Most companies record calls and use call recording solutions. Whether it is for compliance, quality control or training, there are millions of calls recorded daily. North America holds the largest market share of voice call monitoring and recording in terms of both revenue and volume, this is becoming easier to do with advances in cloud call recording and storage software. However, there are some risks with recording phone calls and their subsequent storage and many reasons why you need to encrypt them.
Enterprise technology and security go hand in hand. The amount of high profile hacks and phishing have cost business worldwide billions in lost revenue. The most common targets are employees’ emails, text messages and phone calls.
As technology becomes more sophisticated so does the means by which hackers and phishing attacks occur. More and more attempts are happening daily, with one occurring every 39 seconds and over 300,000 new malware being created everyday.
The bottom line is – if you record calls, you need to encrypt them. Unfortunately, not all call-recording systems encrypt stored data, leaving you and customers at risk.
Why you need to encrypt your recorded calls
Protect your company and your customers from hacks
As I stated previously, there are thousands of attacks daily and cost billions every year and is one of the top concerns for businesses worldwide. Protecting your intellectual property and your customers’ data should be of the upmost importance no matter what type of industry you are in. Many customer transactions occur through phone calls and if left unprotected, sensitive data can be obtained by hackers. Up until March 2019 over 14 billion data records had been lost or stolen and only 4% of these breaches were encrypted, i.e. protected and rendered useless to the hackers. Taking a proactive approach to encryption of all data stored, not just calls, is vital for all business as the cost of reacting post breach is too high both in monetary terms, brand image and customer trust.
Compliance with CCPA and other regulations
There are more and more stringent recordkeeping and data protection regulations being implemented such as CCPA, NARA, FINRA, and MiFId II. Call recording software helps companies comply with these regulations and avoid hefty fines and penalties, which can exceed millions of dollars. Under the new CCPA regulation, encryption requirements are clearly outlined. If you do not encrypt sensitive data, and lose it, you are not complying with CCPA. Not encrypting is evidence that you violated your duty to provide reasonable security procedures and practices to protect sensitive information. The cost of breaches in 2020 is predicted to reach $150 million, so it is crucial to encrypt any data you possess; phone calls, emails and text messages etc. There is little dopubt that in the coming months and years more states will be introducing regulations similar to CCPA, some such as New York have already drafting their own version.
Transparency and traceability
Transparency and traceability were included in Gartner’s 2020 technology trends. New technology has created a trust crisis with consumers. Customers are becoming more aware about how their data is being stored, so businesses need to ensure that they are being transparent and listening to customers. By being transparent with customers and letting them know you take their privacy and trust seriously by encrypting their phone calls, emails and data, you will have happier clients, raise your NPS score and have a higher retention .
Are companies struggling to encrypt recorded calls?
In short- yes. Many businesses are struggling to find suitable solutions for call recording and encryption. Finding a solution that records mobile phones and integrates with other communication methods is proving difficult. There are many solutions that can do one or the other. However, very few that can record everything AND have access to them all in one place.
That’s where Recordia comes in. Recordia is a disruptive call recording solution that captures, records encrypted and securely stores not only landlines but mobiles, emails, social media and more, and lets you easily access them through an easy to use interface.
With significantly lower costs, quick set-up and unlimited usability, cloud-based technology has been slowly substituting on-premise over the course of the last few years. However, despite the increasing number of businesses moving to the cloud, a huge percentage of call recording deployments are still relying on physical infrastructures. In this article, we will take a look at the differences between call recording on cloud vs. on-premise:
Upfront purchasing costs
On-premise: in the majority of the cases, the costs to set-up an on-premise call recording infrastructure can be really high. This includes the purchase of hardware, such as servers and computers, licensing, recurring operational costs, and infrastructure renewal each couple of years due to obsoletion.
Cloud: undoubtedly, one of the biggest benefits of call recording on cloud is that there is little to no investment in hardware or complex infrastructures. In fact, ongoing costs are limited to monthly subscriptions and/or use of the service (depending on the provider), and they are significantly lower than on-premise.
Maintenance
On-premise: onsite installations require regular hardware and software maintenance to ensure that the whole infrastructure is in line with the latest technological and security updates. Because this setup is quite complex, it usually requires for a qualified personnel, which can easily add up to the ongoing costs.
Cloud: moving your call recording system to a cloud-based provider means that you will no longer have to support and maintain a complex infrastructure by yourself. Because servers now belong to a trustworthy provider, they will be in charge of the upkeep, and you can focus this time and resources on more important things.
Reliability
On-premise: reliability is among the major concerns for many businesses. Is the system going to be available when you need it? Redundant data and power system can become really expensive, and not all on-premise infrastructures are prepared to handle them.
In fact, a survey conducted by Nucleus Research discovered that companies experience 32% more downtime on onsite infrastructures than on cloud.
Cloud: cloud systems, on another hand, are prepared to handle huge volumes of data, delivering a high quality of redundancy protection. Downtime is significantly less frequent on cloud than on-premise, for example, our cloud-based call recording solution Recordia has a 99.99% of uptime on our service level.
Security
On-premise: many companies still believe in the myth that call recording on-premise is more secure than call recording on cloud. However, onsite infrastructures not only experience many breaches as a result from human error or malicious practices, but they are also more difficult and expensive to update to the latest security measures.
Because this often translates to additional costs, a lot of businesses do not update regularly, facing risks for security breaches that could have been avoided.
Cloud: cloud infrastructures provide security in many different ways: via AES-256 algorithms, encryption, protection against DDoS attacks, and disaster recovery, among others.
Additionally, updates made by cloud providers impose no costs on their clients, and are easy to implement. This allows companies to stay ahead of security threats without additional costs.
Features & Integrations
On-premise: adding new features or integration alternatives are not only costly for onsite infrastructures, but they can also take a long time to be implemented while remaining compatible with the system.
