Written by Chris Burden, CEO
Telephony providers are increasingly gatekeeping companies’ interaction data and recordings. This practice involves restricting access to crucial data unless businesses comply with expensive maintenance contracts or pay exorbitant fees for data export. This gatekeeping is becoming a significant issue, as with their hands tied, companies don’t have a choice but to pay up!
The Importance of Interaction Data
Why do companies just not record interactions? Less data means nothing to store – right? Interaction data is essential for businesses to understand customer behaviour, improve services, and make strategic decisions. Without having this data, or access to it, companies are hindered in their ability to perform analytics and derive valuable insights that could drive business growth.
The Two-Pronged Ultimatum
Companies often face a difficult choice when dealing with telephony providers:
Pay for Expensive Ongoing Maintenance Contracts: This option involves committing to costly contracts to ensure continued access to their data. Crazy, right?
Pay Extortionate Amounts for Data Export/Access: Alternatively, companies may be forced to pay high fees to export or access their own data. Also crazy, right?
The Impact of Interaction Data Being Held Hostage
The financial implications of these practices are significant. Organisations are charged for call recording storage, which after months of operation, compounds to substantial monthly fees. Over the course of multiple years, these costs will become astronomical. The money effectively compounds because the data needs to be stored for compliance purposes, and so rarely reduces in size. With this in mind, the size of the problem mounts, and the costs stack up.
Organisations have a duty under privacy and data protection legislation to store data securely and compliantly. When a supplier holds data for ransom, it creates a compliance nightmare. If the vendor experiences a security breach or fails to comply with future legislation, the consequences can be severe. Another potential risk is handling Freedom of Information (FoI) requests. If a customer requests their personal data to be removed, edited or simply tagged, this might not be possible without sufficient access to their database.
Why This Practice is Unethical
Large telephony providers’ practice of holding data hostage is unethical. Companies should own and have free access to their own data. Liquid Voice firmly believes that “organisations own their own data and that’s final.” It’s one of our values – true access to data and insights – especially when organisations own that data!
How We Can Help You Unlock Your Data
Liquid Voice champions data ownership and accessibility. Liquid Voice can capture recordings before they are locked into a vendor. This ensures that you can delete recordings when no longer needed for quality management and analytics, while still having access to them as long as required through our platform.
Cost Savings and Control
This approach pays for itself in saved storage costs and allows organisations to maintain control over their data, preventing them from being held to ransom by vendors.
Assess. Realise. Escape.
We encourage readers to assess your current situation with your telephony provider (if you have one). Consider the long-term financial and compliance implications of your current data storage and access arrangements. Find a way out of the maintenance contract and take back control of your data.
Liquid Voice is committed to data ownership and accessibility. And partnering with a provider that respects data rights is crucial for long-term success. Hint hint.
If you’d like a demo of our data extraction and unification platform, which consolidates legacy and current data into one platform with a Single Pane of Glass (SPOG), get in touch today. Or watch this short 1-minute-long video of how our solution works:
