All of you working in a call center know what it feels like to be told 'no' throughout the entire day. In all honesty, it sucks..
Do you already record your sales or customer calls, or do you consider starting to collect such recordings?
The obvious value of saving your recordings in a library is for the use of documentation and reporting. But there are far more beneficial ways to take advantage of the recordings, which might ultimately lead to a remarkable increase in the number of successful conversations.
Such a library is a goldmine of overlooked knowledge that can be used to improve your coaching, refining your techniques, and onboard new agents faster.
If you’re managing a call center, be sure to also check out our guide with all you need to know about call center software and how it can help your business.
What is Call Recording and How Do I Get Started?
Basically, call recording is a method of automatically recording your customer conversations online or through a dialer. Several apps and services support your recordings – completely legal and GDPR compliant, e.g., Adversus. |
The best way to find out what’s happening inside the prospect’s head is to listen to what they say. For this purpose, call recording is a brilliant tool.
Call recordings are a treasure chest full of valuable information, which, among others, give you the answers to the following questions:
By listening to the recordings, you’ll better understand the prospects and their everyday lives and their issues. This means that it is easier for your sales team to tweak techniques and arguments in future sales conversations.
Training and personal development are fundamental to keep the sales agents satisfied and engaged. Hence, you should learn how to give the agents the best and most actionable feedback and coaching possible.
With call recording, you can provide qualified coaching based on data rather than assumptions.
When coaching a team, you can’t possibly find the time to sit next to the agents and listen to all conversations. Recordings enable you to listen when you have the time and still understand and include the whole context in your coaching.
PRO TIP! Remember to listen to the failed conversations but also take your time to review the successful ones. This way, both you and the agents will know what methods work in the sales process. |
Knowledge regarding a successful call is essential to understand how to tweak the conversation. Nonetheless, only 14% of all sales agents believe that their positive results are being analyzed to understand what actually works.
The software Capturi lets you filter the recordings based on, e.g., the specific agent or won and lost calls. This is a unique opportunity to clarify the difference between success and failure.
Even though sales reps have a reputation for keeping their best tips to themselves, you should strive for a culture where you share wins, such as a perfect sales pitch or a well-played objection handling.
Everyone in the team – talented agents and challenged agents – will benefit from sharing each other’s wins.
It’s not just about putting the best performer in the spotlight to motivate the others, but more about making their methods and selling techniques accessible to copy for other agents.
In this case, it is precious to share the recording of a successful call with everyone in the team – e.g., in an audio library. Make sure to point out the specific minutes or seconds of the call, where the sales agent does, especially good or bad.
The point of listening to calls is not to go through them all, but to point out specific areas in which the seller says the right things, let the team listen to the delivery, tone of voice, and the customer's reaction.
Have you ever tried calling a potential prospect and found out along the way that you forgot the details of what you talked about last time?
If there is anything that customers hate, it is to repeat things! Besides, it seems unprofessional and worsens your chances of closing the sale if you cannot remember important details.
If you instead choose to re-listen to the previous conversation, you are better prepared and ready to build on the customer’s sales process.
If you are the kind of person who takes notes after each sales conversation, you might think this doesn’t apply to you. But in fact, the recording does not only replace your notes – it provides even more value! Furthermore, the recordings allow you to investigate the atmosphere, context, and tones of voices. Hence, it gives you a much better understanding of the customer and what areas to focus on.
Quality assurance is an underestimated method to increase sales, but you can upgrade both quality assurance and sales considerably by using call recordings.
The core purpose of quality assurance is to make sure that the sales agents say the right things at the right time while speaking to prospects.
You should note that the sales agents are not always aware of their own errors. This frequently happens if changes occur concerning the playbook, the manuscript, or if the team is launching a new campaign.
If, for example, there is a price change on a product, sellers mustn’t incorrectly state the old price when reaching out to leads.
With call recording, quality assurance will be just as easy as selling something for free!
Instead of listening live, you can listen to selected conversations whenever it suits you as a sales manager or quality assurance employees. You can listen to the saved calls based on specific parameters such as ‘all conversations in less than 5 minutes’ or ‘all conversations that did not end in a sale’.