Cloud: as opposed to on-premise systems, cloud-based services can equipped quickly and easily with new features and integrations. For example, Recordia is constantly adding new functionalities to its cloud-based call recording solution, such as Speech Analytics and Machine Learning technology.
Compliance
With the implementation of directives such as Dodd-Frank Act, GDPR, and MiFID II, call centers and other companies (especially the ones in the finance sector) became obligated to record calls in strict compliance with the security regulations. This means that their call recording software providers must comply as well.
On-premise: as we already mentioned, onsite infrastructures are significantly more complex and expensive to upgrade. Considering that only the compliance with Dodd-Frank Act, GDPR and MiFID II can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars, it becomes even more expensive to do it by yourself.
Cloud: cloud-based service providers such as Recordia offer call recording solutions in compliance with GDPR, Dodd-Frank Act and MiFID II, amount other regulations. Because upgrades are faster and easier on the cloud, it means that your call recording infrastructure will always be up to date with the latest modifications in the regulations.
Looking for Call Recording on Cloud?
If you are looking for a cloud-based call recording solution that captures, encrypts, records and stores communications in compliance with security regulations, talk to one of our representatives today. Contact Us.
The biggest key aspect to the success of a business is a satisfied customer. For this reason, in recent years there has been growing trend of focusing on the customer and their needs. Most people think of a CRM (customer relationship management) as just a system that captures some information about your customers. However, that is only part of the picture. CRM uses technology to gather the intelligence you need to provide improved support and services to your customers. In other words, it is how you use that information to better meet the needs of your existing customers and identify new customers, resulting in higher profits for you.
CRM software is a core part of any organization and companies are spending thousands and hundreds of thousands on it. However getting an ROI on this investment can be quite a slow process. So, how do you maximize your ROI and enhance your CRM strategy? Below, we’ve outlined some tips on how to enhance your CRM.
Most businesses have a CRM system but do not use it to its full capacity. The best CRM strategy that you can have is one that not only helps one particular department, i.e., sales – achieve its goals, but one that is truly inter-departmental.
One of the benefits of CRM software is that you can track a potential customer right from the first moment they to your blog or newsletter to the moment they become a fully-fledged paying customer. Therefore marketing will benefit from the system just as much as sales. From social media campaigns to email workflows, these insights will help inform marketing when the best times are to post content, to reach out to contacts, and to hand-off the lead to the sales department. Having access to CRM data can even benefit the R&D department, as it could help them figure out the next product or upgrade that should be brought to market.
2. Integration with call recording software
integrating your CRM system with a call recording solution can dramatically improve what data you gather and how you can exploit it. Phone calls are still the number one way customers interact with a brand, so ensuring you have easy access to phone calls and data gathered from them should be a number one priority. With recordings you have insights into your customers and the information can be used in a variety of ways such as market research, quality control, employee evaluation and training etc.
3. Speech and Data Analytics
IF you have your CRM integrated with a call recording solution, the next step is analyzing and using the information from those calls. With speech analytics you can transcribe audio into text and then, analyze the content of the transcribed text. With this system, you can detect and analyze patterns, keywords of interest, etc. You can read a more in depth article on the importance of speech analytics here.
Doing an in-depth analysis of the data and information gathered with Speech Analytics, we can gain a better understanding of our customers preferences, concerns, opinions on customer service team, etc, and use this information to improve the customer experience. According to research by Dun & Bradstreet, 91% of data in CRM systems is incomplete, 18% is duplicated, and 70% is rendered stale each year. By combining Speech Analytics software with your CRM you can organize and complete this data and automatically gain large volumes of important information.
4. Artifical Intelligence and personalization
Traditionally, CRM’s have been used as information repositories, however with artificial intelligence CRM’s could be capable of generating targeted recommendations for sales people, for example, prompting relevant marketing and sales collateral at specific times. It could also be used to target certain clients and recommend specific products or sending email offers that are related to items previously purchased by a consumer. Customers want to feel valued, so the more personalized approach the better, for example, following up on a customer’s experience and keeping track of important dates in your relationship with the customer is one way of guaranteeing a positive experience. Artificial Intelligence offers companies the opportunity to greatly improve their relationship with customers and can therefore greatly improve client retention.
5. Integration with social media
It is imperative that your CRM integrates with your brands social media, research has shown that social media can have an influence on whether or not an prospective client purchases, with SproutSocial showing that over 50% of customers. Not only this, but social media offers valuable data on how a brand is perceived, people regularly post to social media to complain and compliment to brands. If you don’t have your CRM system integrated with social media, you will miss out on large amounts of valuable data and information about how your brand is perceived online.
Recordia
Recordia seamlessly integrates with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, enriching the powerful database with the data and information it gathers. With Recordia, your sales team can automatically log phone call recordings, emails, SMS, faxes, and other interactions and they can retrieve and analyze these later, which increases the ability to exploit data and also simplifies the search process in the CRM. All data is synched to your CRM in real time and without taking up or consuming your storage space.
Analyzing your customers’ calls is the best way to know how your business is performing, 92% of all interactions with customers occur over the phone, the information you access through the call recordings can become a gold mine, obtaining information on customer satisfaction, turnover, employee performance, campaign effectiveness and service problems, among many others.
92% of interactions occur over the phone
Reviewing and analyzing them manually is not realistic and unsophisticated. With our Recordia solution, 100% of recorded calls can be transcribed and analyzed generating valuable information. You can also automatically identify and analyze keywords, phrases of interest, categories and topics covered during calls in order to reveal trends, concerns and opportunities.
Speech Analytics is a tool that helps analyze the content of a conversation, this conversation is usually a call that was recorded or processed for this purpose. Speech Analytics normally consists of two parts, on the one hand the transcription of the audio into text, and on the other hand the analysis of that transcribed content. With this system, you can detect and analyze patterns, keywords of interest, etc.
Every day Speech Analytics is becoming more advanced and allows for more complex and real-time analyzes, and not only calls (audios) but also emails, SMSs and other communications that are made between the company and its customers.
