ORECX CALL RECORDING BLOG

Call recording software has become a business imperative today for a variety of reasons, including dispute resolution, customer service excellence, compliance, order verification and so on.

At OrecX, a call recording solution provider in 195 countries, we regularly develop content and materials to help our customers and prospects understand the value of call recording. 

Below are a variety of those resources which you may find useful.

Blog Posts:

• Do's and Don'ts of Selecting a Call Recorder
• How GDPR Impacts American Contact Centers
• What to Expect from a Call Recording Solution

Podcasts:

• Who Benefits from Call Recording?
• This Call May be Recorded

Other:

• Call Recording Laws Around the Globe
• Call Center Terminology (over 300 terms and definitions)
• Free 30-Day Trial of Any OrecX Software

Listen to this informational podcast to learn which individuals/positions within an organization benefit from recording customer calls and specifically what value they derive.

Listen to "Who Benefits from Call Recording Internally? podcast on Spreaker.

Listen to this informational podcast to learn the types of call recording, why companies record calls, how call recording is used, and by whom within an organization...

 "This Call May Be Recorded" podcast on Spreaker.

According to leading independent research organizations, AI-fueled speech analytics has become a mission-critical application for contact centers intent on improving the customer experience and unlocking a treasure trove of hidden value . Speech Analytics can help identify at-risk customers, provide sales and marketing teams with campaign/promotion feedback, and arm the legal department with a tool to help enforce regulatory and internal compliance.

The foundation for speech analytics starts with the audio recording of the interaction, which is passed to a transcription engine and converted to a usable format (text) which can the be searched and analyzed with algorithms to identify patterns and characteristics which lead to actionable intelligence. Leading speech analytic vendors support both post-call and real-time to maximize the efficiency and value derived from their solutions.

Common obstacles experienced that diminish the overall value of speech analytics occur when recording vendors lack open APIs to access customer data, lack the capability to support real-time at scale, and cannot support stereo recording. Additionally, many vendors who offer competing solutions block customer access to their own recordings and associated meta data or charge costly 'extraction' fees for those customers that wish to use a 3rd party solution. With these approach restrictions, analytics accuracy hovers around just 70%.

To maximize Speech Analytics value, a recording vendor must support free and unrestricted access to recordings, produce high quality (stereo) output, and provide an open API to pass the recordings and the associated meta data to the analytics solution. When there is alignment with the recording and SA solution, companies see a significant rise in accuracy, up to 95%.

This type of recording solution could run in parallel to a company’s existing recording solution and simply be used as the engine to feed the analytics system. What’s more, with SIPREC recording, the company would have the flexibility to only capture and analyze the calls it wants to, rather than storing and processing all calls. This saves bandwidth, time and resources.

With the full capabilities of the organization’s existing recording system, this recorder could ultimately serve as the business’s sole recorder for speech analytics as well as for agent performance evaluations, customer service, dispute resolution, order verification and more.

This valuable data is used by customer service departments, contact centers as well as sales, marketing and R&D teams.

Contact Center Value

• Managing regulatory risk
• Reducing agent turn
• Security
• Order verification
• Dispute resolution

Business User Value

• Sales intelligence
• Marketing intelligence
• New product/feature ideas
• Competitive insight
• Campaign feedback
• Buying behavior

In the digital economy, there is perhaps no commodity as valuable as data, so robust safeguards must be implemented to ensure this information is protected. Two years ago, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union approved the most sweeping changes to EU and UK data protection laws in over two decades—the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The regulation is designed to protect the data of individuals within the European Union and the European Economic Area and will impact any organization conducting business with much of Europe. Even multinational companies based in the United States with contact centers that handle calls from the EU and UK must comply with the GDPR or face significant fines.

What is the GDPR?

Social media companies, financial firms, retail giants, government agencies, healthcare organizations, and numerous other services rely on collecting, analyzing, and storing personal data. This data includes names, mailing addresses, contact info, IP addresses, credit card information, bank account numbers, HIPAA records, and information regarding the things we buy and even the websites we visit. And a lot of this information is contained within call recording systems.

Prior to passage of the GDPR, the 1998 Data Protection Directive guided each of the 28-EU member states in enacting their own disparate data protection laws. The GDPR standardizes these data protection laws while imposing stringent regulations on how personally identifiable information is controlled and processed. It declares that organizations engaged in data collection must gather it under strictly defined conditions, safeguarding it from misuse and exploitation while respecting the rights of data owners. The reforms also cover breach notifications, opt-in consent, and transferring data outside the EU.^[1]

Penalties for Non-Compliance.

Under the terms of the GDPR, organizations that fail to comply with the laws face maximum fines as high as €20 million or 4% of total global revenue, whichever is larger. While this stiff penalty is reserved for egregious violations such as insufficient customer consent, companies can still be hit with large penalties for failing to keep updated records, failing to inform proper parties of data breaches, and failure to conduct impact assessments. Both data controllers and processors must ensure they are in compliance to avoid penalties.^[2]

Call Recording

Companies in the U.S. and all around the world rely on the call recording industry for quality assurance, training, security, and compliance. When these calls occur with an individual based in the EU or UK, recorded voice data must be gathered and stored in accordance with the GDPR. Failure to do so could open the offending party to heavy fines.

Choosing Proper Call Recording Software

OrecX designs the world’s most open and affordable call recording solution. We’ve developed our voice recording software to promote adherence to the GDPR. The software is offered in both open-source and commercial applications, which can be easily downloaded and installed in just 30 minutes. It’s fast, simple, and free of implementation costs. Visit our webpage to learn more about our innovative solutions for contact centers.

