When looking for a contact center recording solution, we tend to focus on apparent features and often overlook behind the scenes capabilities that can make our lives much easier later on.
This is mainly true when it comes to features that enable flexibility. You can assess your contact center future needs to some extent, but there are always unknown scenarios or unplanned changes that you could not expect. Changes in the business environment, regulations, number of agents or call volume may occur in the short or long term and you might not be able to predict them all. This means that the contact center’s needs keep changing, leading to adjustments in recording requirements.
So you don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s a fact. The good news is that you can cope with that by maximizing your contact center recoding solution’s flexibility. To better understand it, let’s focus on three common possible changes in your contact center:
- Extended Capacity - The reasons for higher capacity requirements vary from business expansion - growth of contact center, call volume and number of agents - to a management decision to move to 100% recording for quality management or compliance reasons. The need for extended capacity is not always predictable. For instance, we see more contact centers that used to record 20-30% of the calls for quality management moving to 100% recording as it helps them meet regulatory requirements. This means a fivefold increase in recording volume that needs to be supported. A high capacity recorder simply solves this issue and, with the right technology, does not involve significant extra cost.
- Switch Environment Replacement - Business related decisions often lead to changes in contact center components or configuration. You may be adding or replacing infrastructure even if it wasn’t planned in advance, or if it isn’t ideal for your recording needs. A change in the ACD or the telephony switch may require intensive work if the recording solution you are using isn’t compatible with this change. For example, adding session border controllers to their contact centers, many IT executives had to reconfigure their recording solution to cope with the change. Such challenges can be easily eliminated by applying an all-in-one recording solution that supports multiple switch environments and various recording methods.
- Recording Plan Change - As the recording system admin, you want to have as much flexibility as possible in your hands and be able to configure the system as you wish on a need-basis. You don’t always know if there is going to be an organizational change (adding or removing a department or business line from a contact center), a new regulatory requirement, a shift in call volume between contact centers, or even a seasonal change that leads to more recording. Such changes in recording requirements, especially among distributed sites, may impose many challenges and become a huge hassle if your system is not ready for it. A Do-It-Yourself system mapping and optimized licensing management allows you to adjust to such changes quickly.
As we all know, forward thinking saves a lot of effort, can minimize risk and helps avoid unnecessary inconvenience. When sourcing a fundamental platform like a recording solution, you want to make sure that you will be able to adjust to changes easily. This makes long term flexibility a game changer when choosing a recording platform for your contact center.