There are several reasons to use Speech Analytics, among which the most prominent are:
Management analysis, such as quantifying the times that a client mentions the competition, or knowing the customer’s feelings by quantifying, for example, the times that the Client mentions “problem” or “does not work”, thus managing to make decisions quickly, solving any incident that is causing problems for clients.
Detecting patterns of interest, such as if a person mentions “unsubscribe” or the name of the competition during the conversation, this can be used in real time in a digital marketing system, then the system will automatically show the employee promotions or steps to follow in the event of loss of service.
Detecting unknown patterns, for example ranking the words most used by customers, knowing what the concerns are, or understanding what is the informal name that customers give to certain products or services, thus acquiring valuable insights for future business and marketing decisions.
Doing an in-depth analysis of the data and information, which we can access thanks to Speech Analytics, we can understand customer tastes or concerns, what bothers them about our services, where we are failing in customer service, knowing the management flow of our contact centers and employees to users and customers, so we know what needs to be corrected or modified.
The importance of Speech Analytics
Improving the customer experience
Most of the time, improving our customers experience is the main reason to invest in solutions such as Speech Analytics, this type of technology allows us to track and analyze the management of commercial and tele-operators in real time if necessary.
Improve quality
With Speech Analytics, you can track customers and employees simultaneously. Defining key performance indicators (KPIs) that allow measuring, in hundreds or thousands of calls for each of the company’s employees. This allows us to make decisions on those problems that may occur during management: abnormal increase in calls, high dissatisfaction rates, etc. It also lets us to know the weaknesses in the training of company personnel, in order to train them and thus have a better quality service: Customer Satisfaction, First Contact Resolution, Sales Effectiveness, Duration of Service, etc.
Increase efficiency and reduce costs
When we have specific objectives, the ROI (return of investment) of Speech Analytics is usually very high. Focusing the tool on 1 or 2 objectives, we can achieve goals quickly, providing significant savings and improvements in terms of sales, with less effort and in shorter implementation periods.
To meet the expectations of Speech Analytics, it is necessary to have an expert technology company. At CWS, we have the ability to achieve personalized designs for the needs of each client, with minimal internal effort and maximizing the benefits and quality of the results.
Increase sales and identify business opportunities.
Thanks to Speech Analytics, companies can increase sales, cross-selling and up-selling. With this tool gather information on the quality of the opportunities and / or leads, increasing and personalizing offers, according to the interest shown by each client in their conversation. In addition, you can extract best practices in closing sales and managing customer objections, among many other valuable information.
Reduce customer churn
With the use of a Speech Analytics tool we know the perception of customers about our products, services and care, the combination of this information allows us to accurately identify the causes for which customers negatively value the company, or leaving the services. In this way, each client can be identified and rated on their potential leak rate, or on the contrary, on the increase in their loyalty.
In today’s ever-changing environment, businesses need to adapt to the needs and wants of their customers. Companies are now expected to discover and use innovative technologies and methods to get involved and interact with their customers. In fact, a recent report by Forrester found that 63% of US adults agree with the statement:
“I would like to be able to change customer service between channels and without having to repeat my situation every time”.
Customers are not using just landline phones to interact with customer service, so why are some businesses just recording landlines? Recording technology can’t just focus on recording landlines which is why omnichannel recording has increased significantly in the last number of years. Businesses have to be able to record almost any interaction and hold them within one single repository.
In an effort to create a more positive and seamless experience and to retain customer loyalty, businesses and contact centers are rapidly investing in omnichannel solutions to reach their customers in their preferred channels, e.g. email, social networks, applications, messaging services, etc.
Omnichannel means having a seamless and unified experience across all channels for customers or prospects. Omnichannel recording isn’t just a technology, it’s the experience that a customer has with your brand across various platforms and channels at every step of their journey. In this post we’re going to discuss omnichannel recording and the importance of a single information repository for your business.
Advantages of omnichannel recording in a single repository platform
1. Comprehensive compliance
Using Omnichannel recording and a single repository platform can help you reach the demands of regulators and standards keeps your customers and your organization safe whilst minimizing organizational risk by applying best practices and compliance standards on all channels. IF you have one solution that records everything, you only need to worry about one solution complying, making the complex process of compliance quite simple. By using a cloud solution you future proof your compliance as they can be updated and adapted to any changes in regulations. There has been an increase in regulations over the last few years, e.g. CCPA, many other states are currently looking into their own versions of CCPA so you can protect yourself and ensure compliance by using an omnichannel recorder.
2. Scalability and Flexibility
Using an omnichannel interaction recorder with a single platform enables a company to be flexible and easily adapt to any operational changes. Using a cloud pay-per-use solution offers a company the ability to increase or decrease usage at any time. Therefore, during busy periods where you have more agents you can temporarily increase the usage whilst ensuring that you adhere to compliance regulations etc.
3. Scale data processing
With an estimated 80% of the of data recorded being unstructured, this puts huge strain on a company’s resources. For some that receive thousands of calls or emails everyday this creates huge amounts of data that is impossible to process, analyze understand or classify manually. There is too much data to process. Ensuring you use a solution that can automatically process large amounts of data in an efficient and cost-effective manner, is not easy to come by, but they do exist. With Recordia, for example, you can get value from all unstructured information, performing automatic labeling and definition of feelings of all recorded calls, and from these actions, start a workflow for the development of activities and follow-up on each call.
4. Gain customer insights
Storing all customer interactions in a single information repository system offers you the capability to gain insights from large amounts of data. IF it comes with some automatic processing and classification, you can easily gain insights into customer feelings, trends, needs and wants that can be used in many areas of the business such as sales, marketing, customer service training and R&D.
