Why Avaya Call Recording is Essential for Your Enterprise

Avaya’s market dominance in business telephony is undeniable. If your business uses Avaya’s Unified Communications (UC) products to interact with customers and collaborate within your company, then you’re aware that your calls need to be recorded.

Unfortunately, Avaya doesn’t offer a compliant call recording feature, but in this article, we’ll go over what you need to know when picking a call recording platform for your Avaya UC network.

Do I Need To Record My Avaya Calls">Do I Need To Record My Avaya Calls

Yes, is the safe answer to that question. Recording calls for compliance and quality purposes is standard practice for every business that takes credit cards over the phone, provides consultation, sells services, supports customers, specializes in healthcare or insurance, and just about everything else.

Compliant recording means conforming to local and international laws about the collection and storage of calls. Call recordings serve as evidence in customer disputes. They’re used to train employees, mined for actionable customer intel, and with modern analytics, they can provide a detailed understanding of customer sentiment.

Yes, you need to record your Avaya calls. However, after researching several solutions, we recommend evaluating a cloud-based solution like this one.

Compliance Call Recording">Compliance Call Recording

Businesses in every industry sector must comply with a specific set of compliance regulations. Disregarding compliance laws can prove to be dangerous and costly to your company and your customers.

There’s a good reason to take both call recording and compliance seriously. In a lawsuit, all interactions between the plaintiff and the company will be verified and examined.

Merely having an audio recording of the phone call is not enough in most instances. Calls must be time-stamped and untampered. Does your current Avaya call recorder provide time stamping, encryption, and secure storage? Are your recordings redundantly backed up and organized for timely retrieval?

A compliant recording platform helps you avoid fines for failing to comply, and it prepares and equips you if a dispute arises.

Secure Your Avaya Recordings">Secure Your Avaya Recordings

Cybersecurity is an ever-growing concern, and companies across the globe have had to take a detailed look at potential faults in their organizations. Call recordings contain loads of precious information that cybercriminals are hungry to exploit.

Does your company take credit cards over the phone? What about social security and national ID numbers? Even recording names and addresses can pose a potential risk in the hands of a cybercriminal.

HIPAA, GDPR, PCI-DSS, Dodd-Frank, MiFID II, FICA, and POPIA  are some of the compliance laws that directly impact your call recordings. Trying to manage adherence to these regulations is very difficult with an on-site legacy hardware recorder. Cloud-based integrations offer a far more robust and adaptable call recording solution for your Avaya network.

Cloud-based solutions also offer far better scalability, making them affordable for small to mid-sized businesses yet still fully capable of protecting global enterprises. Initially, a complaint call recorder protects your business, your data, and your bottom line. However, the uses of a cloud-based call recorder go far beyond compliance and security.

Use AI On Your Avaya Recordings">Use AI On Your Avaya Recordings

Artificial Intelligence has given rise to a customer service paradigm shift. Trying to extract business intel from legacy call recording systems without AI was very difficult. The term “random sampling” reflects the approach we used to take when monitoring calls for quality assurance (QA). It yielded far less accurate results in measuring agent performance and even less total customer sentiment.

AI allows us to take call recordings and convert audio data into recognizable, searchable speech through a process called Speech-to-Text transcription (STT). Perhaps you’re thinking, speech to text is not a new technology, and that’s fair.

However, AI analytics go deeper into a call transcription by identifying pitch, speed, and keywords that form an emotional profile for every transcript. This profile is sophisticated enough to understand emotional shifts across the length of the call.

Don’t just record your Avaya network; upgrade your entire customer service operation by understanding your customer trends. Recording and analyzing call data gives you a 360-degree view of your customer experience. Craft your customer experience around their specific needs by tabulating repeat issues, frequent keywords, and competitor mentions.

Cloud-Based Call Recording Beats Obsolescence">Cloud-Based Call Recording Beats Obsolescence

Legislators across the globe are constantly updating and adding new language to compliance laws. What happens when a hardware-based legacy recorder can no longer accommodate your industry’s regulations? Answer: you suffer financially for that investment.

