Stereo call recording (aka dual channel call recording) offers many advantages over mono call recording, primarily in the quality of the voice recording upon playback. Simply put, with stereo call recording, the two call participants (likely your agent and a customer) are recorded on separate channels. This means that upon playback, you will hear one voice on one side of the speaker and the other voice on the other side. Similar to stereo music, the dual channel playback dramatically enhances the sound and quality. The result is a higher fidelity call recording.

Imagine a call in which the agent and the customer are speaking over one another, perhaps during a dispute. Upon playback, you need to be able to separate the two voices to understand who said what. This could be particularly important if a discrepancy arises or if a potential HIPAA or PCI compliance infraction may have occurred. You need to be able to prove who said what, and when.

Recording in stereo vs. mono also helps increase the accuracy of automatic call transcribing, which is popular in many of today's speech analytics solutions.  In fact, stereo call recording improves speech to text, key word and phrase spotting, speech analytics, and voice biometrics. The phonetic quality and accuracy that comes with stereo call recording can make the difference between accurate and false analytics results.

"When you take that (stereo) audio recording and pass it to VoiceBase (speech analytics), you can then instruct VoiceBase to process those two channels separately so that you get perfect 'who said what' information," said Bryon Mathias-Fuqua of VoiceBase. "You can imagine that if a caller says a competitor's name first, it means something a whole lot different than if an agent says a competitor's name first. There are huge benefits to using Stereo (dual channel) recordings versus Mono recordings for transcription, keyword spotting, agent monitoring/script adherence and training predictive models."

High fidelity playback in stereo also allows your call center managers, quality supervisors and even business users to focus on just the customer or just the agent when analyzing calls. This saves time when trying to identify skills weaknesses or customer discontent.

Not all call recording software offers both stereo call recording and mono call recording. When selecting or upgrading your call recording system, be sure to inquire about stereo call recording.