5. Traceability
Finding a solution that offers full traceability and auditing trails is essential. That is one of the benefits of using a single repository platform. You can capture, record and store all interactions and associated metadata, ensuring that you can trace every interaction whether you record 100 customer interaction a day or 10,000. Our Recordia interaction cloud recorder after capturing and recording interactions, immediately encrypts them using sophisticated algorithms, always travel through secured links and are protected against unauthorized access through digital signature and hashes.
Recordia’s connector for Salesforce CRM increases productivity and efficiency of all sales and marketing teams. Salesforce is known for revolutionizing the CRM industry. Due to the innovative use of cloud computing, Salesforce CRM is more accessible for most companies, allowing the integration of many third-party functionalities, such as the integration of call recording through Recordia Connector for Salesforce.
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Recordia is a disruptive interaction recorder, capable of capturing, encrypting, recording and exploiting data in the cloud, with the highest level of security available. Recordia is a global service provider that records calls and other interactions, such as video, SMS, fax, chats and face-to-face meetings. Recordia integrates with Salesforce and enables users to get a 360º view of their agents’ performance, as well as receive information for sales, operations and marketing departments.
The Recordia-Salesforce integration is simple and easy to use. Once you’re signed in to your Salesforce CRM account, you’ll find your saved calls under “Tasks.” You can click on the call you want to review and see the call details panel with all the information and the “call recording” link where you will be redirected to the Recordia platform and asked to log in. There, you can play, download, transcribe or view the details of the call.
The need to call customers grows daily, and as the business grows, so does the need to communicate better, faster and more efficiently than ever. The Recordia Connector for Salesforce helps sales, management and marketing teams stay focused on the customer, quickly and easily getting valuable information about the customers with whom conversations have been generated.
Recordia for Saleforce CRM
Recordia is a disruptive interaction recorder, capable of capturing, encrypting, recording and exploiting data in the cloud, with the highest level of security available. Recordia is a global service provider that records calls and other interactions, such as video, SMS, fax, chats and face-to-face meetings. Recordia integrates with Salesforce and enables users to get a 360º view of their agents’ performance, as well as receive information for sales, operations and marketing departments.
Benefits of Call Recording in Salesforce with Recordia
Listen to any sales conversation
Never wonder again why a particular sales call generated new business or not. Recordia captures 100% of sales call recordings in Salesforce CRM, giving you complete visibility into every conversation.
A Powerful Call Training Tool
Many of the world’s most successful sales organizations use call recordings for training. With Recordia, you can annotate call recordings with practical feedback. You can also set up a template to collect sales calls that help reps learn from revenue-generating calls.
Call recording laws vary from country to country, and Recordia enables central management of your team’s calls to help you stay compliant with existing regulations such as MiFID II and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Best Call Recording Tool for Salesforce CRM
Call recordings sync effortlessly with Salesforce CRM, automatically saving recordings against call logs. Just click a button and Recordia will capture 100% of inbound and outbound sales calls in your Salesforce CRM.
The World’s Most Flexible Voice Recording Solution for Sales Teams
Recordia’s Call Recording Tool can be configured to work with any phone system, including your desk phone, cell phone, or Smart Dialer for Salesforce CRM. No matter what devices your sales team uses, Recordia ensures that all calls are logged in Salesforce CRM.
Automatically transcribe all sales calls
Would you rather read the call transcripts instead of listening to them? No problem! Recordia provides complete transcripts of all calls directly into Salesforce CRM, offering another way to gain visibility into every conversation your sales reps have with potential customers.
Identify important calls with Keyword Spotting
Recordia has the function of Keyword Spotting to be able to identify and categorize calls according to the keywords that are defined. For example, identify all calls in which the word or phrase “unsubscribe” or “cancel the service” was used, as well as those calls that mention the names of the competition or that use rude words.
Although Keyword Spotting is used to identify and tag calls based on their content and the keywords that are defined, this function of Recordia has the ability to start a workflow from the moment a call is tagged. For example, all calls tagged as ‘unsubscribe’ could start a workflow so that those calls go directly through an email to a supervisor so they can understand why customers are unsubscribing.
With Keyword Spotting, you can quickly identify within all calls which are positive, negative or neutral, among other categories that can be defined using “keywords” as an identifier.
Learn more about our call recording solution for Salesforce.
Outbound Call Centers are call centers where the focus is not on receiving incoming calls but making outgoing calls. This means, they are call centers that are dedicated to making multiple calls by trained agents to promote the company’s sales, satisfy current customers with new products or services, and motivate new nearby consumers. Thus improving customer service and thereby increasing business sales.
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There are multiple advantages that your company will obtain with an Outbound Call Center
Timely and efficient information for the users of your company
Attract new customers, through multiple phone calls
Make new sales to old buyers of your company
Remember payments and debts by phone
Quality control of the after-sales service
Schedule appointments, increasing customer and supplier satisfaction
Outbound Call Centers
Proper call management by the professional team of an outbound call center will determine the success of our campaigns. But, how can we improve the competitive advantages of our company to position ourselves against the competition? Optimizing the calls of our outbound call center. To do this, we must:
Have the best team of agents
A well-trained and experienced team is the best asset to ensure the success of a telemarketing campaign. As well as knowing perfectly the product or service that is being sold and knowing how to transmit it, empathizing with the potential client. Keeping agents motivated to perform at their best will be key in this process.
Have the right tools
In order to properly manage the campaigns, the company must have the appropriate technical teams. Good software adapted to the volume of calls and the number of agents available is essential to be able to carry out effective and quality work.
Automate processes
Time optimization is vital in this type of campaign. It is about being able to contact as many customers as possible, so the automation of processes such as automatic dialing or recording calls for the analysis of effectiveness, for example, will help to achieve this.
Obtain and analyze the results
This part of the process is crucial to be able to measure which actions have worked and which have not, and thus be able to anticipate future actions, on which the effectiveness of the campaigns will depend. There are call recording and analysis tools for Call Centers that, thanks to Speech Analytics, can generate information on the results or efficiency of campaigns.
Get more information about our Call Recording Solution for Call Center.
