Business Systems UK’s Will Davenport explains how EIM (Enterprise Information Management) can help solve a major issue frustrating Call Recording users…
Call Recording in contact centres is nothing new, but it has now moved into the spotlight as enterprises look for new ways to improve the customer experience.
Many contact centres are now several generations into their call recording technology, and this is where the difficulty arises. Call centres are required to store, manage and audit recordings by several regulatory and compliance bodies. Dealing with one system is complex, but with upgrades and the introduction of new systems it has created quite a riddle for IT departments and management who are legally responsible.
Like many problems they start small and if not addressed grow fast. Here it begins with an increasing amount of data which eventually develops into convoluted silos that are almost impossible to control and manage. Add EOL (End of Life) and technology upgrades into the mix and the situation degenerates into a tangled mess.
In addition to legal culpability and risk, the operational management of this data is inadequate, inefficient and costly. The good news, however, is that there is an answer to this problem in the form of a sophisticated EIM (Enterprise Information Management) tool. This will offer up a ‘federated solution’ from the discordant data silos, offering data consistency, management-control and auditable access across the board.
Cases that prove the point
The examples outlined below have been deployed by the financial services industry, which by its very nature is compliance led. These cases highlight the practical issues they were faced with and the heightened risk if the situation was left uncurbed.
Firstly let’s take the case of a global US bank up against convergence challenges focused on legacy and data governance. The bank was using a system cited outside of the EU that had reached EOL status creating commercial and compliance risks. This also corresponded with Microsoft Windows 2003 reaching EOL which the bank had a mandate to withdraw from its infrastructure.
At the same time, the bank needed to store call recordings for the prerequisite retention period and wanted to make sure that data was easily accessible and not left stranded in legacy platforms.
Using a agnostic ‘central portal’, data was siphoned from different systems and locations. This included data from live on-premise, cloud and obsolete legacy systems. This data was later relocated. The central portal provided access and management of that data from one single point for security reasons. Call records beyond their ‘governance retention’ period were deleted. This resulted in freeing up 30% of its cache providing a highly significant cost saving.
Secondly let’s take the case of a French investment bank which had ten live recording platforms across a large infrastructure with a requirement to pull out data and feed it into a business analytics application. Using a centralised portal the bank was able to extract the data from its current platforms and can now easily scale up and add new recording platforms as and when needed.
In the final case we see the impact of multiple new channels being deployed. The bank had a wide spread of diverse recording systems and needed to capture business conversations across Skype for Business, and other telephone protocols.
Here again a centralised portal was deployed. In this scenario, storing the legacy data and erasing support costs in the process. At the same time, continuously consuming all the calls from the live platforms. The bank has now achieved its goal of having one central interface for compliance and operational requirements.
These cases clearly show how an agnostic data/voice portal can swiftly and effectively overcome interoperability issues, improving operations and better managing costs. At the same time, it ensures quality, accuracy and completeness of call recordings and ticks the boxes on both security and compliance.
The author is a Director at Business Systems (UK) Ltd, a specialist for 30 years in providing call recording and workforce optimisation solutions for investment banks and contact centres.