Key Call Recording Channel Trends 2014

Integrated call recording
In 2014, rather than being sold as a standalone product, call recording solutions will become more feature rich and increasingly integrated with organisations’ wider business systems, databases and process. This more innovative use of call recording technologies will provide both the means and requisite business intelligence to enhance organisations’ customer experience.

For example, analysing call recordings or missed calls, and sharing this data insight with CRM systems and the wider operations teams across organisations, will facilitate more informed, strategic decision-making. Features of a fully integrated call recording solution such as tagging, flagging, annotating and evaluating call recordings simplify and automate business processes, enabling information to be shared across departments. In turn staff and customer communication improves, enhancing performance and ultimately service.

The promise of integrated call recording solutions that deliver more value, presents a great opportunity for the channel to provide an enhanced offering. More new revenue and higher margins will also be generated from the added consultancy and professional services required to implement and support these more complex solutions, and their growing infrastructure.

New market growth
The need for call recording solutions has meant they have become a more widespread, commodity product, available at more competitive prices. This means that these solutions are now accessible to not just large corporates, but a huge SME market.

Resellers now have the opportunity to sell a ‘solution’ that every business can benefit from and deliver a return on their telecoms investment. The channel must become more innovative in its sale of call recording and management software, by bundling them with phone hardware offerings to create a point of differentiation from competitors. The challenge however is to educate customers who are not familiar with integrated call recording solutions on the cost reduction and ROI benefits.

SIP
The increase in UK high speed broadband adoption will continue to prove a major enabler of SIP technology adoption. In 2014, we will see quicker deployment of systems onto SIP lines due to lower cost, greater reliability and easier implementation.

The growing sophistication of call recording technology and the ability for these technologies to provide the necessary compliance is also driving SIP adoption. In 2014, Tollring’s new breed of call recording systems will allow manual or automatic stop/start on SIP trunks whether deployed onsite or hosted.

Looking to the future, SIP-based communications will extend call recording solutions to include; real-time communications, VoIP, instant messaging, unified communications, video, and collaboration.

Compliance
Although compliance is a call recording hot topic, we estimate that 75% of businesses are most concerned about adhering to ‘internal compliance’ in line with company quality assurance and policies. Monitoring call quality, staff performance, disputes and abuse, as well as on-going staff training, will be key drivers for any size business to deploy call recording, to maintain compliance with their internal policies.

This will create a need for fully automated, business-integrated, call recording solutions, where businesses won’t have to rely on staff to follow correct procedures to be truly compliant. In fact, for call recording providers, the consultancy and educational elements of the sales process will be as important, if not more so, than the technical solution.