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| Simply record |
Phil Reynolds, joint CEO at Oak Telecom says that VoIP call recording for smaller businesses is only viable if it delivers enterprise-level quality and reliability.
For many businesses it’s really the applications that are the driving factor in motivating them to make any capital investment, including a switch to VoIP, and one application that’s really easy for everyone to understand is call recording. As enterprise-quality call recording functionality comes down the food chain, businesses that have never been able to record calls in a really useful way can suddenly see the immediate benefits of
investing in fully-featured call recording. These can even outweigh the sales impact of potential medium to long-term savings in call costs of switching to IP. After all, the medium to long term is a hard sell in a recession.
Customers who already have a conventional recording system expect enhanced capabilities from a new VoIP recorder. Customers who are completely new to call recording have their own unique requirements in mind and are looking to solve their business objectives. Ultimately, they all focus on the recording product’s features, rather than on the underlying VoIP technology. Ergo, a VoIP call recorder must be able to provide at least the same features available on PSTN recording applications.
So it is good news to hear Oak’s Phil Reynolds talking about the core functions of the enterprise edition of his company’s new call recorder, known deceptively-simply as Record Enterprise, becoming available as SME software-only solutions for the channel.
Record is definitely no lightweight: Oak is quickly establishing its credentials in the enterprise call recording space. Record Enterprise has an impressive array of features for recording, tagging, searching, sharing and archiving up to 480 concurrent calls over as many as 22,000 extensions spread across multiple sites and multiple technologies, fixed line and IP. What’s more important is that the range of switches that are being covered now include Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, Nortel as well as the many SME focussed switches.
Reynolds explains, “All call recording systems rely on hardware components that tap into the telephone network and pull data into a recording application. VoIP’s packet-based network presents a tapping environment with a unique set of challenges to isolate voice traffic from other data and synchronise the upstream and downstream traffic. That’s not a processing load that you’d want to put onto the host computer in a major installation but we see it as a LAN-based application and have included it in the next release of Record Premium edition, catering for mid-range companies’ traffic with up to 30 concurrent calls across a broad range of IP switches.”
Hybrid market still rich in potential
Reynolds continues, “The bulk of sales are still to businesses with hybrid systems combining standard lines to the PBX and a mix of standard and VoIP extensions internally. It may be that the VoIP extensions in, say, the user’s contact centre, are the ones they really need to record and that they are happy to install VoIP recording only. However, as the benefits of recording all calls, rather than just those they have to record, become more generally recognised then there is more scope for a crosstechnology application like Oak’s Record. Users can then capture both VoIP calls and those to and from the standard extensions and manage them all using a single reporting system with a web interface that makes extracting useful business information straightforward.
“So let’s revisit reason people buy into call recording: despite the ‘training purposes’ mentioned in the pre-recorded messages, the main reason businesses record calls is to ensure that there is only one version of the truth about what was said and by whom. It’s on the record. Management, retrieval and reporting on every call in- or outbound are the key features of any call recording systems as far as the enduser is concerned.”