Call Recording Reviews – What to Buy for your Business in 2019

Data & Analytics

Published: January 1, 2019

Rebekah Carter

Once, when people in business spoke about Call Recording software, they were simply talking about technology they could use to record calls and store the data they gathered on an effective, and secure platform. Back then, all you needed to do was decide whether you were going to record your external trunks lines or each telephone extension.

It’s 2019 and the conversation around call recording has changed, and businesses have more concerns to think about than ever before. Not only are there issues with compliance to consider, like GDPR and PCI DSS, but we’re also beginning to look at new disruptive technologies like speech analytics, AI, and the cloud.

So, how do you choose a call recording strategy in today’s new environment?

The Changing Nature of Privacy and Call Recording

When it comes to choosing your call recorder, it’s more important than ever to plan, as well as the present. Choosing a flexible solution for call recording will help you to ensure that your business can adapt and evolve as you continue to grow and change in the age of digital transformation.

In May 2018, we saw whole new set of rules come into play as the UC world prepares itself for the onset of the General Data Protection Regulations. The GDPR will replace all the current data protection laws throughout the EU, and since the UK won’t yet have moved through Brexit by that point, UK businesses will need to be ready for the new rules to hit too.

When you’re checking out our best call recording reviews, it might be a good idea to keep your GDPR needs in mind and think about what you’ll need to do to prepare for the changing environment of call security and privacy.

Choosing Call Recording Software

Ultimately, like many other forms of UC technology, the easiest way to decide which call recording solution is right for you, is to ask yourself a few important things about what your brand and business needs for the years ahead.

For instance, any company that deals with financial information will need call recording software that allows them to stay compliant with the latest regulations, meaning that your data will need to be stored securely for a minimum of five years. Today, many brands exploring the possibilities of call recording software will also need to select a strategy that’s compatible with their UC solution.

The modern world of work spans across many new modes of communication that go beyond the standard phone call and into VoIP conversations, video conferences and more.

For a full list of call recording companies take a look here.

Our Latest Call Recording Reviews

If you’re ready to take the next step with your call recording solution, check out our call recording reviews:

Product Name	Brand
Mitel MiVoice Call Recording Review	Mitel
Mitel MiVoice Office Call Recorder 5.0 Review	Mitel
Oak Clarify Review	Oak Innovation
Oak Evolve Review	Oak Innovation
Storacall ST Professional Review	Storacall
Tollring iCS Record Review	Tollring
Voiceflex Cloud Call Recording Review	Voiceflex
Xarios Call Recorder Review	Xarios

Benefits of Call Recording

So when you are weighing up whether or not to take the plunge with call recording software, what are the key factors which tip the balance in its favour? Here are seven ways call recording can bring genuine benefits to your business and make sure you get a good return on your investment.

1. Improve Training and Performance

Whatever form it comes in, customer contact is crucial to the success of any business, and is a skill which often has to be learned. If staff deal with customers by telephone on a regular basis, there is a whole unique etiquette to understand, not to mention specific techniques for driving sales and the formalised scripts many businesses adopt. The best way to learn is by example, and call recording helps in two ways. Model calls can be captured and used as examples, but agents can also listen back to their own calls with constructive feedback and see where improvements can be made.

2. Protect Yourself from Disputes

Not every customer will be a happy customer, and not always through any fault of your staff. Especially over the telephone, misconceptions and misunderstandings can arise, which may quickly escalate into accusations of being told something that was not true, or an agreed course of action not being taken. Having secure recorded evidence of conversations can save you a lot of time, effort and, if things ever get to the level of a legal dispute, money.

3. Support Compliance

Certain industries, such as financial and some legal services, are required to record all telephone transactions with clients, so compliance is obviously the main factor in buying recording products. But plenty of businesses face their own specific regulatory requirements, whether set by government or industry, and call recording can be used as evidence in the same way. Similarly, it can be used to check compliance with service level standards within a business.

4. Evaluate Campaigns and Promotions

There are various ways to measure the success of special promotions or specific drives to improve an area of performance in quantitative terms, but getting qualitative insight to explain the figures is not so easy. By listening back to recorded calls, you can get a picture of what is or is not working about a particular sales campaign, evaluate customers’ reactions and see how well the marketing strategy is being delivered.

5. Gain Better Customer Insight

Successful marketing is always based on sound understanding of customers, and the companies which focus the most attention on this are often the most successful. Lots of profiling and modelling is done to categorise customers by type and demographic, but you really cannot beat talking to customers directly. Having conversations recorded means they can be analysed and insight gleaned from them which would not be easy to pick up in real time, plus review means trends can be spotted across calls.

6. Inform Product Development

Linked again to marketing, the best way to get feedback on what customers think about a product, and therefore where improvements could be made to increase sales, is direct from the customers themselves. As product developers often do not spend much time on the phone talking to customers directly, recorded conversations can provide an excellent resource for them to draw on.

7. Raise the Bar on Customer Service

We started out by saying that customer contact is crucial to the performance of any business, and that is where we shall end, too. Call recording not only provides a resource for improving performance at an individual level, it helps management identify where things could be done better across the company. From trends picked up from listening to lots of different conversations, teams can put specific targets in place for boosting customer service, and use recording to gain feedback on its impact.