“Like SmartPhones, the apps they support now defines business telephony platforms, particularly in a Unified Communication environment,” says Robin Hayman, SpliceCom’s Director of Marketing & Product Management. ”We’ve held the view for many years that Business Management – the unification of Call Management, Call Recording and Real-Time Wallboards/Dashboards – is the cornerstone of business telephony. So much so that we developed or own suite of apps in-house to address this need, rather than relying on bolt-on products from 3rd parties, which, by their very nature, will always be a compromise. We continue to be the only IP PBX vendor to take this approach,” states Hayman.
SpliceCom are witnessing three main contributing factors for the accelerated demand in Call Recording;
•Requirement to record mobile calls
•Staff protection
•Elimination of “Platform Tax”
In the past, Call Recording sales have been driven by legislative requirements. Whilst this still holds true, Vision Record complies with both FSA and PCI requirements, there are many other avenues of opportunity for call recording coming to light.
The move to BYOD has seen an increasing number of mobile and smartphones being utilised for business telephony, in combination with, or in some cases instead of, traditional desktop phones. If there’s a company policy in place for Call Recording, this has to extend to these devices as well. “Vision Record is an embedded app that operates across all of our Maximiser OS based IP PBXs,” states Hayman. “This operation is totally independent of trunk– SIP, BRI or PRI – and device – IP deskphone, analogue phone, IP softphone on PC, Mac, smartphone or tablet. As such it’s ideally placed to record all types of call, including those that can’t be handled by conventional 3rd party trunk side recorders and fully integrate the resultant recordings with the full call management report.”
In addition to the obvious use of Call Recording for training and quality assurance purposes, SpliceCom are finding that all types of businesses and organisations are increasingly using it to safeguard their staff in cases of verbal abuse. “We’re finding that schools in particular are starting to deploy Call Recording to protect their staff from over zealous parents,” continues Hayman. “It provides an undeniable log of exactly who said what and the language used, where as in the past revisiting an emotional telephone call has always been a case of one person’s word against another’s.”
Finally, SpliceCom have found the dramatic rise in sales of their Soft PBX have also resulted in great Vision Business Management sales. “The fact that you’ve had to sell both the app and the PC or Server it runs on means that resellers in the past have had their work cut out if their prospective customer hasn’t seen the value of Call Management, Call Recording or Wallboards and Dashboards,” says Hayman. The fact that Vision can share a single underlying computer platform with our family of Soft PBXs – and for that matter our secure SSL Mobility Gateway - either natively or in a virtual environment, significantly lowers the cost of entry and makes it a far easier sale for our partners. Removing the need for a separate PC to run Vision is as significant as a tax break, for resellers and end-users alike.”
‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’, is a quote widely attributed to Management Consultant, Peter Drucker. “There’s never been a better analogy for Business Management as a whole and Call Recording in particular,” concludes Hayman.”