“Your call may be recorded for training or monitoring purposes” is a message we are all used to hearing.
Businesses record their calls for many reasons, including ensuring staff operate as they have been trained and to protect the business and its customers if a “he said, she said, they said” situation arises. By recording calls, if a disagreement or complaint occurs, investigating is easy and the situation can be quickly resolved. Recordings are also used to help train staff on how things should and shouldn’t be done and allow procedures and scripts to be adjusted and improved. It is an unobtrusive process with numerous benefits for both the businesses and its customers and it is very much here to stay.
At Crystal Collections, treating customers fairly is central to how we operate and has helped us become one of the UK’s leading asset recovery and collections companies. We also pride ourselves on having a highly trained and professional workforce and we are always striving to improve the way in which we work.
When we began developing our new vehicle inspection and collection system for our field staff earlier this year, a great deal of thought went in to how it can be used to improve the way we operate. As well as enabling our staff to log photographs and reports on the condition of a vehicle, and allowing customers to remotely approve or decline a vehicle appraisal, all in ‘real time’ and in a Covid-19 secure way, the system requires our staff to follow specific processes when interacting with customers. This means that every customer, no matter where they are in the UK, and regardless of which of our staff members they are dealing with, are treated in the same professional, fair and respectful way.
However, because Crystal Collections is always striving to be the best in the industry, we saw the opportunity to record our field staff interactions with customers via our tablet computer-based system. Our rationale for doing this is simple; we want our customers to have peace of mind by knowing that we care about how they are treated and, in the rare event they feel they have a reason to complain, we can review a recording and address the complaint in an accurate, fair and timely manner. It also allows us to continually improve our processes and procedures and develop the best staff training in the industry.
We are currently rolling out the audio recording function to our field staff and expect them all to have it by the end of the year. Naturally, they will always advise customers that their interaction is being recorded and, if a customer is not comfortable with this, the recording will be stopped. However, we hope that customers will see that having their interaction with our field staff recorded provides the same level of comfort and reassurance they would experience if they were dealing with a professional financial services business on the phone rather than face-to-face.