Basic indicators to measure the success of an Outbound Call Center
Number of calls made
As operators make calls, they begin to identify the tactics that work best. This will help implement this strategy in future contacts.
Call duration
This will depend on the interest that potential customers show in the product or service you are trying to sell. In the first call we can already identify if this is high or not, being able to dedicate more time to those who may represent a conversion.
Contacts obtained
Whether our campaign is effective or not can be measured by the number of leads (potential customers) that we have achieved that are interested in our product.
Value data
With the use of Speech Analytics you can better understand the behavior of the campaigns, for example you can know in how many calls mention the competition or keywords of the campaigns that help you identify the impact of an outbound strategy.
6 tips to optimize an Outbound Call Center
Automating the dialing: We have already seen how having a dialer or predictive dialer system to carry out the dialing automatically and distribute the calls among the telemarketers is essential to correctly organize the work of the outbound call center. But for these calls to be really effective, it is essential that they are based on specific objectives and have a good database.
Monitor the campaigns with the data collected: Thanks to the implementation of the correct call center or contact center software, we can obtain reports and monitor the evolution of any campaign; something essential to ensure your success. Therefore, it is essential to obtain real-time data about the average duration of calls, the performance of each agent, history of successful calls, etc.
Offer different payment methods: In the case of telemarketing and telephone sales campaigns, it is important to have completely secure payment options to avoid being confused with scams or sanctioned.
Keeping agents motivated: Another key aspect of optimizing outbound call management is ensuring that agents are motivated. That is why software for the outbound call center sector is so important, since they enhance your profitability, facilitate your daily work and see better results with the same effort.
Manage multiple campaigns at the same time: On more than one occasion, agents must manage several campaigns simultaneously, so it is important to assign each agent one or more of them, based on their priority and experience, and organize the work of efficient way.
Having the right tools: Having specific contact center software will allow you to optimize the management of outgoing calls. When choosing a software of this type, it is recommended that the system you choose is flexible and allows you to modify the number of agents and extensions depending on your needs.
Get more information about our Call Recording Solution for Call Center.
Most companies have been recording phone calls for years, mostly for quality control, and just like any other data, voice recordings must be securely retained for compliance purposes. Because of this, data security and privacy has become the most important factor when choosing the right voice and data recording system. What does Security in voice and data recording really mean? We have compiled a list of 5 things to look out for when choosing a secure voice and data recording solution.
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5 things to look out for when choosing a secure voice and data recording solution
1. Compliance with regulations
Data and privacy regulations have been increasing over the last number of years and have also become more stringent and deeper in their scope. Therefore, when choosing a call recording solution, you need to ensure the call recording solution complies with regulations such as MiFID II, CCPA, GDPR, the Dodd Frank and PCI DSS etc. This is undoubtedly the most important factor to lookout for when choosing a provider. Ensuring that the solution complies with all of these regulations is the first step to securing your transaction and customer data etc.
2. Ensure security in storage and transport.
Ensuring that all data and voice recordings are recorded and archived securely should be one of the top priorities when looking for a provider. MiFID II for example, makes it very clear in its requirements that you securely record and securely store all interactions using high encryption standard available like AES 256. Encryption protects your business and clients in terms of compliance as well as phishing or hacking which is becoming an increasingly more common threat to businesses.
Call recording platforms like Recordia use sophisticated encryption and security protocols to protect this data including HTTPS, TLS, AES256, HSM, Hash, and Rotating Key Mgmt. Done properly cloud compliance recording can be made far more secure and provide levels of data redundancy that are unavailable with any premise based approach.
3. Scalability
It is also important to consider a solution that is easy to scale. That is why cloud solutions are becoming the most popular over on premises. Why is this? Simply put, cloud recording solutions offer the highest standard of encryption and secure storage available while also offering the possibility to increase or decrease usage at any given time without any upfront costs or installing any hardware or new software.
4. Speech Analytics
Finding a solution with an easy to use interface where you can quickly find your recorded calls or communications in a timely manner. Solutions which have artificial intelligence features such as word spotting offer this possibility.
The requirements of these regulations for businesses to increase the volume of interactions and calls recorded as well as the amount of time required to store them, not only puts pressure on them cost wise but also the sheer volume and amount of data to organise can be quite complicated. However, choosing a solution that offers a speech and data analytics feature that organizes and processes the data in an efficient and cos effective manner is key.
Besides this, speech analysis offers numerous benefits, for example, you can search for the frequency of commonly used phrases by your staff and clients. By doing this, you will be able to gain real-time insight into changes into the markets, customer feelings or wants, staff performance and then make changes accordingly.
5. A solution that can record mobile phones
For most organizations recording fixed lines is not a problem as you can implement solutions easily in the office. However as mobile phones are increasingly being used within businesses and must be recorded. Finding a solution that can both record landlines and mobile phones while securely recording the phone call can be quite difficult boat it is an essential factor when considering a provider or a call recording solution. Not only most phone calls be security accorded you also must ensure that they are securely stored and that they are encrypted during transition stop.
If you would like more information about our Recordia solution don’t hesitate to contact us.
If you work for a financial services company who is legally required to record calls and interactions for compliance purposes, now there is a new reality driven by the latest regulations and the quarantine situation due to the COVID- 19 health crisis.
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This involves more channels than ever and an expanded range of interactions across different devices: voice transmissions over landlines, VoIP, mobile lines, SMS, video, screen activities, even content sharing. These interactions also include new ways to communicate when telecommuting, such as video conferencing, collaboration, and digital messaging tools.
At the same time, growing regulatory demands are driving organizations to increase call recording and interactions with artificial intelligence, automation, machine learning, and other emerging technologies to ensure regulatory compliance across all existing communication channels, from dispatch offices. operations in offices to telecommuting at home.
In the following article, we would like to provide you with sound and practical advice on how you can take advantage of call recording to manage the increased complexity and volatility of today’s regulatory space and protect your technology investments in the future.
