Call Accounting Featured Article

Why You Should Activate Your VoIP Provider's or UCaaS Call Recording Feature

  By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

“We don’t need to record calls.”

This is a commonly heard refrain, particularly with many small businesses. Companies that aren’t legally obliged to record calls or aren’t using recordings to train sales and customer support personnel, may think that call recording is an unnecessary extra expense.  But there are many reasons why it’s a good idea to record calls.

It’s Easy

For starters, call recording is a breeze with business VoIP and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) systems today. Many of today’s cloud-based call recording solutions support a variety of unified communication and contact center system vendors, including Cisco, Avaya (News - Alert), Microsoft, BroadSoft, and more. For not very much more cost, and very little trouble, you can record all or a portion of your calls and use them to gain business insight into your company.

It’s a View into Your Business Operations

How efficient are your company’s communications? Who is making too many calls, and who is making too few? Did that last marketing campaign resonate with customers the way you expected? What is the most effective sales approach for your market? A good call recording solution can let you search metadata selectively using natural language processing, so you can be highly targeted in your evaluation of calls. Add a call accounting solution to work alongside the call recording, and you’ll be able to build a very accurate picture of what’s going on in your business at any time.

It’s Multichannel

Many of today’s call recording solutions will also simultaneously capture the screens that accompany the audio, so you can determine what employees were doing during calls. A quality unified solution will capture voice, video, instant messages, and telepresence simultaneously.

It’s Centralized

You may not realize it, but some of your employees may be recording calls using their personal devices, third-party services or conferencing platforms. But with everyone using their own approach, there’s no centralized management, and little ability to share recordings.

It Can Resolve “He Said, She Said”

While you may not have an everyday need for recording calls, it’s a good idea to have a recording solution that can be activated during on-demand contentious or sensitive calls to protect your business from litigation or social media rumor lambasting, which (as many companies that have made missteps know), can blow up literally overnight.

It Can Form the Basis for Marketing Campaigns

So you’ve done something amazing for a customer. Who is going to know about it other than you and that customer? Call and contact recording can provide you with ample fodder to boast on social media or in other marketing channels about what a great product or service you provide.