What's New and Noteworthy in Call Recording

Feature Story

What's New and Noteworthy in Call Recording

By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, IP Communications Magazines  |  August 17, 2010

In looking for an angle for this call recording article, I came up with a lot of little snippets of news and trend identification, all of which were interesting, but most of which are really different and not clearly related. So, rather than trying to sew them all up in a crazy-quilt kind of a piece, I’ve decided to offer them up in a collection of little swatches.

The High Life

As many business phones have gone high-definition, so has call recording.

SIP Print (News - Alert) CEO Donald C. Palmer and CTO Jonathan Fuld explain that their company earlier this year released a G.722 high-definition version of their call recording solution. The company also recently came out with support for the G.729 codec, which got the company into the carrier side of the business, and G.723.

Clearly, HD call recording is an improvement upon standard-definition, says Fuld, who notes it’s like “the difference between living in Scottsdale and Winslow,” Arizona. (A big difference, I can assure you.)

In other recent news from SIP Print, the company’s solution has gone multilingual. Specifically, it’s able to offer up Web pages in Arabic, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and most other languages. A user in France will see the call information in French, while her counterpart in Spain will view the same call information in Spanish from the same SIP Print appliance. 

A New Aspect

Aspect with release 6.6. of Unified IP has bolstered its recording capabilities with improved recording archiving, security and encryption. This allows companies to record interactions while complying with regulations, such as support for outbound recording in multiple locations.

“The new additions to Aspect’s Unified IP platform address some of the key issues for contact centers,” says Aphrodite Brinsmead, analyst of customer interaction technologies at Ovum (News - Alert). “These tools enable enterprises to simplify business processes and gain more control over distributed contact centers. Aspect continues to differentiate itself in a competitive contact center industry by focusing on unified communications and its partnership with Microsoft.”Andy Bezaitis, senior vice president of product management at Aspect, adds that the company uses direct customer feedback to ensure it’s not delivering technology for technology’s sake, but actually providing capabilities that will deliver significant benefits to organizations.

“Being able to deploy the solution quicker is very important, as well as delivering innovations that enable our customers to operate in a highly regulated and competitive environment,” says Bezaitis. “Our focus is on ensuring that our customers have the solution they need when they need it….”

The Hat Trick

In today's economic and competitive climate, Calabrio (News - Alert) finds a few key themes when it comes to recording. That includes reliability, mobility and speed. Contact centers, and enterprises in general, are often highly motivated or even required by law to capture and archive calls for compliance, transaction verification or dispute resolution. In these instances, it is critical they have the reliability to ensure they do not miss a call. Calabrio provides Monitoring and Notification Alerts, which inform support staff via e-mail, SNMP or Windows Event Viewer if anything is not functioning properly. For example, MANA can be linked to call detail records in the IP PBX (News - Alert) to trigger an alert when a call instance and a recording are not in sync.

At the same time, contact centers and enterprises are embracing mobility, or home agent workers, to increase flexibility, save money and help the environment, notes Calabrio. The company says it provides full-featured mobile agent support to record work-at-home agents with the same level of reliability as agents within the contact center. And Calabrio’s architecture is such that a dedicated server is not required at every location, which saves costs and reduces the company's hardware footprint. Tying into the speed theme noted above, Calabrio says that it provides several, time-saving recording features such as easy navigation and powerful metadata tags for faster retrieval. For example, Archive Search allows an enterprise to locate specific calls or groups of calls based on combinations of employee, agent, date, time, phone number and user-defined fields. Calabrio Quality Management, meanwhile, enables a contact center to record only those transactions that are of particular interest to the business.

The Holistic View

Customers want a holistic view of quality metrics among locations and different call recording platforms, says Bob Kelly, senior vice president of sales and marketing at HyperQuality (News - Alert). Seven-year-old HyperQuality can help customers with that, he says.

The company, which Kelly says is the leader in the outsourcing of the quality monitoring process, has done more than 7 million quality evaluations and handles more than 200,000 quality evaluations per month.

HyperQuality’s ClearMetrix solution, which it brought to market last year and is expanding this year, is a hosted platform that provides quality monitoring on an independent basis, he says. With this solution, customers can record interactions, listen to the calls and score them all using a single tool and set of parameters.

The Whole Enchilada

Greg Sherry, senior direct of Americas marketing at Verint Systems Inc., a Melville, N.Y.-based provider of analytic software-based solutions for security and business intelligence, says five to seven years ago call recording was just for sampling for the quality of calls.

However, today, he says, most companies record 100 percent of their calls, even though it’s not always a requirement. But the rise of new regulations such as HIPPA and Sarbanes-Oxley, as well as over-the-phone payments, is driving the need for more call recording.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi

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