Financial organizations operating in the United States and/or United Kingdom have certain call recording compliance obligations to comply with, specifically with regard to the following overseeing bodies:

1. The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)

2. United States Security Exchange Commission (SEC) - Dodd-Frank Act

FCA Compliance Recording Information:

According to the FCA...

We established rules regarding the recording of telephone calls which aim to tackle market abuse by identifying and punishing those responsible.

The rules apply to firms whose products are included in the market abuse regime. These products are qualifying investments (include shares, bonds, options and futures) that are traded on a prescribed market, or other types of investments that are related to these.

The following types of firms are unaffected by the rules:

• Retail financial advisers
• Insurance brokers
• Mortgage brokers
• Solicitors (other than Authorized Professional Firms)
• Real estate agents
• Firms receiving and executing loans

Calls that need to be recorded either:

• Conclude an agreement with any client or with another regulated firm on behalf of a client.
• Are conducted with a professional client or eligible counterparty with a view to concluding an agreement.

NOTE: Internal organizational calls do not need to be recorded.

Dodd-Frank Compliance Recording Information:

The SEC defines "oral communications" in the eyes of call recording as "oral communications that lead to the execution of a transaction in a commodity interest – commodity futures contract, commodity options contract, retail foreign exchange transaction or a swap."

Under Dodd-Frank Act, the SEC requires the recording of all oral communications that lead to the execution of a transaction in a commodity interest.  More specifically, telephone, voicemail, instant messaging, chats, e-mail, mobile, etc. Records need to be uniformly time stamped. A record of the date and time, to the nearest minute, must be on every record.

According to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the following individuals are required to record their oral communications:

• Futures commission merchants
• Retail foreign exchange dealers
• Brokers that have generated over $5M in aggregate gross revenue over the preceding three years
• Designated contract market or swap execution facility members

These oral communications must be:

• Identifiable and searchable by transaction
• Stored securely and readily accessible for up to one year

Agent productivity (or the number of calls your CSRs successfully handle) can mean the difference between thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of dollars saved or spent each month in your call center, depending upon how large your center is.  Any efficiencies you can draw out of your agents will therefore yield tremendous bottom-line value. This is where call recording, and especially screen recording, comes into play.

When your agents are on the phone with your customers, they should be serving their needs quickly and effectively, by swiftly and accurately navigating the necessary screens on their desktop to access and input customer data, find product/service information, etc.  Sometimes these screens or workflows can be interrupted by navigational problems (by the agent or the system) or application glitches (not the agent's fault).  With screen recording software, you can monitor these workflows to identify any system or agent issues and remedy them at once.  As mentioned before, these fixes can translate into substantial time and cost savings for your call center.

Here are the top five reasons to record agent screen activity during customer interactions:

1. Identify application or system breakdowns that affect agent screen navigation

2. Discover areas to improve agent efficiency through additional skills training (for example, increasing proficiency with certain applications or workflows)

3. Uncover unauthorized personal activity by agents (for example, checking their own facebook or playing Solitaire during a customer interaction)

4. Identify PCI or HIPAA compliance issues upon data entry (such as the agent's screen erroneously displaying the credit card information upon entry when it's supposed to be masked).   

5. Record best-practice agent screen performance to share with underperforming agents

Agent screen recording solutions today can capture full motion video of the agent's desktop throughout the entire customer interaction.  This recording, synchronized upon playback with the corresponding agent and customer audio recording) gives supervisors and managers a clear, 360-degree view of exactly what transpired during a given customer interaction.  

For ease of retrieval, recordings (screen and audio) can be identified and accessed by date, user name, agent, phone number, and so on. These same recordings can be shared and viewed in industry-standard MPEG4 format and played or viewed on any desktop or capable mobile device.   

From TMCnet.com, July 23, 2014...

We’re all accustomed (some might say “tired”) of hearing the line that “this call may be recorded for quality monitoring purposes." The disembodied voice says “may be” because many call centers record only a portion of their calls. Inevitably, those recorded calls are being used to sample the quality of employees’ performance. A manager listens, critiques or praises as the case may be, and may even recommend a promotion or a raise. (Or, if the agent’s not so lucky, some remedial training.)  Read more.

How do you know if you're getting the most utility from your recorded calls?

Well, there is a litmus test you can take that will help you score the value you are realizing from recording customer calls.  Here it goes; answer the questions and keep a tally of your scores, which are represented in parentheses after each scoring option:

1. How many calls per agent are you monitoring a month for quality monitoring?

Five (3 points)

Seven (5 points)

Ten (7 points)

Over 10 (10 points)

2. Do you listen to past customer calls at contact center staff meetings and discuss them collectively to identify best practices and/or areas for improvement?

No (0 points)

Yes, just best practice calls (5 points)

Yes, just improvement opportunity calls (5 points)

Yes, both best-practice and improvement-opportunity calls (10 points)

3. Do you have new agents listen to good and bad calls to help with training?

Yes, good calls only (3 points)

Yes, bad calls only (3 points)

Yes, both good and bad calls (7 points)

No (0 points)

4. Do you have agents self-evaluate themselves on good and bad calls?

Good calls (3 points)

Bad calls (7 points)

No calls (0 points)

5. Do you capture every customer call (100 percent total recording)?

Yes (10 points)

No (0 points)

6. How long do you retain all calls for order verification, dispute resolution and compliance purposes?

Two weeks (0 points)

One month (1 point)

Two months (2 points)

Six months (3 points)

One year (5 points)

Two years (10 points)

7. Do you regularly share select call recordings with outside-the-call-center business users/managers/executives? If so, how often?

Never (0 points)

Once a month (3 points)

Once a week (7 points)

Daily (10 points)

8. Do you have call-of-the-week/month contests with agents and incentivize winners?

No (0 points)

Yes (7 points)

9. Do you selectively record and live monitor calls for quality assurance?

No (0 points)

Yes (5 points)

10. How often do you use a call recording to support/settle a dispute or verify an order?

Never (0 points)

Weekly (10 points)

Monthly (5 points)

Annually (1 point)

Assessment:

Now, tally your score if you haven't already and check yourself against the following scale, which helps you understand how well you are leveraging your recorded customer calls:

Over 60 - You are the gold standard that other companies should look up to.

45-59 - You are doing a great job.

35-44 - You could be using call recordings much more effectively/often.

25-34 - You are doing the bare minimum to utilize your recorded calls.

Under 25 - You are not using your call recording system effectively at all.  Consider contacting a call recording consultant for help. 

Mobile phone recording software is designed to help businesses (particularly financial, insurance, doctors, real estate professionals, lawyers, etc.) capture their employees' work-related telephone calls in order to monitor for customer service, compliance, dispute resolution, order verification and so on. With recent FSA mobile phone recording regulations in the UK, more and more businesses in the U.S. are considering mobile recording software for all company-issued cell phones.

How many times have you taken a business call while out to lunch?  If your salespersons or customer service people or even your stock brokers are taking such calls, wouldn't it be nice to have access to those call recordings if a dispute were to arise, for example?  This is just one example of the tremendous value mobile phone recording software can provide to your business.

Below is a list of criteria to consider when deciding which mobile recording software to purchase:

What am I going to use this software for?

• Assess the performance of my customer service staff?
• Monitor the compliance and customer service of my sales and support people?  
• Ensure medical staff or financial personnel are not accidentally sharing personally identifiable information over the phone, e.g.?
• Capture and store calls for dispute resolution purposes?  If a customer claims he/she never authorized a credit card charge, you can pull the call and play it back for them to show they did in fact provide the necessary verbal approval.

Who do I want to monitor?

• Salespeople?
• Customer service/facing employees?
• Medical staff?
• Insurance agents?
• Financial/mortgage brokers?
• Real estate agents?
• Accounting staff?
• At-home workers? (many mobile workers will use their work cell phone as their primary business line while working remotely - even at home)

How easy is it going to be to implement the mobile recording software solution and get up and running with capturing mobile phone calls?

• Can the software capture both inbound and outbound calls? It better be able to.
• Are mobile call recordings treated the same as landline/VoIP calls? They should be.
• Does the system need to route calls off of the mobile network?  It shouldn't have to.
• Can the recording software handle landline, mobile and VoIP calls all in the same system?  It should be able to.

