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As anyone who has called a customer service number well knows, calls “may be recorded for quality and training purposes.” Call recording serves many additional benefits for call centers, but it is especially important for outsourced call center operations.

A wave of sub-par outsourced call center experiences has left the customers in the U.S. weary of foreign voices on the other end of the telephone, reducing the margin of error for outsourced operations.

“Consumers are no longer willing to tolerate sub-standard customer care,” noted Susan Campbell in a recent blog post on the inContact TMCnet Online Community. The negative response has been enough to generate U.S. legislation forcing companies to reconsider call center outsourcing, she said, although the legislation appears to be dead in the water.

The most obvious use for call center recording is operations monitoring. Recording employees’ inbound and outbound calls gives firms an opportunity to peek into their outsourced call center operations and see how the operations are performing. This is the single best way to show that an outsourced call center is doing its job.

Call recording also shows exactly what calls are taking place, important for statistical purposes but crucial for outsourced call center operations that may be more suspect than their in-house counterparts.

Even if the call center is doing its job, however, customer satisfaction is the real test.

“The challenge with contact center outsourcing – whether onshore or off – is the proper measurement of a happy customer,” Campbell pointed out.

This is another area where call recording is important; not just can employee performance be measures with a recording, but so can the emotional response of customers to the call center. From call recordings, a company can monitor how customers react to call center reps, how well they were served according to their needs, and how they respond to the products and services offered or supported by the call center.

Training is an area where call recording is particularly helpful, especially for the outsourced call center; with call recording, new reps can learn from their peers and get a baseline for company expectations and norms of conduct. Employees also can more easily learn from their mistakes by listening to past customer interactions that may not have gone as well as planned. The training benefits are especially high for outsourced firms that may suffer from high staff turnover and therefore need a cost-effective way to bring on new employees.

Recording calls as a way to improve scripts used by customer service reps also should not be overlooked. Errors in scripts can easily be identified and corrected with call recording, and scripts can be better revised when heard in the context of actual customer/rep interactions.

With so many benefits to call centers, using a quality call recording solution is vital for both outsourced call centers and those done in-house.

One solution companies might want to consider—tailored to BPO and outsourcing operations—is the call recording solution offered by CallCopy (News - Alert). It provides flexibility and scalability by blending VoIP and TDM recording from multiple phone systems into a single solution, cuts down on overhead and maintenance costs through higher hardware density, and offers rules-based recording and archiving that can be stored across locations. It works both in single and multi-tenant situations, too, allowing for allocating disk storage to separate devices, providing remote access to customers and integrating directly with off-the-shelf and homegrown applications such as IVR and CRM.

Whatever solution is chosen, however, the case for call recording in call centers is clear. Especially for those that are outsourced.