The growth of financial regulations and the need to record calls
The evolution and growth of regulatory demands, technological advances and changing trends in communications during the last decade have posed new challenges in the market and have forced providers recording technology to adapt to this ever-evolving landscape.
Call recording is high on the agenda as companies in the financial sector must collect structured and unstructured data to comply with strict regulations such as MiFID II , CCPA and GDPR, report and seek ways to generate additional business value from recorded and stored interactions.
A set of financial legislation that came into force, such as MiFID II in the European Union, requires the capture, storage and custody of calls and other interactions with customers. This applies to a variety of companies in the financial industry, such as banks, stockbrokers, insurers, credit unions, and corporate finance companies, among others.
In particular, MiFID II, the latest financial regulation in the European Union, expands the scope of record storage to encompass more users and channels to facilitate the reconstruction of business events, while requiring companies to record all interactions that could represent a business. This puts great pressure on the capabilities of legacy call recording solutions. Recorded communications should be retained and archived with different retention periods for possible review by regulatory agencies.
Overall, the fundamental objective of these recent trade regulations and directives, along with other laws and codes of conduct at the country level, is to protect investors, strengthen market integrity, and prevent financial crime, including money laundering and the use of inside information. Those who do not meet the requirements run the risk of fines for non-compliance, serious penalties and reputational damage.
What is compliance recording and what role does it play in enabling regulatory compliance?
As we have seen, business call recording has long become a widespread and commonly adopted technology solution in financial services and large corporations.
But what makes it different? Most phone systems and messaging tools have a certain level of built-in ability to record and store conversations. However, recording call for compliance is a different story, recording technology in compliance sensitive environments must meet the following requirements:
Handle large volumes of call traffic (which can equal millions of conversations every month or year)
Capture tens of thousands of centrally regulated users
Support a variety of voice and electronic communication channels, and integrate with an increasing number of new and traditional digital endpoints,
Cover multiple call scenarios, including public, external telephone networks, public switched (PSTN), conference and mobile interactions,
Offer unified management and administration of recording status and captured data,
Provide open architecture and seamless interoperability to make data capture an integral part of infrastructure of compliance.
In particular, a centralized network-side recording procedure can help ensure that the data capture process cannot be interrupted or altered in any way by the registered user or by unauthorized third parties.
A key attribute of business compliance recording solutions is their ability to preserve, protect, and provide secure access to stored data. Given current strict privacy and data protection requirements, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), call recording technology must be able to provide mechanisms to access, manage and securely store data. Help ensure that it remains unalterable, auditable and fully erasable if there is no legal or regulatory reason to process and preserve it any longer.
Therefore, companies should look for compliance recording platforms that offer:
Multilevel role-based access control
Secure authentication procedures
Complete audit logs
The means to digitally encrypt and sign data
To ensure uninterrupted data capture functionality, an enterprise call recording system often relies on high availability and recording redundancy options that facilitate duplication of recording flows allowing continuous operations in the event of server failure.
Increased call recording requires access to data management and analysis
It is a fundamental requirement not only to record conversations and preserve recordings automatically, but also to provide a unified framework for managing, retrieving and replaying stored data, as well as offering ways safe and simplified administration and maintenance. Plus, advanced conversation search, keyword filtering, and tagging capabilities make it easier and faster to spot relevant interactions and analyze the details mentioned during a call.
As an extension of the data capture and process automation layers, artificial intelligence (AI) plays an increasingly important role by putting unstructured data into a structured format.
MiFID II, for example, requires investment firms to demonstrate compliance with recording and storage regulations for recordings and to periodically monitor transaction and order records subject to these requirements, including relevant conversations. This involves a certain level of automation of monitoring procedures, driving full and continuous transcription, and holistic control of interactions rather than selective sampling of recorded calls.
The new generation of call recording solutions offers a set of functionality for compliance managers to facilitate their daily work and gain more comprehensive control, such as:
Unified playback of captured media such as call logs, SMS, fax, email etc.
Data visualization dashboards and options to analyze compliance metrics, track recording trends, and drill down to anomalies and performance,
Report options that can be customized at the organization, group, or user level,
Intuitive, automated identification-based workflows keyword and rule execution.
This is completely changing the way that internal control and compliance teams perform data capture, aggregation, and investigation.
In terms of data capture, it is essential to be able to collect and store communication records from a variety of sources and data points in a common format, regardless of the multiple silos and systems in which they reside, especially in large banks and investment firms. In parallel, data must be indexed using appropriate metadata so that all information relevant to a particular business can be retrieved for audit and compliance purposes.
Another challenge in traditional operating room communications is the ability to capture all sides of the conversation clearly and distinctively. Given the nature of noisy commercial environments, legacy recorders often lack the technology to fully meet this demand. Increased communications capture with highly accurate transcription and phonetic reinforcement make it possible to adjust and adapt monitoring to the environment of a financial company, continually improving the way the engine can understand and understand merchant discourse and financial jargon. specific to your organization.
CWS offers a cloud solution for call recording and interactions that complies with current regulations and helps companies in the financial sector to comply with MiFID II, CCPA and GDPR. Learn more about Recordia.
Call recording is nothing new whether its for compliance, risk mitigation, fraud detection or even training purposes. However very few banks are recording mobile phone calls. Nowadays, customers expect around – the -clock customer service and support and real time responsiveness, which now requires the use of mobile phones. Customers especially expect this level of service from their banks.
Learn more about our cloud call recording solution Recordia
Mobile devices are necessary they are for business today, providing mobile phones to employees enables the greatest level of control and oversight. Monitoring of mobile devices would be available firm wide, and adherence of company policies and procedures is greatly increased. Any wrong doing detected could be attributed to an individual, and not an institutional failure to supervise.
Why Financial institutions need to record mobile phone calls?
There are many reasons financial institutions record calls. quality assurance, best practices and complying with regulations. The risk of non compliance is too high for financial institutions to ignore in terms of both monetary and reputational risk.
