3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

It’s a bit odd that in an era of modern, omnichannel customer support technologies, it’s the telephone that has been garnering a lot of attention as of late. While it may not precisely be the nineteenth-century technology invented by Alexander Graham Bell – it’s a little more high tech than that nowadays – the premise is still the same. Customer uses his or voice to engage with an agent at the other end of the line. Agent solves problem; customers and agent thank each other and say “goodbye.”

The truth is that telephone was never dead, although it would have been natural to assume so judging by the miles of column ink written about serving customers in via e-mail, Web channels, video or over mobile app. It’s still the preferred method of contact for most customers. Whether that will remain the case in the future – the Millennial generation are notorious for preferring text messaging to actual phone calls – is anybody’s guess. For now, companies that hope to succeed still need to ensure that the quality of customer support they’re offering over the telephone is high.

In reality, the Web today is what’s driving the still-steady flood of phone calls. Click-to-call capabilities being offered for browsing customers to simply click on a number and initiate a voice or even video call, a technology made possible by the WebRTC standard, may be driving even more customers to call. According to a recent TechCrunch article by Jason Spievak, CEO of Invoca, services such as Google’s Website Call Conversions and Twitter’s (News - Alert) click-to-call service that’s currently in beta testing could actually drive contact center call volume up.

The ubiquity of the mobile phone is partly to blame, says Spievak, but not all to blame.

“Despite our addiction to mobile devices for getting our information and finding merchants, none of us like to click through multiple mobile web pages, thumb in our billing info, or fill out forms on a tiny screen,” he wrote. “For significant or considered purchases — like insurance, credit cards, cars, trips, satellite TV, plumbers, restaurants, etc. — people want answers before pulling the purchase trigger. That’s why we call businesses tens of billions of times each year.”

When these calls arrive from Web pages or social media, therefore, they’re likely to be important calls. They’re from someone who has researched a product or service online. This means the calls are incredibly valuable and can be considered a prime source of sales leads. It’s therefore important to ensure that you’re doing everything you can to maintain quality.

Call recording for quality purposes is critical, particularly coupled with analytics to sample the language and ensure that calls are handled smoothly and properly. Another option is third-party call monitoring.

Third-party organizations such as BPA Quality can examine your telephone interactions and ensure that they are meeting your internal quality standards. They can help you understand which telephone support behaviors you most want to replicate across all customer transactions. The company’s Remote Call Monitoring service provide accurate and actionable feedback to your agents and supervisors, sampling recorded or live calls and measuring customer interactions based on either your company’s standards or standards developed by third-party experts. This way, you can ensure that when those precious calls come in from multimedia sources, they are being handled in a way that reflects your goals and company culture.