How to Choose a Call Recording Solution: 5 Key Considerations for Local Authorities

The right call recording solution is an essential investment for virtually any business. No matter whether you’re running a retail company or a health clinic, recording interactions safely and efficiently is crucial.

A good recording strategy doesn’t just ensure you can stay compliant with regulations for data collection and protection. It also plays an important role in improving your company’s performance. Call recordings can help with quality assurance measures, training employees, and gathering useful insights into the customer journey, pain points, and sentiment.

In the local authorities’ landscape, the right call recording service ensures these fast-paced organizations can monitor, maintain, and improve the service they deliver to the public. It can also help to protect them from reputational damage, disputes and fraud.

So, how do local authorities choose the right call recording service?

Step 1: Examine Your Compliance Needs

Upholding compliance is one of the main reasons local authorities invest in call recording solutions. To stay aligned with local and federal regulations, businesses need to ensure they’re capturing all the right information and redacting any sensitive information.

Local authorities perform a “public service” and are therefore required to demonstrate evidence that they’re consistently improving and optimizing their processes. Recording calls provides a way of assessing and monitoring service over the phone, as well as providing playlists to support training.

Local government is also subject to Data Protection legislation. Any prospective call recording solution should help a local authority provide a good, informative service, whilst storing recorded information securely and only for as long as needed (see Step 5).

Step 2: Prioritize Comprehensive Call Recording

The world of call recording has evolved significantly in recent years, as the way we communicate continues to transform. Today’s local authorities don’t just need to capture information from phone discussions. They also need to capture data from apps, PBX solutions, and platforms like Microsoft Teams. What’s more, it’s not just voice that brands need to consider anymore.

Many regulatory leaders require professionals to capture all forms of conversations, from messages sent over chat, to screen sharing and video sessions. The right call recording tool should be able to capture all kinds of interactions securely, through every device and platform you use.

A flexible cloud-based call recording service will allow local authorities to deploy their technology wherever they need it, regardless of how calls are routed , and capture all interactions. What’s more, solutions in the cloud can easily scale to suit a company’s changing needs over time.

“A recording solution for Microsoft Teams, for example, should capture audio, video and shared screens,” says William Emm, CEO at Oak Innovation. “In a local authority, that might mean calls with customers who don’t have Teams themselves, or internal meetings. It might mean just in contact centers or elsewhere in the council as well.”

Step 3: Look for Opportunities to Improve Performance

Call recording can offer access to huge volumes of useful insights, ready to transform your organization. The right call recording solution can help local authorities to assess call handling skills among agents, view employee progress, and identify knowledge gaps.

Local authorities can create playlists using complex and common call scenarios to train new staff in much less time than it would take to sit with them on calls. Conversations can be played back to pinpoint opportunities for improvement, whilst live listening tools let managers and supervisors ‘drop into’ conversations to support and provide advice in real-time.

The best call recorders go a step further, with inbuilt quality measurement and speech analytics tools so you can systematically review calls, chart progress, and use the data to inform broader business decisions.

Step 4: Look for Features that Help Mitigate Risk

Recording calls with an efficient and accurate toolkit can protect your business from a range of issues, including disputes, fraud and misconduct.

Simply playing back recordings to check facts can reduce a measure of human error and help settle minor misunderstandings.

Should disputes escalate, encrypted call recordings can provide key evidence during litigation.  For this reason, it’s crucial to ensure that a prospective recorder includes encryption as standard.  Not all call recorders do so, including Teams’ native recording, so it’s worth shopping around.

Innovative call recording platforms may also include analytics tools, helping users to transcribe recordings and scan them for insights, key words, and sentiment. This makes it easier to rapidly uncover trends and opportunities in customer behaviour.

With the right call recording solutions, you’ll be able to pinpoint powerful opportunities to enhance service and protect yourself from risk, not to mention saving considerable time and expense battling disputes in court.

Step 5: Optimize Security

Finally, the right call recording solution for any local authority should always put security first. Local authorities need to maintain extensive control over their recordings, to ensure they can stay compliant with regulations, and protect both their organization  and customers.

Ensure your call recording provider offers a secure archiving solution, whether that’s on-premises or in the cloud. Recordings should be time-stamped and encrypted to prevent tampering. It’s likely that you will need a solution that applies role-based permissions to limit who can access or delete recordings and provides reports on any such activity in line with GDPR and other Data Protection laws.

Customized retention periods will ensure that nothing is kept longer than lawfully required to provide service to a member of the public. The typical exemption to this would be any recordings required as evidence in ongoing investigations.

Choosing the Right Call Recording Solution

A comprehensive call recording solution is an essential investment for local authorities. It can help you to stay compliant with regulations, deliver a better service to the public and help mitigate the cost and risk of court disputes and fraudulent claims. The right solution will contribute to informed decision-making processes, empower staff in their everyday work, and ensure customers have an excellent experience with you.

“ClarifyGo for Microsoft Teams is designed to support the needs of local authorities,” says Emm, “It can be deployed in Teams only environments or alongside your existing PBX, to capture all types of calls. Since it’s call routing agnostic, there’s no need to change your existing calling plan.”

Read more from Oak on  benefits of call recording for local authorities.