by Dr John Yardley, Managing Director of JPY Ltd, London, England

These days, business call recording is still seen as a grudge purchase. An insurance. Something to fall back on when things go belly-up and you need to know who actually said what. But call recording can also be used on a daily basis to greatly improve your company’s productivity. Here are our 3 tips to achieve this:

1. Make your calls easy to find

Although the process of recording calls has become mainstream, the process of finding those calls can be difficult or costly. Recording your calls is no good if it takes you an age to find the call you want or you have to involve the IT department in the process. And although simply listening again to calls can be a major benefit, being able to search them for keywords, can give you a step improvement in productivity. Just think how useful it is being able to search your emails? By transcribing your recorded calls using automatic speech recognition (ASR) you can search them just as you would your email.

2. Make you calls shareable

You may have already heard about the benefits of email transparency, well call transparency can prove just as valuable. Recording calls is not just about taking people to court, but rather to share conversations internally - and that includes sharing them with yourself - and avoid the miscommunication that often happens when you are relying on your memory or scribbled notes. Whilst many organisations invest in expensive CRM solutions, they only tell a part of the story. By intelligently sharing your call recordings and linking them to your CRM, you can foster a culture of transparency in your organisation and ensure that everyone is being kept in the loop - without sacrificing privacy.

3. Combine your phone calls AND your emails

Bringing together your phone calls and emails in one shared inbox brings even greater efficiencies. Seeing the entire thread of a conversation with a customer or supplier in one place avoids the need for countless updates from one team member to another trying to work out who was involved with or what the last communication was. New team members can instantly get up to speed with a project or help with that handover when someone is off sick or on holiday. Furthermore, the context information available from emails can massively improve the ability to find relevant phone calls.

About Threads

Threads is what we call an intelligent message hub and when used with Orecx, is the perfect way to utilise our tips. You can imagine Threads as a multi-channel collaborative inbox that enables users to share both emails and phone calls while automatically building your CRM. The difference is that the user changes nothing. No special apps, training or change of working practices. In Threads, emails and phone calls are fully searchable and are intelligently organised to index information by contact, company or project ensuring that you can find the information you need quickly and more importantly, see it in the context of your company rather than just yourself. Try Threads for free today.

About the author

John Yardley started his career at the National Physical Laboratory, England - home to Alan Turing, the Pilot Ace and arguably the world’s first packet switched network. John gained his PhD while at NPL working on automatic speech recognition. After many years away from research, Threads became the perfect vehicle to use his original work on the use of context to improve the transcription of human speech.