Home | Customer Perspectives | Technology Perspectives | Best Practices | News   Advances in VoIP Recording for the Contact Center Advances in VoIP Recording for the Contact Center With an open-standard, software-only approach for next generation active VoIP solutions, contact centers are achieving seamless business continuity, mission-critical reliability and investment protection Introduction VoIP is quickly becoming the industry standard, enabling a cost effective, centralized and consolidated organization. For the contact center - VoIP flattens the infrastructure, removing expensive network charges. An IP-based contact center allows ubiquitous access to applications and communication channels while simultaneously reducing the total number of servers across the enterprise. In spite of these pivotal benefits, concerns regarding the move from traditional circuit-switched to packet-switched network technology still abound. Contact center managers are still weary of the impact on the quality and reliability of their mission-critical applications. With recent advances in VoIP recording technology that include a unified-software-only approach and active recording, today's contact centers can benefit from seamless business continuity, mission-critical reliability and greater scalability for branches and remote sites. Business Continuity & Mission-Critical Reliability A number of exciting advancements have been made to ensure that the VoIP recording environment meets the five 9's reliability (99.999%) of traditional circuit-switched networks. These advancements constitute critical considerations for mission-critical reliability: A unified architecture that utilizes the same infrastructure and applications across all TDM and IP environments, which spells into better integration with existing business continuity plans A software only solution that does not require special telephony boards reduces the number of hardware components required, which spells into greater reliability by improving the mean time before failure (MTBF) and ability to meet specific IT service level agreements (SLAs) High-end redundancy and the ability to mirror audio streams means a high level of fault tolerance and reliability through increased system survivability and the elimination of a single point of failure The above listed capabilities are available in the NICE VoIP recording solution, which brings 20 years of market leadership in mission-critical reliability, providing compliance and liability solutions to the world's top-10 banks, thousands of financial institutions and most of the trading floors in the world. NICE VoIP recording solutions offer proven scalability that exceed one thousand IP ports (i.e. either a physical IP phone device or a PC-based IP soft-phone) per site and have been utilized by dozens of the most mission-critical financial organizations for several years. With extensive experience and unique, patented redundancy and business continuity solutions specifically designed for the needs of the finance and banking industries, NICE is leading the migration path to VoIP in high-end, multi-site and mission critical VoIP implementations. Some of the world's largest investment banks and outsourcers have deployed NICE IP-enabled distributed environments, which include thousands of users and thousands of IP phones that are being recorded for critical compliance and liability purposes. The Next Generation of VoIP: Active Recording Passive recording, which captures customer interactions through the network, was the first step taken during the grand VoIP sweep, mainly due to advantages such as transparency to the telephony system. In spite of this advantage, passive VoIP recording entails the disadvantage of requiring additional setup by the network administrator, which results in an installation and administration overhead. Moreover, this approach was limited mainly to IP phones residing in proximity to the VoIP recording system. An active VoIP recording solution, on the other hand, is more transparent to the network. This approach involves sending a replica of captured audio to the logger using the standard TCP/IP network routing, making the replication process transparent to the network. This is done either by the gateway or the IP phones, which means that set-up, administration and management are location-independent. By eliminating the need for set-up, administration and management at branches or remote sites, active recording profoundly reduces the overhead and risks associated with passive recording. It helps flatten the organization, enables efficient management and administration of remote agents and agents from home, and enhances centralized recording capabilities for distributed environments. NICE has developed a cutting edge offering for active VoIP recording that is fully integrated and supports all of the major IP telephony vendors. Furthermore, NICE is offering its VoIP Recording Gateway, which is a unique network appliance that transforms any IP telephony environment into an active recording solution. To illustrate the advantages, one of NICE's customers, a leading European retail-bank is currently implementing an active recording solution to record 12,000 Cisco IP-phones across more than 1,000 branches using 400 recording channels that are centrally managed at only 8 data-centers. In Conclusion With NICE's unified-software-only approach to VoIP recording that introduces next generation active recording solutions, along with the most advanced applications for quality monitoring, liability and interactions analytics, the contact center and branch of today and of the future can expand advanced capabilities to all branches and remote locations, enable enterprise connectivity and mobility and improves overall business performance. The result is increased agent productivity, seamless business continuity, mission-critical reliability and IT investment protection.     "We've implemented the NICE VoIP recording system because of its reliability, flexibility and its compatibility with our new VoIP network environment. Furthermore, NICE is the industry standard, so the choice was an easy one." Sean Dickson, Network/VoIP Engineer, Automated Trading Desk - USA. "We needed a recording system that was reliable and scalable enough to meet our Internet-based call recording needs. NICE is one of the only vendors offering this system today, and theirs has proven to be the best." Adriano Mormul, IT Manager of Instituto Curitiba de Informãtica - Brazil.
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