Call Recording Software Buyer's Guide: Top 10 Solutions of 2022

What is Call Recording Software?

Call recording software enables businesses, organizations, and individual users to actively record and store all of their business VoIP phone calls. Call recording tools provide users with the ability to record and store calls and with more advanced functionality. It enables users to gain more insight from their calls, use them for training, and stay compliant with any industry or legal regulations.

Recording calls and interactions between teams, departments, collaborators, agents, clients provide your organization power insight. You’ll get an entirely new path to improve and optimize interactions and collaboration. Recorded calls provide a touchstone for historical reference as well as new data to analyze.

In contact centers specifically, call recording solutions are a must-have. It enables agents to return to previous calls for training, assistance, or clarification. A lot of unified communications, contact center and call center software will include call recording as a functionality.

Individual call recording software exists as well for organizations with a need to take full control over their recorded calls, storage, and more.

How Does Call Recording Software Work?

Call recording enables organizations or individual users to record, store, manage, organize, and analyze all of their phone calls. This is done without the need for a complex or complete business VoIP solution. Stand-alone call recording tools easily integrate with your organization’s existing infrastructure, from standard telephony to advanced hosted PBX platforms.

Depending on the solution or vendor your organization chooses, the behind the scenes workings of the call recordings may differ.

Some solutions are capable of detecting VoIP voice data packets as they travel through a network. These packets are then copied, or recorded, creating a back-up of the conversation.

Other solutions provide an organization with a dedicated recording number. When that number is called a connection will be made with your business’ phone system.

At the end of the day, call recording is a middleman of your VoIP calls. The software sits between the caller and their network to capture the voice information without interrupting the conversation.

Key Benefits of Call Recording Software

Call recording enables organizations to create an archive of previous phone conversations, collaboration meetings, and client interactions. An existing log of previously recorded calls enables an organization to look back on what was being done and how to improve. This information enables better optimization of processes and communication practices.

Ensure Regulatory Compliance

Call recordings enable decision-makers to go back in time and analyze conversations to ensure participants are not violating any regulations. For example, businesses that deal with credit card payments over the phone must ensure compliance with industry-wide regulations.

Call recordings provide training examples and allow for improved processes to prevent any future issues when they are identified.

Training and Quality Assurance

In a similar fashion to regulatory compliance, call recordings enable users and decision-makers to look back on past conversations. Listening to these conversations enables users to identify any potential quality issues in calls.

Managers can also and provide examples of how to better proceed with positive interactions that were recorded.

Enhance Products or Services

Organizations can look back on recordings to better understand any issues or complaints with a service or product that they offer. Analyzing technical support phone calls, for example, will enable organizations to identify common bugs or issues. With that information, they can begin to address a proper solution.

Capture Missed Details and Information

Users can simply refer back to the recordings of their previous calls or the calls of others. With an archive of recorded calls, you will never have to miss an important date again.

Call recordings allow users to capture information or details that they might have missed the first time or should have written down during the interaction.

Resolve Potential Disputes

Disputes are an inevitable aspect of any form of collaboration. Sometimes two parties have different memories of a shared interaction. Call recording software ensures you will always have a back-up of that conversation to refer to in the future.

The ability to clarify any disputes or prevent them from even occurring in the first place is a valuable result of this tool.

What to Look for in Call Recording Features

When introduced as a stand-alone application, call recording tools provide users with more functionality than simply recording a call. The ability to access that recording later enables users to optimize their process with rules, provide training functionality, and evaluate conversations.

On-Demand Recording

Users have the option to choose when to start or stop phone call recording. This works best for organizations collaborating internally. More advanced agents within a contact center are provided with the ability to record at their discretion.

Live Monitoring

Live monitoring is particularly useful for contact centers. It enables a manager or administrator to listen in on a phone call as they happen in real-time.

This enables an even greater level of collaboration and quality assurance, proactively optimizing the interaction.

Call Recording Rules

Some users may not require the discretion to turn off recording. Instead, organizations can set up rules or guidelines for when a recording will automatically be initiated.

Speech Analytics

With speech analytics, call recording software can help provide greater insight into the conversation. Some solutions can utilize speech analytics to provide a speech-to-text transcription of each call. This makes sharing the call after it has concluded easier for your whole organization.

Call Evaluation

Going even further with speech analytics and more advanced analytical functionality, call recording can help evaluate the outcome of calls as well. These solutions analyze the conversation, sentiments, tones to provide a score for each call.

What to Look for When Comparing Call Recording Solutions

Different call recording software vendors and providers offer different solutions and platforms, which provide different functionality. When looking for a cloud solution specifically, there are several factors to pay attention to in order to understand accessibility and limitations within the software.

Online Dashboards

Most cloud platforms provide this feature. It is important that your call recording application provides online dashboards to keep an eye on data as its collected.

Some older solutions may rely on offline dashboards, storage and recording. Keep an eye out for cloud-focused and cloud-delivered tools that provide something more flexible for you and your team.

Recording Database Limitations

Much like with other cloud services, call recording tools place limits on the service depending on your subscription plan.

One very common limitation will be the amount of recordings and data that can be saved. Some solutions enable users to store recordings within the service, which is a big plus.

Security and Encryption Practices

Security is an absolute must for any cloud-based solution. If your organization is storing and accessing recordings over the cloud, security is imperative.

This is especially true when it comes to regulatory compliance. Organizations need to take every step to ensure that important information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

PCI Compliance

PCI Compliance is a set of regulations and guidelines that dictate how organizations must store and protect customer data. This is most important when dealing with credit card payments.

Look for a call recording solution that provides PCI compliance built-in so you can prevent issues before they arise.

Recording Organization

When your business starts racking up a large number of recorded calls, it’s important to have the necessary functionality to organize and search that archive.

Look for solutions that provide different the ability to organize and tag your recordings. This includes call center features like in-depth, multi-point search, call tagging, or call evaluation.

What Call Recording Software Buyers Need to Know

Call recording software is an absolute must-have for any contact center. It shoulda also be a strong consideration for any business or team that works over the phone. Call recording provides individuals and businesses with a resource to turn back time to listen back in on a conversation.

This has massive benefits. It enables organizations to ensure the absolute perfect compliance with regulations or guidelines. It also provides a resource for training and new data sets that organizations or decision-makers can leverage to further optimize business processes.

Even if your business is not dealing with client relations, call recording enables departments and teams to stay on task. You can prevent any disputes or lost information. Call recordings should be utilized by just about any business, especially those using business VoIP solutions.

As cloud-based call recording has become even more accessible, there’s no reason to skip it when putting together your suite of tools.