The world of corporate communications has been changing significantly over the past decade with the emergence of VoIP and growing take-up of cloud telephony platforms. According to Frost & Sullivan, around a third of all organisations now utilise cloud telephony and a further 35% have plans already in place to move to a cloud platform. Gartner believe this is moving even faster stating that this year 90% of IT leaders will stop purchasing on-premises telephony.
Whereas I do not believe the pandemic has changed this direction of travel, I do believe it has accelerated it, with many more organisations looking to build flexibility and agility into their communications strategy. This is a trend that is not just centred around small and mid-sized businesses, but over the past twelve months I have seen an increasing number of major enterprises migrate to cloud-based communication platforms.
How Does This Change The World of Interaction Recording?
This move to cloud-based UC and contact centre platforms is changing the way we deploy call and interaction recording. Traditionally organisations placed their communication platforms on premises; either a PBX and/or a specialist ACD contact centre platform. The recording platform would sit next to this solution, connecting directly to either record the incoming lines or the agents’ extensions.
As the communication platform moves into the cloud, the fundamental topology of recording has not changed. You still need to connect the recorder to the telephony platform and capture the interactions taking place, but this is now software driven with the captured media being streamed between the two platforms.
Most Cloud UC and Contact Centre platforms come with some inbuilt recording capabilities however, these are designed more for capturing interactions for immediate playback. Recordings are retained for only a finite period of time; they do not provide long-term retention, comprehensive call tagging, and the search and retrieval capabilities required for compliance recording. They also do not have the comprehensive range of applications that most organisations are looking for today in terms of quality management, real-time transcription and interaction analytics.
In these cases, the role of the specialist recorder has changed. It does not capture the interaction but ingests the recording from the cloud-telephony platform, tagging the call with associated structured data and then providing all of the required functionality to securely store, search, replay and analyse these interactions.
Supporting Multiple Communication Platforms
The move to cloud telephony is creating a hybrid environment. Recent research suggests that over half of businesses now operate a mixture of hosted and premises-based telephony and this is before you introduce collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams.
This means that the one-to-one relationship between communication platform and recorder has changed and so too should our thinking about interaction recording.
Hosted telephony provides organisations with the flexibility to consume the most appropriate service for each part of the business and also to switch service as requirements change or better options present themselves.
Unified Recording Hub
The need to support multiple communication platforms is fundamentally changing how organisations should think about their recording solution. Whereas this was once a one-to-one relationship, it is now and needs to be, a one-to-many relationship.
The recording platform should be the hub; the single unified solution that captures or ingests recordings from a multitude of sources whether that be current hosted or premises-based platforms, or legacy recording solutions to create a single repository – a single pane of glass onto all interactions.
This provides organisations with a capability to fully meet compliance requirements, an end-to-end view of all customer interactions and a single repository that can be mined for actionable insights into customers’ needs, behaviours and preferences.
By creating a unified recording hub, organisations are able to detach the recording layer from the underlying communication layer. As you add or change communication platforms, the recording solution can remain consistent with the ability to turn on and turn off feeds from the various channels and communication systems.
Liquid Voice are specialists in interaction recording and analytics solutions that are designed to work in today’s multi-platform and multi-channel communication environments. If you are looking to embrace cloud-telephony, or have legacy recording systems you are looking to unify into a single recording hub, we would love to discuss this with you. Please contact the team.