In this episode of Asterisk Live (by Asterisk), Bruce Kaskey, COO of OrecX joins the call to discuss voice recording with Asterisk. Bruce notes, "OrecX, which stands for 'Open Recording Systems', provides both open source and commercial versions of call recording and voice data software. OrecX solutions work in tandem with Asterisk to do passive, SPAN-based calling recording. This offloads the CPU of your Asterisk PBX allowing it to be able to handle more simultaneous call load. Additionally, OrecX provides data solutions that allow for screen capture recording. SMB Contact Centers can use screen capture in tandem with voice recording to train contact center agents.

Click below to view the entire webcast.

Every business deserves to have call recording software but not all can afford it. Call recording software helps companies across all industries improve customer service, minimize risk, verify orders and maintain compliance.    Many systems cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy, tens of thousands to implement and tens of thousands to maintain.  Not all systems do, however. Some call recording software is much more affordable, can be installed in just minutes and requires little if any maintenance.  These are the systems that every organization has a right to own. 

In fact, there should be a Call Recording Bill of Rights to ensure every business has access to call recording software, as it has essentially become a business critical application today.

Bill of Rights:

1. Call recording software shall be affordable enough that any business in need can easily acquire, install and maintain it.
2. Call recording software shall be flexible enough to interoperate with any technology environment.
3. Call recording software shall be installed remotely or onsite.
4. Call recording software shall require little, if any, maintenance and support.
5. Call recording software shall feature at the least voice/screen recording, quality monitoring and mobile call recording.
6. Call recording software shall be open source or open architecture to ensure full interoperability with existing systems.
7. Call recording software shall cost nothing or almost nothing to customize and tailor to one’s environment.
8. Call recording software shall be offered as a free trial prior to purchase.
9. Call recording software shall be interoperable with leading PBX systems – both TDM and VoIP – such as Avaya, Cisco and others.
10. Call recording software shall be both PCI-DSS and HIPAA compliant.
11. Call recording software shall be installed in hours, not days, weeks or months.
12. Call Recordings shall be portable and available in industry-standard file format.
13. Call recording software should be easy enough to learn in just a few hours.
14. All call recording software advanced features shall be available in all product levels - no feature stripping for basic offerings.

While call recording is obviously not a right, we at OrecX we believe it should be. 

Video posted by Sangoma.

There are multiple factors to consider when moving away from your existing phone system to a new IP telephony system. One of the most important decisions to make is choosing the right PBX system, and taking into consideration the company’s IT and business practices.

The implementation and future growth of the business or organization depends on an important decision you need to make at the start: you need to choose between hosted PBX and a premise-based system. The latter means you will have the company’s PBX system physically located at arm’s length, which also means full control, while the former means your PBX is hosted by an external service provider.

While there are a couple of factors that come into play, we will focus on costs and unique features that will help you choose the right PBX system. 

In the long run, cost is one of the most important factors to consider. While it’s obvious that the initial setup costs of a hosted solution will not be as high as an on-site solution, there are factors that will influence the bill in the future, such as maintenance costs.

A hosted PBX offers lower setup costs and no maintenance costs, as these costs are shouldered by the service provider. Premise-based PBX systems have higher setup costs, but potentially lower ongoing costs (the maintenance costs); however, it’s risky, because you never know how technological change will affect your existing equipment.

Besides saving you money and offering scalability, hosted PBX services come with different features and packages, such as voice recording, click-to-call widgets, voicemail to email, and performance tracking, just to name a few.

Call recording increases company productivity and helps the company to better evaluate sales people's performance. The recorded conversation can be easily downloaded with the help of an active Internet connection.

With a click-to-call widget, companies can take advantage of another way to get in touch with their customers, as a call can be initiated simply by clicking a widget that appears on the screen.

With growth being the keyword for every business, performance is an essential factor that needs to be measured, and a hosted PBX allows exactly that via reports that track calls, their length, and other important details.

After taking into consideration all the advantages of hosted PBX systems, one difficult question still remains: since more and more companies are providing such services, which one should you choose?

In order to make the best decision, here some of the most important things to consider: integration, reliability, support, and finally, the features included in the service package.

What separates Digitcom from others is the company’s 20 years of experience in the business. Digitcom has grown to become the leading provider of hosted PBX, and has won numerous awards over the years, including the prestigious CDN Top 100 Solution Providers of 2011, 2012 and 2013 three years in a row.

For more information on hosted PBX systems and to learn more about Digitcom, please visit www.digitcom.ca.