Donna Fluss is highly regarded as an expert on contact center, analytics and the back office. With 30 years of experience helping organizations build contact centers and back office operating environments, and assisting vendors to deliver competitive solutions, Fluss is a renowned speaker, author and source for industry and business publications. She can be reached at Donna.Fluss@dmgconsult.com.
There are substantial differences among recording solutions, despite claims that these systems are commoditized. Prospects should look for a multi-channel recording platform that handles audio (calls), screens (servicing applications, email, chat, SMS, social media, etc.) and video. The platform should be software-based and able to handle thousands of channels, as well as multiple channels on one server, in order to reduce complexity and the cost of implementing and maintaining the application. As importantly, prospects should find a recording system that is highly secure, capable of encrypting all interactions from the moment of capture, and that makes it easy to store, search and retrieve data, as needed. These core recording capabilities allow organizations to address business continuity, comply with regulations, and meet the needs of their business units.
When purchasing a new recording solution, it’s essential to assess whether it can:
- Reduce company risk by capturing 100% of all transactions regardless of whether an employee is located on-site, at-home or in a remote location
- Capture, store and retrieve all interactions in a highly secure environment
- Address the company needs for business continuity and disaster recovery
- Comply with all relevant government regulations that require the capture of all or certain types of calls
- Capture communications from mobile devices
- Support the call and screen-masking requirements of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS)
- Capture and replay recordings in real time
- Support traditional and analytics-enabled quality assurance initiatives
In today’s world of high-speed distributed networks and software-only applications, recording solutions have to be highly scalable, flexible, secure and capable of capturing and centralizing the management of interactions, regardless of where employees are based. Multi-channel recording is a must, as it is essential for organizations to “see” what is happening in all of the channels in which customers and prospects interact with them. The ability to capture communications from mobile devices has become a priority for financial services organizations that must comply with government regulations, specifically Dodd-Frank in the US and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK, and there are other requirements under consideration in various European and Asian countries.
Recording is the cornerstone of a contact center workforce optimization (WFO) suite. As familiar and ubiquitous as these solutions have become, however, they should not be taken for granted. Prospects should take great care to assess the varied capabilities of the solutions available in the market today, in order to select one that meets their current and future needs.