What to look for when buying call recording
by Paul Skinner
Director
Macfarlane Telesystems
CALL recording is a critical function within modern contact centres. Bank and emergency service contact centres are required to record calls by law; others record calls because they want to capture a mine of information that will help them better understand what customers are saying — and so improve service delivery, advisor training and “customer experiences”.
In local government, call recording is used to reduce the incidence of abusive calling and to assist councils in meeting their obligations under the Verification Framework.
In fact, there is no such thing as a standard call recording requirement.
Modern call recording and quality management solutions must meet all needs. They range from the basic requirement to record a few calls for advisor training, to the complex requirements of organisations looking to record and analyse 100 per cent of calls for key strategic reasons such as compliance, quality management and “customer experience” analysis.
It is because call recording requirements are growing more complex that organisations are seeking more highly featured technologies. The early single/multi-line answer machines and single/multi-line recorders that record to tape, floppy, hard drive, DAT tape or DVD are increasingly being replaced by a new generation of advanced, open architecture digital platforms that combine call recording with analytical software add-ons.
Organisations thinking of investing in a call recording solution must consider whether the call recording solution being examined has the flexibility to meet their needs.
When it comes to “what” they record, for example, does the solution:
Allow users to initiate the monitoring and recording of any advisor’s phone from any handset?
Record selective calls or 100 per cent of calls?
Set up management templates to selectively record calls based on DDI, CLI, advisor and advisor group (e.g., record any calls to advisor 12, except on DDI 1234)?
Support the recording of incoming or outgoing calls on-the-fly and date and time stamp all recorded calls?
Allow for the easy retrieval of call records against a range of criteria such as date and time, type of service etc.?
Users should also look at the supervisor monitoring capabilities of solutions, ensuring that supervisors can coach as well as listen to both advisor and caller and intervene, if required, by speaking to advisor and/or caller.
Macfarlane Telesystems; 020 7314 1314; pskinner@macfar.co.uk