This selection process saves you from many unnecessary extra hours of listening live.
Capturi's software can track specific words and sentences.
Using AI and machine learning, you can easily set up so-called ‘trackers’, highlighting places in the conversation where the sales agent or customer says specific words or phrases. Then you don’t have to re-listen to entire conversations in case you missed certain points. With the software from Capturi, you get access to exactly the sound bite that is relevant for you.
Let’s face it – nobody thinks that it’s decidedly nice to hear their voices on a recording. For some reason, you always sound more shrill, nasal, or snorting than you initially thought.
If your sales team can ignore the unpleasant discovery and instead listen to what their voices are saying, then there is a lot to learn!
For instance, make them listen to specific parts of the conversations of their choice. If they would like to refine their intro section, they should listen to the beginning of their conversations. They should keep in mind what works well and what doesn’t.
The sellers don’t have to wait to be coached by you as a team leader or a quality assurance employee. They can easily take matters into their own hands by evaluating their calls themselves.
PRO TIP! If your sales agents have a long way to and from work, they can use the drive to rehearse conversations. That way, they take advantage of the driving time and get better without spending office time on it! |
The marketing team presumably works with buyer personas, segmentation, and understanding different target groups and customer types.
But do they know the customers? Not as well as you or the sales agents, who have direct contact every day, I dare say.
By recording your conversations, you can let the marketing team listen and gain a much better understanding of the customers.
You can easily select conversations that reflect the most typical customers or divide them into categories based on customer types. In this way, call recording also supports marketing and gives the creative department a better basis for creating relevant campaigns.
PRO TIP! Divide leads into the following categories: cold, lukewarm, or hot, and let marketing specialists analyze the conversations. In that way, they can adjust the target audience and campaigns. |
Hiring new employees in the team can be time-consuming and expensive, but good training is crucial if the new sales agents will feel prepared for the job and deliver great results.
Today, onboarding often takes place where the new employee listens to more or less random sales conversations to learn how conversations go and what to say.
The problem with using that method is that no one knows the outcome of each call. It may be that the new employee happens to have to listen to unnecessarily many calls before the call is answered at the other end or before they experience an example of a successful conversation.
With call recording, you can create playlists with themed conversation recordings. The new employee only uses to listen to the conversations that give them the best insights into the material. You can, for instance, create playlists containing:
Using an audio library, the new employee can virtually onboard themselves just by listening to good examples!
Just as self-coaching is a great way to supplement feedback from the manager, team coaching is also a very effective way to improve your team’s sales skills!
Using call recording, sales agents can listen to each other's sales conversations and provide feedback. It is good learning for all parties. As a bonus, it also supports the interaction and job satisfaction within the team.
PRO TIP: Create a team culture where it is natural for sales agents to ask each other for help and feedback. It boosts performance, creates higher involvement, and provides fewer layoffs. |
You probably already know everything about typical KPIs such as turnover, activities, customer satisfaction, and the number of new customers. These are important and concrete objectives, but call recording also allows you to qualitatively access different kinds of data.
With recordings of sales calls, you can dive into a whole new world of completely new knowledge, which tells you how the team performs overall and what needs to be improved in the conversations.
One option is to look at the length of the sales calls. Filtering only the closed deals might say something about the optimal call length, which gives sales agents a good benchmark to aim for.
With the right software, you can also shed light on parameters such as speech speed, number of interruptions, and speech distribution between customer and seller. It makes you wiser about the perfect sales conversation in your particular team. Simultaneously, it makes it easy to give constructive feedback directly to the individual sales agent.
Capturi’s software is specifically designed to analyze customer conversations, ensuring that you get the most out of each conversation.
If you want to ensure your call recording’s full benefits, you can quickly start your 14-days free trial right here. As a bonus, Capturi helps you optimize your quality assurance and coaching sessions.
Are you making the most of your call center software? Be sure to check out our guide with all you need to know about call center software and how it can help your business.
