Call recording used to be a tool to enable financial and legal organisations to achieve compliance but its scope has radically widened in recent years. This broader scope encompasses mainstream activities such as consumers agreeing contracts but is also seeing recording used to aid staff training and wellbeing, and to gather insights into the customer journey that can enable predictive actions to be taken. The increased accessibility of call recording in the cloud means it is now available across entire organisations and, when allied to readily available analytics, exciting new capabilities are enabled.
“We see a widening of call recording as part of the democratisation of voice data,” says Tony Martino, the Chief Executive of Tollring. “Compliance is one part of recording but certainly not the only part and many of our customers use recordings to enable them to run their businesses better and to ensure staff and customers are supported. Storage and analytics have become more accessible and cloud-based systems mean greater ease of use and ease of management while problems associated with scaling up have gone away.”
Real Insights in Real Time
The ability to recognise data within voice recordings and then perform analytics on it in real-time is contributing to capabilities to support both customers and staff and this has been particularly emphasised during the pandemic. The rise in working from home has seen traditional processes such as in-person support to ensure the wellbeing and training of staff change and enterprises have moved further away from on-premise systems in order to gain flexibility.
This is a substantial factor behind the growth predictions for the voice and speech market which Grand View Research estimates will grow to US$31.82bn by 2025 at a CAGR of 17.2%. Martino points out that Tollring’s own experience reveals a massive increase in appetite for call recording equipment. In 2020, he says, customers of Tollring’s call recording service, recorded 24 million minutes of calls each month in the company’s cloud, and sales of call recording increased by 89%.
“We’ve been providing call recording in the cloud since 2016 but it has become critical now,” he explains.
“Analytics and call recording elements are now the go-to services for businesses that want to understand their people and customers. The ability to understand what all those interactions look like is fundamental and being able to analyse recordings specific to breaches of service level agreement or key performance indicators enables areas of concern to be addressed”
These capabilities are also being utilised for compliance-related call recording. Meeting obligations has become much more complex as workers have dispersed from office, leaving traditional deskphones and on-premise recording equipment unused and switching to mobile phones and cloud-based recording. The challenges of adhering to rules such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which carries substantial penalties, are extensive so setting call recording policies are essential to define what needs to be recorded.
What’s Next for Call Recording?
The future of recording and analytics will see increased alignment with transcription tools which can turn voice into data and see further innovation from companies such as Cisco, Google, Nuance and Amazon. Martino welcomes the expanding ecosystem and sees it as an opportunity for Tollring to bring more functionality to its customers.
“Tollring is now able to utilise amazing APIs to apply data sets to lift out critical insights in real-time,” he says. “First, it’s about the ability to record and scale and grab information and analyse it but the second piece is how to get even richer insights out to customers and staff. The future is all about voice, data and speech transcription and we have a very strong capability to utilise these services and help our customers maximise the benefit of call recording, within their unique compliance strategies.”
