Maximize Call Recording with VoIP, Especially in a Tough Economy
1 Mar, 2009
By: Kris HopkinsCase study findings have not been verified by Contact Professional and are solely the findings of the contributor.
Call recording carries many obvious benefits in a tough economic climate. Some analysts find it to be one of the brightest growth spots in telecom as businesses look to optimize operations to cut costs, improve customer relationships to maintain clients, and mitigate risk for reduced liability. To maximize the effectiveness of call recording toward these ends, businesses need to evaluate deployment options, feature sets and the expected use of call recording.
VoIP Improves Deployment Options: With the prevalence of Voice over IP (VoIP) growing in contact centers domestic and abroad, call recording can be deployed more affordably and reach more broadly across any business. The latest call recording products work easily with VoIP interfaces on legacy switches, ACDs and SIP trunking to monitor home agents, remote contact centers and primary contact centers alike. VoIP-based recording offers high availability across sites while consolidating storage via affordable iSCSI storage with a single point of access to recordings and reports. VoIP also simplifies management of call recording in a telecom environment by deploying on standardized enterprise architectures and standard protocols. In some cases, VoIP lifts restriction on per seat-based licensing for recording, allowing recording to be deployed more broadly.
Choosing VoIP-based call recording future-proofs the call telecom environment, allowing those businesses that have not yet completed the migration to VoIP to get started with recording and follow on with larger switch upgrades as business allows.
New Feature: With the introduction of VoIP-based call recording, these features are becoming more robust. While every vendor loves to beat the drum of expanded features sets, the most pertinent are those specific features that represent an improved understanding of and better context for each call.
• Cradle to Grave: Recording no longer needs to reside in black box solutions, isolated for IVR or the agent portions of calls. By ensuring a seamless integration between IVR and the ACD, recordings will capture the full call experience providing insight into the customer from start to finish.
• Decision-based recording / ad-hoc recording: Recorders with open programming interfaces allow IVR & CTI systems to control when recording is started, paused, resumed and stopped within the same call. In turn, an IVR or VoiceXML application can push a recorder beyond simply evaluating DNIS or Caller ID for recording, IVR applications control recording based on critical accounts, failures in an IVR, speech recognition inputs or to which agent the call is transferred.
• Files & file segmentation: Similar to ad-hoc recording, the same decision can be applied to how recording files are segmented and stored. CTI & IVR applications can choose the file name, the directory for each call recording and how many recording files are created from a single call.
• Bookmarking, tagging and recording metadata: Using decision criteria to glean information from the call, VoIP recorders can append data to individual recordings. Account numbers, agent IDs, transfer times or attempts, and tasks names can all be tagged to recordings for search and analysis. Going one step further, bookmarks or cue points also assign the exact time within the recording for which metadata is attributed. For example, in a recording, cue point could be placed at the end of the IVR portion of the call, at the end of hold music while in queue and at the completion of a task.
Use of Recording: With improved decision making and more detailed context to every call, analysis of recordings becomes more granular and revealing. In turn, recording can be better coupled with call analytics software. For those solutions that offer it, Web access allows secure and easy, single point of access to centralized data for individuals, teams, departments and even customers as permitted. Web access should be combined with multi-tenancy which delivers access to specific recordings only for those that need specific privileges.
New call recording solutions are more affordable, broad reaching and feature rich than ever before. One such company in the mix is Massachusetts-based Newfound Communications which offers the technology, tools and expertise to fuel the speech recognition revolution. By working with Newfound, companies and developers bypass the largest impediments to creating reliable and successful IVR applications.
