provide real-time coaching.

With call recording technology, customer interactions can be recorded, and based on specific business rules, can be flagged for later evaluation. Supervisors can listen to a batch of calls and review them at a convenient, planned time, and a greater number of calls. Their attention is also undisturbed and their evaluation skills refined through comparison and volume scoring.

Taking call recording and training to the next level, some call recording solutions provide E-learning tools, which can help to automate the delivery of training materials back to the agents, based on specific evaluation criteria. This completely automates the training process. Performance reporting can track the progress of individual agents, teams, departments and entire organizations.

The business value of call recording is indisputable - reducing training cycle time and improved performance can be achieved in a relatively short time period. There are big differences among the solutions available on the market today - not the least of which is budgetary.

Here is a quick list of questions you need to ask yourself before you begin bringing in potential vendors:

* What is our true business requirement? Quality of service, legal/liability, dispute resolution, verification, or a combination of the above

* What is our growth requirements?

* What model phone system do we have? This may limit your options.

* What are your plans for migrating to VoIP? Make sure your call recording solution has a migration plan or is already VoIP compatible.

* Will you want to capture screen activity? Most call recording solutions offer synchronized audio and screens, but be careful, some do not and instead offer screen snapshots seperate from the audio.

These are among the most important questions to ask. With such a wide array of options, you can literally choose from dumbed-down recording devices for hundreds of dollars to enterprise scale systems for hundreds of thousands. Be careful not to overspend based on feature sets which you will never use. Remember to stay true to your actual business requirements!

Additional general resoruces include:
TMCNET
CrmXchange
CRM2day

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Csiworld

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Virtual Observations