Financial institutions are required to track and protect enormous amounts of customer data. Remote customer engagement continues to rise as companies continue to adopt a work-from-anywhere culture to better serve their customers. Microsoft Teams is quickly becoming the standard for flexible communication between the finance community and their clients. Whether it’s a phone call or a full-scale video conference, the recorded meeting represents a valuable cache of customer intel that can lead to critical business decisions.
Customer Video Engagement in the Financial Industry
In a financial institution, your employees who interface directly with your customers benefit the most from actionable insights created through transcriptions and key data mining applications. These are your personal bankers, financial advisors, and sales associates.
Mining Recorded Video Calls
In a perfect world, financial institutions would easily navigate across a growing archive of video and audio conferences. All interaction recordings would be tagged, time-stamped, searchable by agent name, phone number and any number of other custom criteria that suits the operation.
In reality, several roadblocks typically impede financial institutions from benefiting from that collection of data.
Roadblock 1: Proprietary and Hardware-based Recorders
Many onsite hardware-based call recorders, including ones meant to capture video conferences, present a significant roadblock: proprietary storage formats. Currently, kids making fortunes on YouTube reacting to music videos have more access to their data than you do unless your recordings are in standard formats like mp3, mp4, or wav. Unfortunately, many companies benefit by keeping their customers locked into expensive service contracts by storing recordings in an encrypted, proprietary format.
This form of data gatekeeping is typical with hardware-based call recording companies, so don’t be surprised when they try to upsell you for access to your data. Keep in mind this is not a charge for using tagging or search features. These fees are principally a charge just for access to your data, which is not only costly, it ushers in the other roadblock to optimization (and compliance): ownership. The obvious question is if it’s your data, why don’t you have total access to it?
Roadblock 2: Data Ownership
Some global compliance laws require companies to own the data they record and store it within a defined territory based on where each recording was captured. When your hardware recording platform puts a paywall and proprietary obstacle between you and your data, you risk more than losing out on optimization. You risk violating industry compliance, and that can get expensive.
Cloud Recording to the Rescue
Using on-site legacy hardware platforms to record your audio and video calls places you between the proverbial rock and hard place. Even if you manage to get over the proprietary file obstacle, you may still not own your data.
That’s where the Cloud is the silver lining. Call and video recording have undergone a ground-up redesign through the use of Cloud-based applications. Microsoft Teams, for example, was an obvious integration choice for companies already using Office-365. While Teams doesn’t have a compliant recording mechanism, Microsoft-certified
Cloud recording platforms like CallCabinet cleverly use Microsoft’s own Azure space. As if solving the data ownership issues wasn’t enough, file storage is encrypted and in standard formats.
Migrate, Mine, Optimize
Benefitting from your call data should include all of your call data. No matter what locked format your existing data is in, find out if the Cloud company you pick offers a legacy data migration option. Modernizing your video recording software takes you far beyond the necessary QA procedures of old. When legacy recording systems were previously installed, many of today’s key CX features were unavailable. Features like:
- AI detection of emotional trending
- Keyword and phrase search (cancellations, competitor mentions, feature requests)
- Automatic PCI DSS redaction
- Advanced, granular data filters (find the needle in a call stack)
- Compliant sharing of call audio and video for dispute resolution
- Plugging in your call recordings and transcripts to company-wide big data analytics platforms
The larger your customer call archive, the more you’ll be able to mine it through keyword searches, advanced filtering, and emotive recognition. Your call data can benefit your entire organization when you transfer it to multi-channel, big data analytics platforms. The bottom line is that any organization, most especially financial institutions, gains a great advantage in their customer service efforts by leveraging their ability to record and analyze video calls.
Brian is a freelance technology writer and media editor based out of Central New Jersey. He’s logged 20 years of experience in the Telecom industry and side-hustles in the record industry. Brian started his career in technology at a company that made analog modems. He migrated to a marketing career in the call recording industry where he learned exactly how and why calls are monitored for quality assurance. These days Brian fuses his skills together to deliver his researched observations about telephony and compliance laws in polished articles and videos. He’s also composed the music for a long list of big Hollywood trailers. He does not miss the sound of analog modems but he is endlessly fascinated with phones.