BUSINESSTECHNOLOGY

Agent Screen Recording: Your Ultimate Guide

Call center problems are proven to be hard to discover, even for managers. Without benchmarks and metrics, managers fail to optimize their departments. 

Customer service managers seeking to increase their workforce efficiency should utilize an approach that draws from multiple data sources. One source of rich data that often goes overlooked is agent screen recording. 

Some organizations will try to design a solution in-house using various add-on software and hardware for their call centers. Many seemed to prefer the single platform approach that pairs screen capture as a feature inside a total compliance platform. 

Call Center Performance Management 

As a manager, justifying the costs of deploying a new system into your existing call recording network can be tricky, and that’s fair. But to hit those benchmarks you established for your workforce requires that you make a detailed analysis of what your employees are doing when your customers talk to them, and call audio only brings you part of that picture. 

Agent screen recording not only gives you deep insight into each customer call but also into a host of larger operational topics including: 

  • Workflow evaluation 
  • Procedural bottlenecks
  • Agent software use
  • Employee efficiency 
  • Compliance and policy adherence

Agent screen recording shows you the complete customer interaction by synchronizing the call audio with the agent’s desktop recording. It will clarify when a process needs to be improved or an agent needs more training. Sometimes the customer service software your agents use needs improvement. Agent screen recording can show you where your employees get repeatedly bogged down, allowing you to make process adjustments or request a software update. 

Metrics

Metrics are measurements that define the key performance indicators (KPI) inside your operation. They help you take a snapshot of a department’s performance and efficiency. 

You can also use metrics to help define new goals for your business. Setting a standard that your metrics can measure allows you to focus on optimizing the processes and policies running your call center. 

Compliance 

Compliance is the primary reason to use call recording software in the first place. Without legal compliance, your business may face fines, lawsuits, and a severe loss of reputation.

Your call recording platform offers you the tools to achieve compliance, but it doesn’t ensure that your employees follow the policies needed to meet your industry regulations. Data breaches are among the most damaging examples of compliance failure, costing companies millions. Are your employees following the customer data-handling policies prescribed in your company security manual?

Having a recording of an agent’s screen during each phone call can quickly answer that question. It will show you if the agent is redacting sensitive customer data (a major requirement of financial institutions). It will also show you what other windows an agent has open during a call. An out-of-date browser or malicious website can compromise your agent’s computer and expose your customer’s data. 

Reviewing your agent desktop recordings can help you secure potential security gaps and train your agents to observe best practices when handling customer data. Agent screen recording protects the customer and the company.

Dispute Resolution

Your customer service agents have compliance responsibilities with every call they take. When a dispute arises, you’ll want as much information regarding a customer complaint as possible. Knowing what happened on an agent’s screen can either show you where an agent went wrong and allow you to get ahead of the dispute, or it can vindicate your company outright. 

The key to surviving any dispute, even one where your company is at fault, is to shorten the time to resolution. Having as much data as possible from the outset reliably closes issues sooner than later because it eliminates the need for discovery.

Combining call audio, time-stamps, call metadata, and screen recording provides clarity regarding your agent’s handling of a call. Again, even if your company is at fault, the sooner you can resolve the issue, the more likely you’ve saved money, reputation, and in many instances, the particular customer involved. 

What Agents See During Work

Every company wants to know its workforce is performing optimally. Managers previously had an easier time surveying agent practices when a walk around the call center gave them the bird’s eye view they needed. With the rise of remote work, that bird’s eye view is no longer as reliable as it once was. 

The likelihood of a security failure with a dispersed workforce taking customer calls from home-based networks is significantly higher than that of an on-premise security lapse.

One method to close security gaps with remote agents is to enforce the use of company-issued devices for company business. This allows your company to set and keep a security standard and also enables you to deploy a screen recorder into the remote environment. Agent screen recordings present managers with data that can improve the customer experience, like:

  • Recurring support issues
  • Agent distractions (open browsers, cluttered screens)
  • Software and network bottlenecks that lead to longer calls
  • Agent adherence to call scripts and policies
  • Agent software training needs that affect call length and resolution

Will you find the occasional employee playing a game or watching a show on your screen recordings? Yes, but the primary purpose of that recording is to ensure compliance practices are followed and to identify optimizations that need to be made in the company workflow. This holds true for remote and on-site agents alike.

See What Agents See, Then Put It To Use

Establishing a training curriculum and security manual is not enough. Practices must be constantly updated to evolve with your company. Call centers typically have a steady employee turnover rate, and the metrics you’ve established tell you when an optimization need arises. But employee training is the conversation between manager and agent that implements that optimization. 

Seeing each call as a whole lets you separate employee needs from policy needs. The saying goes that knowing is half that battle, and it holds true in customer service for sure. Hearing a call while viewing your agent’s screen will quickly connect you to issues and their solutions. For example:

Do your agents all struggle with a section of your product manual? Update your documentation.

Do your calls slow down when the customer account is being called up on the agent computer? Maybe your network infrastructure needs some updates.

Do your employees have a wide array of responses, some of which waste time, others of which aren’t entirely business-appropriate? Time to employ a call script to guide them. 

More Data 

More data is better than less, but only when that data is relevant and organized. As mentioned previously, your call recording platform should offer agent screen recording and not saddle your IT team with duplicative tasks. 

To truly get a fully formed picture of your customer experience, combine your call recordings, and captured agent screens with robust analytics that can hunt for keywords and track the emotional progress of each customer interaction. 

Use your fully dimensional playback of the call to observe the agent and customer behavior as the conversation progresses. With analytics, you can search for keywords like competitor mentions or common phrases like ‘cancel account’. Having conversations with those terms assembled by your call recording platform, you can study how successful and unsuccessful agents behave when these areas of interest arise. This detailed review can reveal:

  • Agents that are too aggressive
  • Agents that are screen-distracted, failing to attend to the customer
  • Agents that capably reverse negative trending calls (good for training other agents)
  • Agents that collect customer data compliantly

Workforce Optimization

Agent screen recordings aren’t just for managers. Using real-world examples of successful and unsuccessful customer interactions is a proven method for training your staff. Whether you’re teaching a new agent, updating your team with improved practices, or giving your call scorer a metric to gauge calls by, showing is consistently better than merely telling when it comes to workforce optimization. 

Try Agent Screen Recording 

Your customers may never know that your agents have their screens recorded, but what they do come to understand is that they’re safe in your care. Let’s sum up some key benefits.

Agent Screen Recording:

  • Can be used to optimize your workforce
  • Identifies compliance failures
  • Spots bottlenecks in company practices
  • Greatly helps in training your workforce
  • Helps quickly resolve disputes

When researching this article, multiple technology vendors were investigated to gather current market information.  Many factors were explored to determine at what point an organization found it affordable to invest in a screen capture platform. 

Ease of deployment and ongoing maintenance costs proved to be the driving factors dictating whether a company would invest in an agent screen recording platform. Piece-by-piece solutions tended to price themselves out of range, even for enterprises, especially on deployment costs. 

It was determined that unified cloud platforms, like Atmos by CallCabinet, for example, brought the price down significantly because of their subscription model and non-dependence on new hardware purchases. 



TBN Editor

Time Business News Editor Team