Call Recording Trends in 2019
After GDPR: how have call recording solutions evolved?
Although rules around call recording have tightened and businesses recording calls for general purposes need to actively justify legality, the need for consent to record a call in line with the six GDPR conditions has had a positive effect on call recording applications, both in terms of added business value and improved functionality.
The requirements of GDPR regulations have enhanced the feature set within call recording applications to provide greater control and flexibility over compliance policy management. Administration of policy rules and IVR workflows facilitate compliance and make it much easier for day-to-day business to take place. Extension archiving makes it easy to manage starters and leavers, permission-based access enables compliance officers to gain access to compliance-specific functionality, and call recording deletion delivers peace of mind when needed. Although audit reporting has become more important as proof of GDPR adherence, it adds value by protecting both businesses and their customers. Tollring has taken the evolution of call recording applications even further to include a dashboard summary of compliance metrics. As speech analytics are introduced in 2019, automated filtering of call recordings and keyword search will enhance functionality even further in line with GDPR regulations.
Tollring advocates that as well as these enhancements helping businesses directly, partners can also benefit by becoming the trusted experts on GDPR relating to call recording. As call recording applications have evolved in line with regulations, so has the opportunity to sell greater, more powerful and easier-to-use applications.
Call recording for the mid-market
Mid-market businesses are more likely to have larger customer-facing teams or contact centre environments where customer interactions need to be monitored and measured in line with business SLAs. In our opinion, the call recording features which are most prevalent in mid-market organisations are:
- PCI DSS Automated stop/start of call recordings: This is an important feature for a team of agents that need to take payments over the phone. Although a feature that is available to SMEs and mid-market companies, mid-market organisations would be more likely to opt for more formal and automated Stop/Start functionality. PCI DSS compliance for card payments tends to involve more sophisticated solutions that allow customers to enter credit card details using their keypad and hence call recording solutions must be able to cater for DTMF suppression. Manual PCI compliance options risk human error and non-compliance but offer a more affordable solution to smaller businesses.
- Supervisor call recording control via permission-based access. In order to monitor calls, call recordings are reviewed by supervisors, whether for training purposes or customer service improvement/review. The bigger the team the more important performance monitoring is.
- Speech intelligence: Speech analytics, sentiment analysis and keyword ‘spot and search’ functionality is becoming available to the mid-market and this is functionality still unlikely to be adopted by small companies. The driver for speech analytics is the management of a team of agents dealing with large volumes of customer interactions, where automated analysis of transcribed calls is valuable to improve overall customer experience.
Call recording on-premise and in the cloud
If a reseller is not yet embracing the cloud and is selling premise-based call recording solutions, hybrid call recording provides a good option, where call recordings are undertaken locally, then stored for accessibility in the cloud. This provides the benefits of the cloud without fully moving to a cloud solution. On-premise call recording is also still available, with recordings stored locally, but this does not have the flexibility, future-proofing, scalability of storage options of cloud call recording solutions.
As featured in Comms Business.