^[1] https://www.gdpreu.org/

^[2] https://www.gdpreu.org/compliance/fines-and-penalties/

Organizations of all sizes today employ call recording software to help optimize sales, service and compliance; and when chosen and managed correctly, these solutions can be invaluable in this regard. However, call recording software is not always selected or utilized properly, and when this happens, its effectiveness can be significantly stifled.

• Uncover what business challenges you are trying to solve…
  • Customer experience
  • PCI/HIPAA compliance
  • Dispute resolution
  • Order verification
  • Agent performance
• Consider everyone in the organization who can benefit from call recording…
  • CEO/business owner
  • VP customer service/care
  • Call center manager
  • Compliance manager
  • Sales manager
  • Marketing manager
• Decide how many of your physical locations you want to record. Some recording solutions don’t support multi-site.

• Consider the vendor’s expertise with companies your size and with businesses in your industry.  The more they know about your specific business issues, the more they can help customize a solution to your specific needs. If you’re a small business, e.g., you ought to look for a vendor that specializes in SMBs. Same goes for larger companies.

•  Uncover any hidden costs – Some vendors charge per seat or per user costs.  However, these do not include the costly implementation support you’ll need for the install, and ongoing professional services support you will require for customization, etc.

• Ask about pricing flexibility – Does the vendor offer monthly subscriptions, e.g.? This way you can avoid a large upfront capital expense.

Don't Do this

• Don't decide to purchase call recording without carefully considering all the ways in which it can be used and for whom.

• Don’t just consider how call recording can be used by your organization today.  Consider your anticipated growth and how you might need it down the road. Will you need multi-site capabilities, will it scale to more users, does it support mobile call recording?

• Don’t forget to free up select staff’s workload to manage the system – if necessary.  Some solutions require no maintenance.

• Don’t choose your vendor/solution without first trying it out.  Ask for a short trial period so you can see how the software works in your own environment. If they refuse, find a different vendor.

• Do not assume the software will automatically support your compliance needs.  For example, to help with PCI Compliance, some recording systems will pause the recording while sensitive personal information/data is being discussed.  Not all solutions do this, however.  You need to be sure the one you choose supports all of your regulatory needs – e.g. PCI, HIPAA, Telemarketing Sales Rule, GDPR, MiFID II…
• Do not simply expect the software to easily mesh with your existing environment/systems.  Check to see if the vendor has verified integrations with your PBX vendor or your CRM system, for example.  An open API will ensure interoperability with any application.

As a BPO or call center outsourcer, you are potentially taking over a role your clients cannot manage on their own or don’t want to handle any longer.  Therefore, you are under enormous pressure to over-perform each and every day or you risk losing business.

With the help of the right call recording, screen recording and quality monitoring software in your arsenal, you stand a far greater chance of satisfying (if not wowing) your clients.  But first you need to pick the right solution(s) to fit your specific business requirements, which can be dramatically different from other types of businesses.

Here are the top 18 call recording features to consider when purchasing a recording solution, if you are a BPO or call center outsourcer:

Call and Screen Recording

• Centralized management of all recording data (voice and screen)
• Multi-tenancy so you can manage multiple clients independently, yet simultaneously
• Precise search querying to find the exact call recording you need to prove compliance, share with your client, settle a dispute and so on
• Scalable to thousands of seats (whether through one logger/server or by linking multiple devices)
• Open platform (i.e. open API) so you can easily integrate the recorder with your clients’ existing applications (CRM, ERP, SFA)
• Compliance-ready – Ensure the system has masking or muting capabilities to protect personally identifiable information for PCI-DSS and HIPAA
• Subscription-based, affordable pricing so you can activate and terminate licenses when necessary to support your dynamic project workload
• Same-day installation so you can be up and running immediately in support of your new accounts; this serves as a competitive differentiator for your business

Quality Monitoring

• Customizable evaluation forms so you can tailor them to your clients’ specific and varying requirements
• Custom coaching agreements commensurate with specific agent performance goals
• Calibration tables to standardize service level expectations and measure quality across sites, teams and agents
• Ability to attach agent evaluations to voice and screen recordings so they can hear what went right and wrong
• Report filtering (e.g. by date, group, department, agent, supervisor, etc.) so you can extract meaningful intelligence to improve performance
• Detailed reporting including form-level summaries, section-level details and question-level details
• Standalone product or it includes simple and multiple integration points to the call/screen recorder
• Open API so you can pull data from your CRM system into the quality monitoring system
• Open file exporting to share reports and recordings with agents and clients
• KPI tracking to measure service level, customer satisfaction, average handle time, calls handled per hour, first call resolution, adherence to protocol and others

If you have ever called into a contact center, chances are you have heard the phrase before: “This call may be recorded for training quality assurance purposes.” We may not think much of it, and completely forget we’re being recorded once an agent answers the phone. While the customers calling in never get to hear that recording, or ever even know if the information truly does help training, the opposite is true within the Contact Center. 

Call Recording allows your business an entirely new path to improve and optimize, with entire new sets of data and information to analyze. But, we’ve always seen Call Recording as nothing particularly special, just another great feature users can gain thanks to the power of Business VoIP, and the Cloud.

However, as it turns out, there’s so much more to call recording than we ever really thought. In fact...

Read more

There are two very different types of call recording solutions available today, and when searching for the right software to record your calls, there are a few things to note about the difference between business call recording and personal call recording. 

Business call recording refers to business class call recording software which captures a business's customer calls and stores them for later reply on workstations or servers to mitigate risk, settle disputes, monitor for quality assurance, maintain PCI and HIPAA compliance, etc. These business call recording solutions include various advanced features to offer more value to businesses, such as selective or total call recording, pause and resume, speech analytics, multidimensional searching, auto tagging and more.

Personal call recording is when you want to record a personal call you have with someone while using your cell phone. There are many applications available in the Google Play Store and the iTunes App Store that can help you capture and replay such calls.