UC Today and CallCabinet discuss the value of complete compliance call recording for MS Teams
UC Today’s Rob Scott interviews Ryan Kahan, CallCabinet CEO, and discusses what bringing complete compliance recording to MS Teams means for enterprises around the world and what they can expect from a cloud-native solution.
Read the full transcription below.
Rob Scott: Hi, my name is Rob Scott, from UC Today News. And in this session, I’m joined by Ryan Kahan, who’s a CEO at CallCabinet, and he’s going to be walking us through the latest Microsoft Teams compliance recording challenges and what options enterprises have to choose from. Now, if you’re looking beyond the standard built-in recording feature in Teams, and need a comprehensive and compliance solution, this interview is well worth the watch. So, stay tuned. Welcome, Ryan. How’s it going?
Ryan Kahan: Hey, Rob. How are you doing?
Rob Scott: I’m very good, thank you. Good to see you. Thanks for joining me. And before we dive into this one, how about we just do a quick intro? Ryan, do you want to just tell us a little bit about CallCabinet, please?
Ryan Kahan: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. CallCabinet is a recording compliance and analytics company. We focus on call recording, compliance recording, contact center recording, and everything that goes along with it. So, everything from screen recording to PCI compliance and analytics, A.I., you name it, we pretty much cover the full spectrum of recording.
Rob Scott: That’s fantastic. So, let’s dive into today’s conversation. We said we’d talk about compliance call recording or recording within Teams. Let’s just set the scene for the audience here. What are the most popular reasons companies want to record their conversations today in Teams?
Ryan Kahan: Well, it’s interesting because it really depends on the country and the location. So, certain locations globally lean more towards one reason than others, but the main reasons are really compliance, customer service, making sure that your agents or your employees are saying what they need to say. Security. So, in the event, let’s say you’re a stockbroking firm and you want to make sure that when someone said, “Hey, I want to purchase 100 Apple shares,” that that was portrayed correctly. And then obviously quality assurance and training. Those are the main reasons. We find that certainly compliance is a really big driver in typically countries like Australia, the UK, South Africa, and Europe. In the US it’s more customer training and customer service focused, but that’s changing really quickly to be more compliance-driven as well.
Rob Scott: Yeah. And I’ve spent a lot of time with call recording products over the years, and wow, the world of call recording and compliance is getting much more complex nowadays. So, I suppose, lead into my next question is given all this complexity and given this hybrid landscape that we’re in, what’s the current status of Microsoft Teams in this kind of compliance call recording world? And what challenges are enterprises facing right now?
Ryan Kahan: So, obviously, Microsoft has released a compliance recording product or compliance recording program, and they have selected a handful of vendors that have been certified and security vetted in order to be part of that program. Obviously, CallCabinet is one of them. The recording part is actually just the tip of the iceberg. Recording audio, recording video is the easy part. The bigger the customer, the bigger the challenges are. And so, simple things like who do you record and how do you record them and when do you record them? Different teams or different groups of people or users within an organization cannot be painted with the same brush. You may have to treat how the CEO uses Teams very differently to how the HR department or sales department uses Teams.
Rob Scott: I was just going to say, as far as I’m understanding, Microsoft have got this convenience recording solution out of the box within Teams, but it’s very fairly basic. And now, they’ve got this policy-based solution. So, how does that work in your solution?
Ryan Kahan: So, the basic recording that comes built-in with Teams is really I’m a single user, I want to record my meeting, I want to record my audio and save it to my local computer. That’s obviously not what the business wants. A business wants everything in one location. They want to control access to it. They want to make sure that the security controls are in place, that audit logs are there. They want to make sure that certain people only can have access to those calls. The last thing a global enterprise needs is for their calls to end up on Facebook and be out there for the world to see. So, all of these things play a really big part in what makes a really solid compliance recording product. So, just starting from the beginning, you need to record a call. You need to decide who needs to record a call, what ability they have when they’re recording a call, then where is that call stored, where globally is it stored.
Because many companies, especially large ones, have really comprehensive global legal requirements to maintain and fulfill. And what happens if you have a company that maybe is in two jurisdictions? You have Company A that is in the UK and in the US, their UK calls need to be stored in the UK, their US calls need to be stored in the US. How does that all merge together? And then layering on top of that, who has access? How can we see what’s been accessed when it’s been accessed? What do we need to do if a call needs to be shared with a third party or someone externally? And how long do we need to keep these calls for and where do we keep them? So, there’s a huge number of really important questions that enterprises need to dive into in order to come to the solution that really is going to work best for them.
Rob Scott: And just in terms of the hybrid workplace, that’s created a real added complexity to, I suppose, recording these meetings and conversations. How does that work with Teams? I suppose with Teams you can be virtually anywhere, on a mobile, a handset, sat at your desk, virtually anywhere in the world on the same Teams platform. Does a solution like yours connect into to wherever you are, whatever you’re doing on whatever device kind of thing?
Ryan Kahan: Absolutely. So, the beauty of Teams is that it allows recording, at least compliance recording, across any Teams device. It doesn’t really matter what the agent is using. So, they may be using Teams on their iPhone, they may be using a desktop phone that’s connecting to Team, or a conferencing solution in a boardroom. All of that can be effectively recorded by the platform.
Rob Scott: And ultimately made compliant, I’m assuming.
Ryan Kahan: Absolutely. It goes without saying. From our perspective, we very much put ourselves out as a compliance company because without the compliance aspect, none of this works. And it’s becoming a bigger and bigger driver globally for customers.
