What’s next in recording, and how it will affect you

YOU know the importance of recording customer-agent interactions and how those recordings can be used to manage performance and maintain compliance with the regulations.   What you may not be aware of is how changes in technology may also enable you to increase functionality while reducing the overall costs of ownership.

Let’s look at some of the latest trends and how they may fit into your strategic plans.

Storage media Although network-attached storage devices have been used to reduce the costs of archive tapes, the current regulatory environment is quickly pushing removable media into extinction.  We are also seeing an elevated importance of call recordings during legal actions and regulatory audits and the consequences for not being able to produce specific recordings have increased significantly.

In response, recording systems now provide advanced litigation hold features as well as increased security through advanced data encryption and authentication.    

VoIP The convergence of voice and data networks has begun in haste.  With most communications managers having plans in place to upgrade their voice platforms, it should come as no surprise that existing call loggers will also need to be replaced during this change.  Fortunately this change offers an opportunity to replace your existing systems with one that delivers more reliability at a lower operating cost.  This is because a VoIP recording system eliminates the cost of deploying and maintaining proprietary hardware, often required by legacy systems.

With a VOIP recording system the software is designed to run on commercial low cost servers. With such an arrangement, systems can in many cases be installed in a data centre and even virtualised to yield greater savings.

What’s next New media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have the potential to emerge as one of the most powerful forms of communications ever developed.  While personal users have long discovered the value in user generated content, marketers are now starting to recognise the value of monitoring what customers say to each other, and using that information to gain a better understanding of unmet needs or operational inefficiencies. 

In the future I expect the process of monitoring social media interactions will be formalised and responded to in real-time by live agents.

To leverage this new environment future recording platforms will need to adapt again to capture this information and provide the tools to manage an organisation’s ability to deliver a meaningful customer experience.

The bottom line for recording technology is that as the methods we use to communicate continue to evolve, so does the flexibility and affordability of the recording platform.  Being able to leverage these abilities will require planning and vision. I hope this article has provided some framework for such plans.

Ed Kawecki, manager business development – call centre, CyberTech International; ed.kawecki@cybertech-na.com