Did you know that many call recording solutions charge a substantial fee to access your own recorded audio data? It's true, even after you've already paid for their software. If you think this doesn't make sense, it doesn't. It's similar to going to McDonald's and paying for a Happy Meal, but before they give it to you, they charge you again.

So why does this happen? Well, it's due to a few reasons:

1. Many call recording software vendors are greedy
2. Some vendors claim it is complicated and time consuming to export your recordings in a playable, industry standard format - which it shouldn't be!
3. Other vendors feel the need to involve their professional services team to grant you access to your own recorded calls - this shouldn't be necessary

If you think these reasons are ridiculous, you're right! They are. Once you pay for a solution to record your customer calls, you shouldn't be charged extra to access your calls. First off, many of these same recording solutions are expensive to begin with, only to then charge you additionally for something that is already yours.

When this happens, a couple things occur:

1. You must lay out more money for something you already paid for

2. There is an unnecessary delay (days or even weeks) in accessing your recordings. This lag can cause you to lose dissatisfied customers to your competitors as well as incur costly compliance issues, because this process also delays your ability to send the recorded audio to your conversational analytics solution. Once this finally happens, you can unearth some rich customer insights that could have led to rescuing dissatisfied customers, thwarting expensive compliance infractions, mitigating costly disputes, etc. 

With all this being said, you want a recording/audio capture solution that offers unbridled access to your own recorded data (in a standard exportable format) at no extra charge. You also want the ability to collect non-audio data from CRM, ACD or agent desktop applications via a REST API, which can then be appended to audio recordings. This improves your ability to correlate, discover patterns and pinpoint specific types of interactions. Most audio capture solutions do not offer this level of openness. 

If your recording vendor charges you for access to your recordings, it may be time to look elsewhere. You don't have to be in that position.