“The call recording space is a little bit all over the place right now,” according to CSI’s (News - Alert) Rich Marcia, marketing director for the company, “from the customer perspective, there are a lot of vendors to choose from”.

“There really are many ways to slice and dice this market. Enterprise vs. Mid-Market/SMB, Hosted vs. On-Premise, Simple Loggers vs. Quality Suites. There are over 25 call recording vendors across these segments.”

In an interview, Marcia described how the economy has affected CSI, the call recording industry, and what to look forward to in the future.

He noted, “the economy has affected many industries differently and heavily. We certainly feel the economy in terms of the way it's impacted friends, family, vendors/suppliers and the negative effect it has seen across the country with unemployment and debt. Contrarily, our quarterly sales have actually increased for over ten consecutive quarters.”

Yet certain businesses have come out unscathed. “CSI has zero debt and have survived multiple recessions. Our founders are battle-tested, and not just because our CEO is a decorated war veteran – we’ve thrived despite the chaos of the financial markets and the challenges it has put forth,” said Marcia.

“Yet, the economy is also a driving force in innovation,” Marcia elaborated: “Many of the companies involved in call recording are adding new features to their solutions, such as speech analytics. Others have gone the route of a hosted solution.”

Marcia noted, on a more specific level, “Being in the enterprise space, we (CSI) don't see many requests for a hosted call recording solution. There seems to still be security concerns surrounding having your customer calls stored in the cloud. It creates a huge, polarizing discussion.” He added “I do think Salesforce.com (News - Alert) (CRM) has done a good job of educating the market about cloud solutions for business.”

“We’ll continue to differentiate CSI through high-value customer-focused features such as our Call Insight Speech Analytics suite, which helps to automate the entire quality assurance process. Focusing our development efforts in areas such as speech enables to thrive and move forward.”

Juliana Kenny graduated from the University of Connecticut with a double degree in English and French. After managing a small company for two years, she joined TMC (News - Alert) as a Web Editor for TMCnet. Juliana currently focuses on the call center and CRM industries, but she also writes about cloud telephony and network gear including softswitches.

Edited by Chris DiMarco