Call Recording Featured Article

While many enterprises and contact center managers today understand the importance of call recording technology, many people still view call recording as an unnecessary tool or even a negative thing; something that the government takes advantage of to access our information without our permission. On the contrary, call recording is a very useful tool for organizations and consumers alike. The huge gap in perspectives on this is due to a lack of knowledge, so I’m here to go over a few basics with you.

First and foremost is the question of legality. Call recording is totally legal in the U.S. and Canada. Thirty-seven of the 50 U.S. states are only one-party consent states, which means the employee is the only person that needs to know the call is being recorded. Thirteen states are two-party consent states, which means both parties on the call must consent to recording. This is when you’ll hear, “This call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance.”

Call recording offers a number of benefits and use cases. The technology can help users improve customer service by analyzing key performance indicators from the calls – are customers continually asking questions about specific products? What are the turning points for when customers tend to become frustrated? Call interactions can give organizations a lot of insight into how they can improve the customer experience in just a few steps.

Call recording can also be used to gather data about which employees and agents are performing well on calls, and using examples from those interactions to train other staff members. On the flip side, you can also figure which employees are slipping up and how to resolve their performance.

Many organizations have to turn to call recording to meet compliance regulations. Almost every industry in the U.S. is subject to some type of state or federal regulation; some oversee practices that are used by businesses in multiple industries, such as telemarketing, and some are industry-specific, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

One particular industry that benefit from recording calls is the collections industry. Collections agencies and law firms operate call centers for client debt collection can record calls to ensure accuracy and minimize risk in case of threat of litigation. Quality monitoring can help managers spot emerging trends at group and individual collector levels and maintain an agency’s service level to help mitigate litigation risk. Call recording can also help settle challenges in relation to regulations such as the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) and Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).

There are a number of providers in the industry today that offer call recording solutions and products. One to consider is Coordinated Systems, Inc. (CSI (News - Alert)). Its flagship product, Virtual Observer (VO) is a call recording and quality assurance solution for call centers. Virtual Observer's core feature set include all of the necessary call recording and quality monitoring components needed to help your call center reach your performance targets and turn your recorded calls into valuable assets.

Earlier this year, CSI implemented VO Call Insight Speech Analytics in Automated Collection Services, Inc.’s (ACSI) headquarters contact center. ACSI used the speech engine to facilitate rapid detection of trends in the contact center, which helps ensure customer objectives are met. The collections agency turned to CSI and its call recording solution because of the features it offers, the low cost of ownership and its reputation in the industry. VO also connects to ACSI’s ShoreTel (News - Alert) phone system, enabling ACSI to not only leverage call recording for quality and compliance purposes, but also record screen activity, evaluate the entire interaction, run performance and trending reports in a dashboard environment, encrypt calls to protect sensitive data and run speech analytics on every call recorded.

CSI’s Virtual Observer is enterprise-ready and scales to the larger size collections call centers. On the other end of the spectrum, with a different focus, TriVium Systems provides a call reporting system with call recording capabilities for the collections industry. TriVium recently partnered with The Computer Manager (News - Alert), Inc., to offer call reporting to collection agencies running Debt$Net software. The partnership with Debt$Net enables customers to search for recordings based on client ID, file number or any other parameter they use in Debt$Net. It can be concluded that the collections space is well spoken for in terms of being able to leverage call recording for compliance concerns, and with Virtual Observer, workforce optimization and quality assurance initiatives as well. To learn more, visit www.csiworld.com.