When a new barista starts working behind the counter, they shadow their coworkers to learn how to make different drinks, how to clean the equipment, and how to interact with customers.
You wouldn’t want to just throw them into the fray and wish them luck on their first day. You’d end up with a lot of customers waiting a long time, only to receive messed-up orders.
Training and learning are important parts of any customer service philosophy. It’s important to learn from your mistakes as well as your successes. The same applies to new members of sales, service, and other customer-facing teams in the corporate world.
You’ve got to have resources that accurately reflect real-world scenarios. The best case is to record your best and worst experiences so that new and current reps can learn from them and feel better prepared for anything.
With the right call recording software, capturing and learning from customer interactions and phone conversations can uncover opportunities and unlock advantages.
Why Businesses Need To Record Calls
Call recording can be used in a lot of different ways across teams to help build more effective sales, support, and collaboration workflows.
Recording calls in sales
For sales teams, recording inbound and outbound phone calls with customers and prospects can help individuals and leadership find patterns — sometimes, these are opportunities for improvement as a team and other times, it helps identify and address common issues for each rep early on.
By reviewing even a small sample of customer calls regularly, sales managers quickly gain visibility into reps’ day-to-day interactions so they can course-correct them together if necessary.
Here are a few ways to use recorded sales calls and make an impact:
- Ensure accuracy and consistency: Recordings allow managers to monitor customer interactions and verify details such as pricing and product capabilities. This early detection of deviations from spoken agreements can help to prevent miscommunication from affecting deals.
- Improve training and coaching: Recordings also offer useful content for training sales teams in objection handling and closing techniques, allowing managers to provide customized feedback based on each employee’s interactions.
- Enhance performance evaluations: Voice recordings help managers conduct objective, evidence-based evaluations. Using recordings, managers can recognize employee-customer interaction patterns and use these to guide constructive feedback and work on areas for growth.
- Gain customer insights: Call recordings enable teams to gain a deeper understanding of subtle customer cues and needs — insights that can inform pricing, features, and product positioning strategies. This helps businesses align offerings more closely with customer expectations, ultimately creating a more desirable and profitable product.
Related: How To Record Sales Calls: What Team Leaders Need To Know
Recording calls in customer service
In customer service, recording calls, especially those involving complaints and concerns, can greatly improve client interactions. Call centers and shared services teams use these recordings to:
- Uphold quality standards: Managers use recordings to score calls against criteria such as correctness and courtesy. This call monitoring approach helps ensure staff adhere to internal guidelines and helps flag when retraining or coaching is needed.
- Accelerate onboarding: Authentic call examples are invaluable for training new hires and existing agents. They offer practical learning experiences over theoretical roleplays, showcasing best practices and common errors.
- Resolve disputes: Recordings are crucial for settling disputes about agent commitments in situations such as returns or service upgrades. They provide clear evidence of what parties actually discussed on a call, which helps protect the business from false claims while enhancing customer trust.
How internal teams collaborate better with call recording
Call recording systems help improve alignment for internal meetings while driving smoother cooperation between departments that rely on shared situational awareness. There are several key benefits here:
- Facilitate collaboration: Recordings ensure that teams (sales, marketing, and operations) all share a consistent understanding of decisions and discussions, which reduces misunderstandings and aids cooperation.
- Reinforce commitments: Recordings quickly clarify why decisions were made, promoting transparency and accountability and settling any concerns effectively.
3 Most Common Types of Call Recording
But what are the main methods for capturing these recordings? There are a few ways to record calls, and each has its advantages and disadvantages depending on your unique needs.
1. Automatic call recording
Automatic call recording integrates seamlessly with your existing telephony infrastructure, such as VoIP, business phone systems, and contact center platforms that route calls. You can configure it to record all or specific calls based on criteria such as phone numbers or user groups.
Advanced tools organize and index these recordings, making it easy to search by date, representative, or product.
Additionally, analytics features offer managers vital insights into call trends, handling times, and other performance metrics, helping them make informed decisions about staffing, training, and operational strategies.
