On LinkedIn across various contact center groups I asked the question: "Is call recording necessary?".  I received some very insightful responses that I wanted to share.  Here they are:

A good starting point would be for the Call Center org to answer these questions? Are every single 1 of our Agents the best they can be without any Supervisor being able to play a Call Recording back to the Agent to Coach them into becoming better? Do you have proof that an Agent could be stealing company time by dragging out calls far beyond the time they should be? Do you have protection from an Angry Consumer that turns into a she said/he said scenario & they want a refund/chargeback or complaint to the BBB, FTC or any other organization that could be detrimental to your company? (By JA)

Call Recording is one of the most basic tenets of any quality management program. Aside from fulfilling any compliance requirements tied to proof of purchase/enrollment, or cancellation, call recordings provide a quality team with the ability to monitor the customer interactions and how well the agents are serving (or selling) customers. I believe call recording is a best-in-class functionality that should be deployed to augment live call monitoring for any call center quality management initiative. Beyond simply finding agents that aren't doing well, recordings of "great calls" can be a useful training tool as well. (By JK)

I do a lot of work in the area of quality management and believe it is critical to record calls to engage agents and provide them with a means of contributing to their own learning and development. It is the only coaching method that allows for self assessment. Listening to calls with agents provides an opportunity to not only review and enhance agent orientation,  skills and knowledge but also explore customer behavior and needs. It provides a collaborative forum for teaching representatives how to interpret and apply company processes, procedures and policy in the context of a customer interaction to develop critical thinking and problem solving capabilities. When sales representatives are given the opportunity to review and deconstruct calls, our experience has shown that they become more adept at hearing verbal cues and clues and understanding the buyer's motivation. This results in better call control, more relevant, customer-focused dialogue and increased sales. Additionally recorded calls can be leveraged to assess organizational performance. Literally the 'Voice of the Customer' can be used to demonstrate to other stakeholders within the company - Sales, Marketing, Compliance, IT, Training, HR even the C-suite - what's working and what's not from a customer perspective. This is particularly powerful when speech analytics are used to quantify the magnitude of an issue and the potential impact to the organization. (By JF) 

Recording calls is critical to the success of the organization. Listening to calls with agents regardless of experience level always provides learning opportunities in a safe environment. Employee engagement is another key part , agents who contribute to the "Library of Recorded Calls" become advocates for the QA team....(By JM)