1. Conflict resolution and Quality assurance
By having calls recorded any disputes that arise between a firm and a client can be swiftly dealt with and calls can provide evidence avoiding a he said -she said situation. Regardless of the outcome, recorded evidence is compelling, and sometimes may even rebut information presented through documentation or oral testimony.
In today’s global pandemic situation with COVID – 19, where many employees are working from home the need for mobile recording is quite evident. If you only record office landlines, you cannot prove or back up employees, leaving your firm liable to huge risk, as if any dispute were ti arise you have no evidence.
Financial institutions also record for quality assurance purposes. Even while remote working, a quality assurance manager can still listen to interactions provide feedback and improve processes and customer services.
2. To comply with regulations
In today’s heavily regulated business environment, financial institutions must comply with a variety of laws and requirements to remain insured and avoid heavy penalties.
With U.S. financial legislation such as the Dodd-Frank, Consumer Protection Act and CCPA as well as in MiFID II and GDPR in Europe, banks have been looking at how best to monitor and control the activities of their employees and their contact centers to ensure they’re complying with all regulations.
For instance, banks in the U.S., are required to record every transaction, such as the orders from customers over the phone when buying or selling a stock. Banks must record those calls to prove they have not broken any laws and that they actually did what the customer requested.
In Europe, MiFID II expands on the current mandate requiring firms to record communications. These requirements cover ALL telephone conversations and electronic communications – including those which take place on mobile phones.
3. Avoid market abuse, through enhanced detection.
American business are losing $50 billion dollars a year alone to employee theft. Financial institutions are especially vulnerable to this and must take into consideration how culture and conduct risk affect every aspect of their operations and must ensure best practices and accountability. The top 20 banks globally spend more than $300 billion on conduct every four years. Ensuring that you use a call recording system that works correctly and captures ALL calls and communications is essential to helping with this.
With trading moving further away from the physical trading floor, there is a higher risk of market abuse. The FCA’s expectation is clear that firms must take all steps to prevent market abuse risks and firms are expected to be able to maintain a sufficiently robust control environment.
It is becoming more difficult for compliance departments, authorities, or regulators to detect market abuse and prove malicious action. Using recorded calls provides additional material for discovering the facts of a case.
If your firm only recorded and monitored trading, front-office, and back-office communications, and excluded communications on mobile phones, the risk of market abuse would be much higher. A few bad apples would instantly be able to perform untraceable fraud. Given the importance in today society, excluding mobile recording annuls regulatory purpose of increasing certainty, investor protection, and deterring marking abuse.
Use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to further protect your firm
If your firm records all communications including landlines and mobiles, you can take your risk management and compliance one step further with artificial intelligence. Some solutions offer capabilities such as word spotting, sentiment analysis, quasi – real- time analysis and data processing.
Around 80% of the world’s data is not structured, i.e. not organized. Large quantities of call audio data is created every day (in Recordia more than 3 million calls are processed per month), due to the large amount of stored data it is difficult to analyze, understand and classify manually, not to mention It consumes a lot of time and is expensive. By utilizing AI your firm can protect itself from fraud, non- compliance and dispute resolution by quickly using the features outlined above, to quickly access the data you need.
How can financial institutions comply and manage risk effectively?
There are a few methods in which banks can monitor, secure and reduce risk. The first step is monitoring everything from communications, trading, accounts, HR data and ensuring staff receive regular training and have a strong knowledge of all policies such as ethics, conduct and a high awareness of regulations.
There are a few factors financial institutions should take into consideration when choosing a call recording solution.
Record multiple channels and all communications in a single platform
Does the provider themselves comply with regulations that cover them
Fault tolerance to ensure recording is never interrupted or files lost
Seamless recording of mobile phones to ensure you comply with all regulations and don’t miss any interaction
Does the solution incorporate Artificial Intelligence and Speech Analytics
If you would like further assistance or more information about our Recordia solution, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Session Recording Protocol (SIPREC) is an open SIP based protocol for call recording. The standard is defined by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It is compatible with many telephone platforms and providers of call recording systems. Session controllers (SBC) that support the SIPREC interface
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Session border controllers (SBC) that support SIPREC interface
AudioCodes Mediant
Avaya
Cisco
Genband
Metaswitch Perimeta
Oracle / AcmePacket
Sonus
Hosted PBX platforms that support SIPREC interface
BroadWorks
Metaswitch
SIPREC protocol
Overview
SIPREC standard defines a protocol used to interact between a Session Recording Client (SRC) (the role played by the PBX system or the Session Edge Controller) and a Session Recording Server (SRS) (a third-party call recording solution, such as Recordia).
The following illustration shows two endpoints- SIP users. The communication session is established through the recording device and the session is being recorded by an SRC and SRS.
The session recording client has access to the media path between the users. The SRC then establishes the recording session with the SRS and sends replicated media to the SRS. The SRC is also responsible for delivering metadata to the SRS, such as participant information (phone number, the call, etc.) in XML format. The standard also allows the extension of sent metadata. Providers are free to send additional metadata attributes that are specific to their telephone system. For example, BroadWorks sends the values “service provider ID”, “group ID” and “user ID”. Metaswitch sends “Business Group Name” and other attributes.
It should be noted that an SRC is a logical function. Its capabilities can be implemented in a session border controller, a SIP media gateway, a SIP phone or a SIP media server integrated with an application server.
Benefits for customers
Lower acquisition cost. The cost of implementing a recording system based on Premise can be high, which requires a large capital investment and is generally beyond the reach of many companies. Recordia’s Cloud Computing architecture allows you to achieve economies of scale with the consolidation of IT staff and hardware resources.
No initial investments. Customers pay a monthly fee. The call recording service is provided using the software model as a service (SaaS). Without administration or maintenance costs, the software is managed by the service provider.
