Using Live or Recorded Calls and How To Run a Calibration Session

00:00My aight, Tom Lair, you've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast a lot time and time again. Now it's time. just, Thanks for watching. advice from a call center geek a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call, What's up Thursday as I record this, it is two days before before we're deep into plans of figuring out how we're still to do our Halloween festivities here at the office with everybody, all our call center agents at home. But I today, they're really important in my line of business being an out to agents but I think it's really important to once a week or once every So that's kind of what I what I wanted to get into today. So, a question that I do get all the time is, hey, should we be using live calls or recorded calls? And again, my answer is both.

03:45that you're listening

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04:15know that we're going to create, you know, we're going to fix, you know, recorded calls are basically like, you know, you're, you're after game evaluation of what happened, right? So you can kind of take a breath, you can dig a little bit deeper into the types of calls that are coming in, right? You can, you can get a feel for what they're doing and I think you know it's really important to see a trend that's happening, right? If you notice that the opening isn't a verbiage that they're using. You know that you have an overall You're looking for more big ticket, big issue things when I think again and what your MO and what you're trying to do. So if you're just listening to the recorded stuff, it doesn't really put them on point B-roll can always kind of be like, oh, I had a bad day or I'll do better next time kind of thing where if you're getting them right in the moment, it's much easier to kind of correct and fix that problem with less excuses.

06:18and again, if they know you're listening, it does make, make a difference. No matter, it's kind of just a human nature thing. So I think that's pretty important. I want to say this to you know the person or the group of individuals or the staff that you have monitoring make sure they have the right personality for it their job is not to find problems you have to

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07:19I think it's really important that there's some engagement between the reps and in their QA staff. I'm not I'm really not not a firm believer in having the QA people also also be the trainers, right, right so like, if they listen to a call, there's a problem that they go on to the floor. I still think that should be a supervisor that should be b doing that. But I think I think you need to include in everything that you do, maybe outside of the call center stuff or even during the day, include some of these guys out on the floor, so that the reps kind of get to know them, right. And second of all, make sure that the understanding of your QA staff is that basically they're there to be the listening, not to catch them to do something wrong post, if that, if that makes sense, right?

08:03Hm. Hm. into when somebody does. the right mindset And calibration sessions for us is a little bit different, right? So we have multiple clients that we're dealing with every. And on the inbound customer-service side, we have clients and then we have inbound sales, and then we have cross-, sell, upsell, upsell. So we have everything. You know, even getting into the digital stuff, right? chat and email and how we're calibrating all that stuff and all of these different channels. Most of our clients are weekly and then I shouldn't say week but half of them are weekly and another half are about by weekly or bi-monthly right every two weeks. I get those confused by weekly bi-monthly shouldn't bi-weeklyly a week, right I don't know. Anyway I digress. So clients to listen to your calls. If you and trust the numbers that we giving and we can trust the numbers when they blind monitor in the It can be difficult sometimes on live calls to get quote unquote I guess for us for or for you, maybe your executive or your boss, can hear the work you've done, can hear the agent's tone, can understand the You're kind of dating all that so it's not just you know listening to the agent making sure that they're You're doing their job, but it's most of our clients don't do that, right? And if they get the recordings, they want to make a point on something, which is fine, right? They're footing a bill. So it's, it's kind of a give and take-take understanding that we say random, but a lot of times it's probably not. and we want to basically, in this half hour session of live calls, in this half hour session of recorded calls, we want to be scoring calls together, so normally for the recorded calls, they get sent earlier so that, that everybody has a chance to come.

12:41to, listen to them, score them, so we kind of bring our scores together. When we're doing our real time, we're all scoring real time together to make sure that we're kind of on the same page there too. I think that that's important. That again, that you're scoring together and that on the recorded calls that you have some time to really think it through and you can sometimes see the difference between when you think things through and when you're doing it really quick on the fly. And that's another reason that you need to have a mixture of live and recorded calls when you're kind of doing this and when you're being fair to a rep, a rep scoring their calls. So again, you don't want to go into these things and we have a lot of clients who are awesome with us with this, but we have a lot of newer clients or clients that that maybe there's a program manager that's, I don't know, trying to, I don't wanna say prove her worth, right?

13:32But prove, you know, her job, that go into these things, Try to find something wrong and just looking at mistakes that the reps. If you want, it's like football,. If you want to throw a penalty on every single play, you could probably find something. And I think you can do that. If you wanted to pinpoint any little thing on a. you could know how healthy or how good that is and what benefits that really.I. rep is doing everything they can to keep it together, but they just snap at the end, right? You know, some clients will lose their mind over that. Granted, they shouldn't do that. H. Our rep should not do that, but we'll have other clients that to be like, hey, I get where they but they need rst. And if they didn't do a great job, they're kind of mort mortified and you know, we're again, we're not embarrassing them, but then we're going to the points. And they're going to to really get that message. So I think that's a really cool way to kind kind of do things as long as you're you're doing it the right way. Picking on people that you know, they, they had a bad call to bring the man, but there's good calls. There's calls in in the middle and that can be a really great learning tool that you have.

16:04So things to kind of wrap this up is obviously it's dealing with the rep issues but then You training trends and things that you as a team can work and get better. I like to feel the energy on the calls, the

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16:58analysis for the, for the supervisor needs to be talked to, we're gonna work that through. So really important tool, I mean obviously monitoring is important, but outside of the monitoring everyday to really sit down and take an hour, focus on a specific program or specific client, or specific call type, and then make sure that you're doing everything you can to be I think fair your executives with yourself, if you're a call a big test and it's your calibration and you want to make sure that that everything kind of hitting on all cylinders and that we understand what what are some of the things we need to fix. All, right guys, that's what I for you for you today, please, as I always kind of talk about, you know one of the things I haven't really actually brought up is, I do have a book, I actually have two. [pricing remark omitted] Advice from a McCall Center Geek and more advice from a call center geek.

18:48Forget about advice from a call center geek, because because more advice from a- a call center geek is the first book added onto, right? So it's on Amazon. [pricing remark omitted] More advice from- from a call center geek. because a lot of theo things I talk about here, but it gets into more depth into some of them. So that's a tool for you guys to utilize as well. Please join the SMS texting community just text call center I'm going to have the members of the community ask questions. I think that I have an added bonus feature for joining