More and more organisations are making the switch to cloud telephony in the form of both UC as-a-Service (UCaaS) and Contact Centre as-a-Service (CCaaS). The 2020 Pandemic has been a key driving factor, with organisations forced to support home workers during periods of lockdown; many of these are now looking to embrace virtual working moving forward.
UCaaS and CCaaS solutions provide you with the elasticity and flexibility you need to support virtual working with the ability to connect any employee, in any location to a feature-rich company-wide communication platform.
However, what is the impact on your ability to record interactions when you switch to a cloud-based telephony platform? If you need to record for compliance reasons can you continue to do so in a compliant manner? If you want to record calls to monitor quality, agent performance and to understand the customer experience is this possible with a UCaaS or CCaaS platform?
Cloud Recording for Cloud Telephony
The good news is that moving to a cloud telephony platform does not stop you from being able to record customer interactions, to the contrary, it can open up a whole host of additional opportunities and allows you to leverage recording-as-a-Service.
In the same way that a premise-based recording solution can connect to your premise-based telephony platform, a cloud-based recording solution can connect to a cloud-based telephony platform. This enables every interaction to be captured regardless of where your people or agents are located.
Should I Use the Standard Record Option in my Cloud Telephony Platform?
If you are simply looking to tick the box that all calls are recorded, then the standard capabilities provided in many of the cloud telephony platforms is sufficient. However, if you are looking to generate value from recording calls in terms of managing quality, compliance and truly understand the customer experience, then the best approach is to complement your cloud telephony with a specialist recording and analytics solution.
We are the perfect example of this, our Liquid Voice recording & analytics is provided as a cloud-based solution which can be consumed as-a-Service. We have standard interfaces into all of the leading UCaaS and CCaaS platforms and are supporting many of our customers in this manner.
By complementing your cloud-based telephony with a specialist solution like Liquid Voice means you do not have to compromise in terms of gaining all of the benefits of capturing interactions. From our cloud we are able to not only record calls but also capture email, SMS, chat and even self-service interactions. We are able to transcribe and analyse these in real-time and provide your team with rich reporting and analytical insights into your operation.
Can I Use The Same Platform for UCaaS and CCaaS?
This is a key point you should be considering. An increasing number of customer interactions extend beyond the contact centre and if you only focus on recording within your CCaaS platform, you are only capturing part of the customer journey.
By separating out your recording platform from the underlying communication platforms (of which you are likely to have multiple) you have the ability to capture every interaction regardless of where they take place across your organisation. This does not only ensure that you are fully compliant, but also means that you are analysing the holistic picture, not just a part of it.
What is more, one of the key benefits of moving to a cloud-telephony service is your ability to switch between providers as required to reduce cost or cater for new requirements. By having a logical separation between communication and recording platform enables you to do this without affecting your underlying recording capability.
What About My Legacy Recordings?
This is a key concern for those organisations migrating to a new platform; you are required to retain recordings for a defined period but you don’t want to have to maintain multiple legacy platforms. We have solved this for many of our customers by simply ingesting their legacy recordings into our platform. This approach provides you with a single consolidated repository for interaction recordings and as part of the process, provides you with an opportunity to clean-up your legacy data.
Many organisations are required to retain calls that pre-date the latest GDPR, Privacy Act and PCI DSS legislation and as such creates a compliance risk. As part of our process of ingesting legacy calls into our platform, we are able to validate each recording for compliance, taking the necessary remedial action to redact sensitive information, encrypt and secure recordings and remove any toxic data.
One final thought addresses the concern of those organisations that are moving to a cloud-telephony platform but want to retain control of recorded interactions on premise or in their own private cloud. For some industry sectors this is a standard requirement and one that we cater for by providing the flexibility to deploy our solution as a cloud service, a private cloud deployment or indeed a premise-based solution seamlessly connected to your cloud telephony service.
Chris Berry is the managing director of Liquid Voice, a leading provider of interaction capture and analytics solutions that is helping many organisations to continue to deliver the best possible service to its customers in these difficult times. You can reach out directly to Chris by email chris.berry@liquidvoice.com or find out more on our website liquidvoice.com.
