Call Recording Featured Article

While larger enterprises have for some time been moving toward replacing their traditional phone systems with voice over IP (VoIP) to save money and increase flexibility and feature sets, the trend has now taken the small business sector by storm. According to a recent report by software company Software Advice, small businesses are increasingly shifting toward VoIP solutions.

The report surveyed over 350 small businesses and found that more than half of prospective buyers were investing in business VoIP service for the first time, and that no buyers were interested in an on-premise IP-PBX (News - Alert), while a vast majority wanted a hosted solution. Only 31 percent of respondents were still using PSTN land lines. In general, small businesses are seeking VoIP solutions for reliability, cost reasons and better support from vendors.

This data has strong implications for the providers of call recording solutions, who are increasingly finding that a significant portion of their business is from smaller contact centers. For many call recording solutions, this will mean a significant switch of technologies, often to a native SIP recorder, and support for most popular VoIP phone systems such as those offered by Cisco, Avaya, Five9 (News - Alert), 8X8, ShoreTel, Microsoft, 3COM and more.

Increasingly, small business customers are after the kind of flexibility, feature sets and 100 percent call recording that is possible with VoIP call recording that may have been technologically or financially infeasible with traditional recording solutions. Within the solutions, contact centers can have access to important features such as 100 percent call logging, selective screen capture, integrated evaluation and performance reporting, agent monitoring and supervisor-agent chat. It’s a way to virtualize their call recording environments and make recording easier to use, store and administrate.

Additionally, workforce management solutions, which incorporate call recording as a feature, often use a network appliance loaded with a packet sniffing recording engine to capture voice conversations from a VLAN for the purposes of compliance and training in a contact center environment.