Companies record customer interactions for a variety of reasons. Some, such as banks, trading floors or insurance companies, are required by law to document business transactions. Others, especially organizations with call centers, use it for quality monitoring, to supplement agent training and provide optimal customer support.
Many companies continue to use their TDM network with analog or digital phone lines and different connection types to the PSTN. A voice recording system must be connected to the trunk or extensions to work.
VoIP transmits calls over LANs. The voice data is streamed over the network, and the recording system captures these streams. The recorder can be connected to the network and acts either as a third party in a conference call (active recording) or analyzes the traffic and filters out voice streams (passive).
Market Requirements and Trends
Large companies and high-volume call centers are investing in VoIP because of economies of scale and other advantages, but TDM is still prevalent and is often replaced on an ad hoc basis. Therefore, for financial reasons, a recording system must support hybrid operations. By recording both TDM and VoIP calls, organizations can undergo a seamless transition without incurring additional expenses for separate solutions.
Larger companies must also evaluate the flexibility of their system. During periods of rapid growth, the solution should cover additional channels without buying an extra unit to increase capacity. Also, when new PBXs with their own proprietary interfaces are integrated into the network, the system should support them all in the same box.
Due to the nature of unplanned growth, these organizations often adopt a mixed operation with both analog and digital extensions. A flexible system should handle this situation as well.
Larger companies must also address security concerns. To prevent loss of data due to hardware problems, redundant hard disks as well as backup for databases, recorded calls and configuration settings are needed. Ability to connect to a UPS offers high reliability and shuts down a system smoothly to prevent corruption of data during power failures.
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