Call recording has become a critical add-on for organisations of all shapes and sizes operating customer-facing contact centres. For monitoring service levels, training staff, resolving disputes and ensuring regulatory compliance, recorded calls provide concrete, reliable information resources which can be returned to as and when required.
All the indications suggest the importance and utility of call recording is only likely to increase in the future. As the technology becomes more sophisticated, particularly with the integration of analytics tools, recording has the potential to provide ever more powerful insights into customer relations, service and sales.
But there are challenges ahead, too. The regulatory landscape has always been critical to call recording, with data protection and privacy laws weighing heavily on how companies use and handle recorded materials. With major changes to data legislation set to come into force in 2018, regulation will continue to play a key role in shaping the market.
As part of our Technology Track series on call recording, we decided to get the inside view on these issues and more from a panel of leading industry experts. Our thanks to Chris Harris, Managing Director of Xarios Technologies, Phillip Reynolds, CEO of Oak Innovation, Simon Whatley, Sales Director at Tollring, Paul Wakefield, SIP Trunking Product Manager at Gamma, and Paul Taylor, Sales Director at Voiceflex.
Cloud Calling
Discussing how the call recording market had developed in the past few years, Xarios’ Chris Harris described it as “maturing”, referencing in particular an increased willingness in the SMB market to buy into call recording for reasons other than compliance. “There is much greater grasp of the benefits of call recording for both transactional verification and also for training, mentoring and adherence to best practice,” Chris said.
Oak’s Phillip Reynolds agreed that more businesses than ever before now appreciated the link between call recording and improving customer service. “Demand for call recording is mostly driven by the need to have every customer interaction recorded so it can be measured and improved upon,” he said. Paul Wakefield said wider recognition of tangible business benefits had made call recording less of a “niche technology”.
Everyone agreed increased appreciation of the wider benefits of call recording had gone hand in hand with improvements in the technology. Tollring’s Simon Whatley suggested cloud technology had been instrumental in this, offering benefits such as managed and scalable storage, easy access to recordings on any device via a web browser, and little or no up-front investment. As Paul Wakefield pointed out, if the price was right and someone was managing the system for you,
“Why wouldn’t you ask your Telco to record your calls?”
For Voiceflex’s Paul Taylor, this trend for flexible, scalable, managed recording will remain the key driver in the market going forward. “It’s a forgone conclusion everything in time will move to the cloud - by the nature of the application, it’s quicker to deploy and easier to manage,” he said.
Building the Platform
The panel were also in agreement that the emergence of cloud-based recording would open the door to further innovations in the technology. Phillip Reynolds argued that scalability will be key. “We’ll see a move away from simply recording calls to recording all forms of customer interaction. Call recording vendors will become communications recording vendors. It’s a very exciting time for the channel and it offers the opportunity to grow sales dramatically.”
Paul Taylor agreed that it will be crucial for vendors to broaden the focus of recording beyond voice to embrace all web-based forms of communication. “Contact centres will move quickly and leverage WebRTC technology across all their applications. Call recording will be a small part of the application given the move for more and more online interaction.”
Paul Wakefield, however, argued that voice will always play a key role in business communications, and that the most successful recording platforms of the future will be those which best master the difficult task of voice analytics. “There will always be a role to play with voice, and it’s in the mining of this data – a field which has long promised results - where AI and other exciting technologies show true promise,” he said. “My view is that the winners will be those who do that job well and make it easy to interoperate with other best-of-breed technologies.”