Benefits for the service provider
A hosted call recording service offers a great opportunity to generate revenue for service providers, allowing them to reach new markets, attract new customers and expand their portfolio of solutions, such as our cloud solutions: Recordia and eComfax.
Call recording is a critical and indispensable requirement in many business communications environments, such as call centers and companies in the financial sector. In some of these sectors, all calls must be registered for regulatory and compliance reasons. In others, calls can be recorded for quality control or business analysis. Service providers can gain a competitive advantage with cloud call recording solution.
High availability
Most SIPREC protocol implementations provide high availability architecture support.
Because SIPREC is based on the SIP protocol, it supports proven techniques in the field, such as DNS SRV, for load balancing and self-tuning.
In addition to that, many telephone platform providers implement patented solutions to support multiple recording servers simultaneously. It usually allows you to configure a group of recording servers with some load balancing and failover policies. The telephone platform, for example, the session edge controller, periodically checks the availability of each of the recording servers in the group using some kind of ping (for example, by sending the SIP OPTIONS message and verifying the response). This mechanism allows the SBC to intelligently choose the “available” server in the group.
In addition to support on the SRC side, the SRS must support synchronization of data between servers in a cluster. Such data synchronization allows you to achieve data redundancy (each call recording is stored on at least two servers simultaneously), as well as providing a single point of access to the data and configuration (that is, it is not necessary to access each server individually). Our Recordia solution is geographically redundant, with 99.99% platform availability and 99.999999999% consistency of all recorded calls.
Interoperability of SIPREC-based solutions from different providers
The SIPREC protocol is an open standard; most suppliers aim to follow the requirements of this standard.
In simple recording scenarios, a vendor’s SIPREC-compatible system must be easily replaceable with another vendor’s system, be it the telephone platform (SRC function) or the recording system (SRS function).
In the real world, this is not always the case …
Firstly, many telephone system providers use proprietary extensions for metadata. This additional metadata may be important for end users and the recording system must analyze and process them properly. Thanks to an open standard, this proprietary data is sent in plain text XML format, usually self-descriptive.
Secondly, some implementations suffer slight deviations from the standard. For example, at least two SBC providers do not allow codec negotiation with the recording system, that is, they silently ignore the SDP response of the recording system. The recording system must be designed to receive RTP packets in unexpected codec.
Find out more about our call recording solution using SIPREC protocol.
Call recording is often used for the resolution of disputes, but in more serious cases companies or individuals may want to use recorded conversations in court as an evidence for their claims.
However, whether call recordings are admissible or not does not have an easy answer: it will depend on the country, the parties’ consent, the reliability of the recording, and a few other factors that we will discuss in the next article.
Before we move on, it is important to specify that legality does not equal admission. Put simply, only because a call has been recorded legally doesn’t always mean that it will be admissible in court. In addition, it also needs to be predicate: in other words, you will need to provide evidence that the recorded conversation is reliable and valid. Although this rules may vary by state and country, in most cases you should be able to:
Prove that the voice on the tape actually belongs to the person you are claiming to be.
Show that the software or hardware you used is reliable for making accurate recordings;
Prove that the tape is true and accurate representation of the interaction, and no context of importance is lost.
Authenticate that the recording has not been altered or modified.
Additionally, there is the Hearsay issue: in some cases, using someone’s prior, out-of-course statements in a recording might become problematic in the court, and could make the recording non-admissible.
Recorded conversations in the USA
The federal court and every state have established specific rules on the types of evidence that are admissible, and the authentication that is required to prove their reliability. As a general rule, evidence that has been obtained illegally will not be accepted in court.
But when exactly is considered that evidence was obtained illegally? The answer may vary between states, but here are some of the most common law applications:
One-party consent
When the law applies the one-party consent rule, it means that the consent of only one of the participants in the conversation is enough to make recorded conversations legal. However, it is important to put an emphasis on the word participant: if you are not a part of this conversation, the recording is generally considered illegal.
For example, if you are talking to someone and one of you decides to record (aka give his consent), even if the other party is unaware that the call is being recorded, it is legal under the one-party consent rule. However, if a third person is recording the conversation without participating in it, it will be considered illegal.
In the USA, the federal law and some states including New York, Louisiana and Texas are bound under the one-party consent.
Two-party consent
This type of consent, also known as all-party consent, accepts that the recording is legal only of all parties are aware that the call is being recorded, and have agreed with it.
In this case, if someone secretly recorded a conversation without informing you about his intentions and obtaining your consent, this won’t be legal in two-party consent states.
States like California, Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Michigan and Montana require the consent of all parties of the conversation before taping is allowed. Otherwise, it will be illegal, and not admissible in court.
How can Cloud Worldwide Services help?
Our flagship call recording solution Recordia is designed to ensure that companies that record calls legally can also make recorded conversations admissible in court. Here is how:
Digital Thread: we generate a hash to ensure the integrity and authenticity of the recordings. If a recording is downloaded from our cloud platform, we are capable of comparing it with the original file to detect alterations or modifications.
Security and Reliability: all conversations taped with Recordia are encrypted with the AES-256 algorithm, and protected through security certificates. We comply with GDPR, MiFID II, and the Dodd-Frank Act, which makes us a reliable service for safe and accurate recordings.
Voice Traceability: because Recordia integrates with telco providers, allows logging traceability, and detects any possible recording alterations, we reduce the risk for falsifying or impersonating voices for malicious intentions.
Accuracy and Data Consistency: with a data consistency of 99.99999%, we ensure that interactions are recorded without lost elements that might distort the context of the conversation.
Data Traceability: our logging and auditing system allows operators to know with precision who accessed what, when and from which device, thus allowing full access traceability, as Data Protection Laws require.
Data Storage: with Recordia, you can store conversations for 5+ years to comply with security regulations such as MiFID II.
NOTE: Cloud Worldwide Services is not a legal firm and this article is not intended to provide legal advice. To ensure proper compliance in your region, please consult a lawyer.