Or what if your organization is spread across the globe? Maintaining call recording hardware across multiple locations requires labor from your IT professionals and usually a service contract from the hardware manufacturer. This is one of the instances where software truly outpaces hardware on every level.

A cloud-based call recording platform is self-updating and requires very little attention from your IT professionals. As compliance laws evolve, so does the platform. Updating hardware is expensive, time-consuming, and eventually ends with the life cycle of the equipment. Software, on the other hand, can be rapidly updated and rolled out globally in minutes.

Another benefit of a cloud-based call recording platform is that it eliminates the tremendous upfront costs that a hardware solution presents. Hardware requires purchase, installation, and secondary costs like consultants, on-site storage, and offsite backup. If redundancy is required in your industry, that means you have to have duplicate hardware that takes over your call recording operation if your primary hardware fails.

Subscribing to a cloud-based call recorder shifts those costs to the platform provider. This model saves your company a great deal of money upfront and over time. It also ensures that the staff in charge of your call recording operation are not pulling double duty. For instance, your IT professionals have to wear many technical hats throughout the day, and if your call recording operation is on-site, that’s just another hat they have to wear. It does not mean they specialize in call recording.

Conversely, a cloud-based call recording platform is managed by people who do nothing but record calls compliantly, store them securely, monitor compliance law changes, update your software and deliver services that help you extract benefits from your call recordings. It pays to have a company that’s solely dedicated to compliance call recording.

What Data Should Your Avaya Call Center Not Store?">What Data Should Your Avaya Call Center Not Store?

If your company is in the healthcare, insurance, finance, e-commerce, or banking, your company must protect, encrypt, and redact vulnerable data from your recordings, such as:

• Credit Card Numbers
• Patient health information
• National Insurance and Social Security Numbers
• PINs and Bank Account numbers
• Financial transactions information
• All consumer privacy regulation data

Compliance laws like HIPAA and PCI DSS require that this information be scrubbed from recordings and transcripts to protect customers and patients. Your call recording solution is the best mechanism to perform this removal because it can redact the information from the recording as soon as the interaction is complete.

Protecting Your Customers">Protecting Your Customers

Customers share thousands of PIN codes spoken or keyed in during phone calls every day. Some call recording platforms can allow the agent to temporarily pause call recording while PINs and account numbers are spoken. However, a more effective solution is to remove user involvement and have AI automatically redact sensitive information on the call.

Deploying a call recording solution with advanced AI capabilities can keep you compliant, maximize the efficiency of your Avaya call center, and above all, protect your customers and company.

Protecting Your Business">Protecting Your Business

While call recording is a necessity for every company, it also yields significant benefits to your customer service efforts.

When calls are used to monitor and score agent performance, they become a tool to improve your current staff’s performance and train your incoming employees. Not only does this save time, but it also puts better-trained agents on the phone with your customers from their first day on the job, increasing and protecting your reputation.

But what happens when a customer pursues legal action against your company because of exposed data? When incidents like this become public, they damage your reputation and hurt consumer confidence in your company.

Provided that you followed your security procedures and were not the source of any exposure, your call recording platform should be your number one defense in this scenario. A clear recording of a call can eliminate even the possibility of having to go to court when the call is verified and vindicates your agent.

Further, the calls collected in your Avaya call center should be stored with the highest possible encryption in a secure data center. This kind of security compliance allows you to demonstrate that the customer data was not compromised at the storage point. Finally, using military-grade encryption is so effective that even in the event of a data breach, any data stolen is useless to would-be thieves.

Compliance Call Recording Is a Must and a Benefit:">Compliance Call Recording Is a Must and a Benefit:

Initially, your company needs to compliantly record and store its calls to adhere to industry regulations. Doing so ensures operational continuity without interference from legislative powers that can fine you and harm your bottom line. But compliance isn’t just a burden a company must bear; it also yields many benefits.

Taking advantage of modern compliance recording platforms opens the door to an expansive toolset designed to significantly sharpen your customer service operation and raise customer satisfaction.

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