Call Recording 2020: Delivering Compliance and Customer Experience via the Cloud

Call recording compliance

In recent years, much of the drive for compliant call recording has been around meeting GDPR, but requirements are continuing to evolve as understanding of the regulation improves.

One key challenge is complexity, and making adherence to policy simple for every business. This requires effective call flow policy management to facilitate decision-making and minimise manual effort, and the flexibility to tailor compliance capabilities and to not record unless you should or need to (without debate).

To be effective, integration at platform level enables customised capability to deliver a higher level of compliance functionality. A focus on interoperability can solve these challenges, by for example, embedding compliance to record calls within every area, including mobile apps.

The global nature of modern business is also impacting this market, with businesses outside the UK exposed to more complex requirements. For example, in Denmark outbound numbers need to be anonymised in call analytics but they still need to be matched to call recordings and used to analyse recordings. These requirements drive the development of more sophisticated solutions that benefit call recording users in multiple markets.

Call recording for the SME and mid-market

The basic functionality provided by call recording solutions is largely the same whether in a formal contact centre or a single user who needs to record conversations with customers. The key differences are in the application of the technology in terms of how policies are applied, which compliance features are used, and accessibility, both in terms of cost and usability.

The mid-market typically has specific departments that need call recording, as opposed to rules that apply to the whole business. Often with more complex GDPR responsibilities, mid-market businesses need policies that are tailored to their own range of interdepartmental requirements.

In contrast, SMEs typically have less stringent or varied requirements that do not need formal business processes and are less dependent as a business on corporate regulations.

The value of analytics-enriched call recording

We have long held the belief that delivering stand-alone call recording is a missed opportunity. To truly understand customer experience, businesses need to pair the latent insights held within call recordings with wider business-based analytics. Businesses are seeing that voice-based intelligence, coupled with call analytics, provides a much deeper insight into customer experience. Analytics is offered across all of Tollring’s call recording propositions, from stand-alone entry-level right through to our fully integrated enhanced-level solutions.

A wide array of call recording options within our portfolio enables us to address requirements across the entire ecosystem of customers from SME to mid-market. Tollring is seeing increasing adoption of all of its iCall Suite modules where business-wide analytics coupled with call recording is an integral and important customer requirement.

Cloud-based call recording

Cloud-based delivery has evolved to the point where the initial challenges that users and the channel experienced are no longer an issue. As the wider business services market has advanced to where even the most precious business data is often cloud-based, such as accounting packages and CRM, trust in the cloud has greatly increased. The benefits of cloud delivery and storage outweigh the negatives around on premises, and a general focus on security and compliance has forced these elements to be addressed.

That said, there is still a level of flexibility for organisations to deploy things their way, with storage of call recordings via private cloud, on-premise datacentre or public cloud, allowing them to tailor solutions to their needs.

Call recording innovation in 2020

Call recording has historically been relatively expensive, but the added value from combining recording with analytics, and delivering a consistent user experience at all touchpoints, will mean that we will see call recording provisioned to a much larger audience. Tollring is already seeing attachment rates north of 50% amongst our base and we expect this to rise.

A lot of market players are talking about speech analytics in mid-market and enterprise, but there are some existing challenges in making it affordable and scalable for the SME market. 2020 will see a maturity in cloud AI and speech recognition engines and will bring more affordable and reliable options to the market.

As collaboration platforms such as MS Teams continue to evolve and the requirement to integrate with cloud calling platforms increases, the demand to provide integrated customer interaction analytics and the ability to access call recordings across all these interactions will be essential. This will add the need to include internal and external chat-based analytics and the ability to record all conversations both voice and video. While these capabilities are available today, we’ll see solutions around organising and presenting this information in a usable way evolve as customer requirements become clearer.

As featured by Comms Business.