Protect your client and record that telephone conversation!
January 30, 2010
We are now finding it necessary to record our telephone conversations with service suppliers when we call them on our clients’ behalf. In this way we can maintain proper detailed records and are able to remind suppliers exactly what it is they have agreed to should they forget, or ignore, their verbal undertakings to our clients. This is particularly important with regard to queries relating to contract or price negotiations.
It is simply unacceptable for a supplier to say one thing one day upon which our client comes to rely, only to say something completely different on a subsequent occasion – even though we confirm our understanding by email immediately after the call. When dealing with supplier call centres we often find ourselves dealing with different individuals on separate calls relating to a single matter. It is very common for a call manager to agree a course of action, only to fail to comply. Then when we call again, a second person within a supplier’s organisation can sometimes take a different position on the issue. This “change of mind” can reflect on our own service levels and impact on our clients’ business costs.
We have now introduced call recording as a standard operating practice (SOP). In the same way that suppliers often announce that their calls are being recorded for “training purposes”, we inform them that we are also making recordings of the calls for quality control purposes. The file of that call is then downloaded, indexed and and kept as securely as our email traffic. We are now just starting to find that this certainly focusses the attention of the supplier’s call handler and response levels are improving.