“Please note that this call may be recorded” is an all-too-familiar message to anyone who has ever called a business before.
Call recording is not just done by call centres anymore. Many businesses in various regulated industries, such as financial institutions like banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies, and public safety organisations like fire, rescue and other emergency services, are required to record their calls in order to comply with the law.
Many businesses also do it to measure employee training and performance (especially if much of the employee’s job requires them to deal with customers on the phone), to provide optimal customer support, to verify data, and to protect themselves from lawsuits by maintaining recorded evidence.
“Whichever reason your business has for recording, with the birth of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), numerous providers within South Africa are making it far more cost effective and easier to deploy than what would traditionally be required in the past, because these providers are bundling this as a value add to their VoIP or Hosted PBX service,” says Mitchell Barker, founder and CEO of WhichVoIP.co.za, a directory website containing a comprehensive list of South Africa’s top VoIP providers.
He explains that voice recording has historically been quite a complex technology, with various levels of integration required given the many different types of communication platforms and vendor solutions deployed in the market, as well as variables in a client’s network which may contribute to the complexities of integration. The great news is that with integrated recording on VoIP or Hosted PBX services, most of these complexities are thrown out of the window.”
He points out that MIA Telecoms, for example, is one of the few providers to offer this service. “In most cases, an active recording function is not included in your telephony equipment because you have to specifically request it and pay for it separately – and sometimes this investment is more than the communications system itself. The solution offered by MIA Telecoms makes this unnecessary as it is part of the package.”
Barker says that the implementation of the Protection of Personal Information (POPI) act in South Africa has changed the way that those South African companies who do record calls, handle those recordings.
“No matter which recording method you use in the end, the recorded data will have to be securely encrypted, not just to meet regulatory compliance, data security and protection requirements, but also to provide tamper-proof records that can be legally admissible in a court of law,” he concludes.
