The pandemic has not slowed the pace at which organisations are moving applications, data and infrastructure to the cloud. If anything, it has accelerated this as there is a greater realisation that agility is key and recognition that the flexibility and scalability of the cloud enables organisations to adapt quickly to change.
Corporate telephony, contact centre solutions and indeed call recording has traditionally been viewed as on-premises infrastructure, but this is changing fast. Unified Communications as-a-Service (UCaaS) and Contact Centre as-a-Service (CCaaS) is being rapidly adopted by organisations looking to virtualise their organisation and provide a more agile approach to consuming these technologies. But for those organisations who need to record interactions for compliance, wish to leverage recording for quality management, or enable customer experience analytics, there are a number of factors to consider.
Where do you record?
Traditionally telephony and call recording has been two separate systems, with the need to have a specialist recorder connected to your telephone system to capture interactions between customers and agents. With cloud telephony, most of the leading platforms now offer a capability to capture the calls within the cloud-based application.
Whereas this simplifies recording, there are many factors that you need to consider. It is important that you do not confuse capture with retention; many of the leading platforms provide the ability to record interactions but offer only limited retention of these recordings. If for compliance you are required to retain recordings for a number of years or even the lifetime of the customer, you will need to combine cloud capture with a solution to archive and secure recordings.
Do You Need To Capture All Interactions?
It is no longer just about recording telephone calls, but capturing every type of interaction over every channel – SMS, email, Web Chat and even video in some cases. You may be utilising different solutions for each of these channels, but what is important is that you are able to capture everything and ensure you are able to join the channels together to gain a full picture of customer engagement.
You need to understand the recording capability of each of these channels and put in place a solution that can address any gaps and consolidate recordings into a single repository.
What Are You Looking To Achieve?
Today it is not just about interaction recording but utilising what is captured to deliver value to your organisation. This may be validating compliance, measuring and managing quality or utilising speech and analytics capabilities to better understand your customers, their preferences and behaviours.
This is where combining the recording capabilities of your cloud-interaction platforms with a specialist interaction analytics solution is key – delivering the best of both worlds in terms of simplifying recording while also delivering what each team needs in terms of quality management, compliance and customer experience applications.
Ensuring Compliance of Recording
Today there are many factors that have to be taken into account when recording customer interactions. Often sensitive information is recorded and just like your business applications, these need to comply with legislation such as GDPR and PCI DSS.
It is essential that either at source, or as part of post-call processing you are able to ensure that recordings are compliant with sensitive personal information and card payment details redacted and the recordings encrypted for security as well as managing access.
What Is The Right Solution?
The right solution is the one that takes the best elements from each solution and combines these to deliver what you need. At Liquid Voice, our solution separates out the ‘capture’ layer from the ‘retention’ and ‘application’ layers. This means that we are able to connect to the leading cloud-based solutions and utilise their capability to record interactions. We are then able to ingest these into our specialist platform to provide the retention capability required and deliver the breadth of applications to generate value from the recordings.
This approach offers significant benefits to those organisations that are utilising multiple solutions for telephony; for example, MS Teams for corporate-wide collaboration and a specialist CCaaS solution for their contact centre. It also enables organisations to have separate platforms for different channels i.e. telephone calls and webchat. All of these channels can be captured at source and then unified into a single interaction repository.
Bringing The Past With You
The final consideration is what you do about your past. You are likely to have in place legacy recording solutions, sometimes multiple systems. Maintaining these is not just expensive but proves complex when historic interactions need to be retrieved.
In a similar way as recordings can be ingested from your cloud platforms, these legacy interactions can also be ingested into a single repository and what is more, it is a perfect opportunity to clean these recordings ensuring they are compliant with GDPR and PCI DSS and that any toxic data is removed.
Moving your interaction platform to the cloud does not have to be complex, does not require for you to compromise on capability and can provide you with far greater agility for the future. If this is something you are currently reviewing and want to discuss the above considerations or other factors you need to take into account, we would be more than happy to connect you with one of our specialists. Simply contact us on 0113 200 2020 or drop us an email at sales@liquidvoice.com.