Related: What Is a Contact Center? Definition, Features, and Uses
2. On-demand call recording
An on-demand call recording feature contrasts with automatic, always-on recording, enabling team members to have more precise control during customer interactions. Users can manually start and stop recording as required.
For instance, recordings are often halted if confidential information, such as credit card numbers, is being discussed. Similarly, law firms can use on-demand recording to take recorded statements from clients or witnesses when necessary.
3. Video meeting recording
Finally, video recording entails capturing audio, on-screen activity, and video feeds from virtual meetings, training, and events via platforms such as Nextiva or Zoom Meetings.
Key use cases for video meeting recording include documenting critical meetings to share with personnel who couldn’t join live and structuring asynchronous training sessions for onboarding materials.
As remote distributed work continues to be the norm, video recording ensures transparency and alignment with all teams.
How To Set Up a Call Recording
Businesses that use Nextiva’s industry-leading call recording software can easily set up call recording by following these three steps:
- From the NextOS admin home page, select Users > Actions > Voice Settings > Monitoring > Call Recording.
- Choose when the user’s call should be recorded (“Never,” “Always,” “Always with pause/resume,” “On-demand,” or “On-demand with user-initiated start”) and set up call recording announcements to inform the caller they’re being recorded by clicking the “Play recording start/stop announcement checkbox.”
- Click the “Record voice messaging” checkbox to record users’ voicemails. Click “Save.”
| NOTE: If “Always with pause/resume,” “On demand with user-initiated start,” or “On demand” is enabled, you can also set up alerts and notifications to alert the caller when recording is enabled/paused. After enabling call recording for a user, additional steps will need to be taken by Nextiva Support to make sure that an administrator, supervisor, or the agent themselves can access recorded calls. To contact our amazing service team, click here. |
Legal Aspects To Consider When Recording Calls
While call recording delivers immense value, it also introduces important legal considerations surrounding participant rights and preferences and tight data privacy protocols.
👍 Consent
Businesses must inform participants and secure consent before recording interactions to align with local laws.
In two-party consent states like California or all-party consent localities like Canada, businesses must gain approval from every party on a call before recording can legally commence.
Companies typically notify callers when recording starts through audio queues or on-screen prompts. Representatives then log all verbal or electronic consent received to shield against future disputes.
In many one-party consent states, businesses must obtain permission from at least one party before recording calls. Still, upfront notification is considered a best practice to uphold transparency, even in these regions.
Nextiva cannot provide legal advice here. Check with a licensed attorney in your state to understand your call recording obligations and restrictions.
🤝 Transparency
Further, companies implementing call recording must manage access to accumulated interaction data in compliance with regulations. Leaders must limit internal access to sensitive customer recordings only to roles requiring playback for call center quality assurance, dispute investigation, etc.
🔐 Privacy protection
IT and security teams must also adhere to far-reaching regional privacy rules, such as GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California while storing, accessing, and processing call recordings. Legal departments commonly establish retention rules to age out old recordings balanced against continued business value.
Another federal law businesses must be aware of is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which “defines national standards for security and privacy to safeguard protected health information.” Nextiva provides full HIPAA-compliant voice, fax, and video services to its healthcare communications clients.
📋 Employee training
Lastly, businesses seeking to implement call recording must thoroughly train team members on the laws pertaining to securing consent locally. They must coach personnel on company guidelines regarding how to disclose recording procedures, respect caller preferences to stop recording, and protect private data.
With the proper precautions around obtaining permission and dialing-in privacy safeguards, companies can confidently unlock the performance benefits of call recording while avoiding unnecessary legal and reputational risks.
Start Recording Your Calls With Nextiva
Implement call recording processes across sales, service, and other teams to unlock data-driven performance gains — legally and securely.
Using Nextiva’s call recording features can bring several practical benefits to your business, focusing on enhancing communication and operational efficiency:
- Seamlessly record various media such as voice calls, video calls, and chats.
- Analyze trends across large volumes of interactions.
- Quickly search and retrieve specific recordings.
- Provide ongoing consent management as preferences evolve.
- Shield sensitive interaction with metadata.
Related: How to Record Customer Service Calls & Why You Should