Rob Scott: Well, I know you’ve been in the business for quite a long time. Now, let’s talk about your solution because you’ve got a cloud-based solution. I know you support other types of deployment methods as well. But tell us about the solution you’ve got for Teams and how does it work and what features are your customers liking the most?
Ryan Kahan: Yeah, sure. So, we’ve pretty much, at least I’ve pretty much seen everything. I’ve been doing this for around 20 years now, being in the call recording industry. And what we found is the biggest thing that customers want is flexibility. So, I’m going to give you an example. We touched on it a little bit earlier where we spoke about recording different groups of people. So, when somebody records in Teams, there are different ways that they can be recorded.
So, to give you an example, do I record only inbound calls? Do I record only outbound calls? Do I record both? Do I record internal meetings? Do I record external meetings? Do I record video on internal Teams to Teams calls? All of those things are critically important and can be turned off in our system anyway, can be turned on and off by user or by group. So, we can do really in-depth rules for customers. So let’s say, for example, we’re recording the HR departments, we can say, In the HR department all calls are recorded or start recording automatically, but we give the agent the ability to stop recording or to pause recording. We then realize that maybe in the HR department they have an anonymous tip line where people can phone in with certain tips or complaints, and the company says, But those calls should not be recorded at all.
So, the rules are really complex. We can go into every single granular piece of a call and say, for these users or these groups, this is how we actually differentiate both the audio or the video recording, screen share recording. And then once those calls have been recorded, we’re then looking at how do we share them, how do we give access to people, to them? What are the company’s policies? If I’m an agent and my calls are recorded, should I have automatic the ability to go and listen to my own calls, or is that not allowed? And so, there’s the access permission, the security logs. And then taking it one step further is how do we really automate quality assurance? How do we take that audio file or that video file and really extract the data out of it? So, no more do companies have to listen to thousands of calls to really find the calls that are important, we can automatically grade and score and give our customers the ability to look into the calls that are really important to them. And those may be calls where compliance isn’t met.
Give you an example. If by law in a certain jurisdiction, you have to tell the customer that a call is being recorded, well, that’s easy on an inbound call because you just change your system and say, Hey, welcome to CallCabinet, your call is recorded. What about an outbound call? So. In that situation, you’re relying on the agent. How do you make sure that they’re doing it? Because it’s a serious risk to the organization. Fines can be in the millions of dollars if that’s not done. So, going back to using the analytics and the A.I. To say, Hey, did this agent tell the customer this call was recorded? If not, flagged the call for supervisor review. Or was your competitor mentioned in the call? Or was the customer’s emotion negative? These are all key drivers to helping not only understand the data at the end three months later when you’re looking at a report, but really at the same time on the same day, so you can really act on it and turn that customer experience positive and thereby turning call recording from when you have to do it from a compliance, it’s always like a grudge purchase because I have to have it, to something that you really want because now you’re really seeing business value that affects your bottom line by using the data that you have.
Rob Scott: It’s really interesting. That’s where A.I. and the cloud is really adding that additional value, isn’t it, and at that additional return on investment, because it’s able to kind of attach those superpowers to the recordings and the conversations and the data that’s in there. Is that fair to say?
Ryan Kahan: Yeah. The bigger the company … You have customers with 10,000 seats. How do you manage that? How do you know that the agent is giving the right information to your customer? How do you know that your company image is portrayed correctly? And there are such simple things that customers don’t think of. Let’s say you’re a TV company and you make a decision to cancel a certain channel. How do you know what the feeling or the emotion of your customer base is? Well, we can measure it for you. We can say that on average, up until you made that change, X number of calls were positive. Now, how has that affected things that happen further down the line? And really start to dig into that data and understand the metrics.
Rob Scott: Just on sentiment analysis, how has that progressed over the last five years, ten years, let’s say? Because I remember it once upon a time, it was fairly inaccurate, it wasn’t always really able to pick up everything. What’s that technology like nowadays?
Ryan Kahan: So, it’s really interesting. In the early days, going back five, ten, whatever years ago when we started extracting words from audio, the calls were analyzed and given sentiment based on words that were said. So, there was someone that was really negative on the call, he said these words, so it must have been a bad call. That’s now changed. So, we started instead of just analyzing the words, we analyze the tone, the how much space is between people’s words. Because the more aggravated or irate they become, the shorter that becomes. So, there is a lot of tone that can be picked up from the calls. We also go one step further, which says, How does this work? If I phone in, let’s say you’re a contact center agent and I phone in and I’m like, “I’m done with you. Your company sucks. I don’t want to speak to you guys anymore.” Before, it would be a negative call. But what happens if at the end of the call I’m saying to you, “Rob, you saved my life. You were fantastic. This is awesome. Everything’s resolved.” That’s a really, really positive call. So, you need the intelligence to actually understand that negative can become positive, and by the same way, a positive call can become really negative, and how to differentiate that.
Ryan Kahan: So, yes, it’s changed significantly over time. And what we see is really important for customers is taking those calls and feeding them back into our quality assurance tools. Because likewise, in years gone by, quality assurance, you would have ten contact center agents, maybe one per one supervisor. And that supervisor would analyze, let’s say, 3% of the calls from each person. And you’d be able to say, “Okay, I want to analyze all calls greater than 3 minutes in length. I want to analyze incoming calls only for these agents to a specific supervisor.” And now you’re taking that real in-depth data and saying, ‘Yes, I want to analyze calls, but I’m not interested in what kind of calls they are. I want to analyze calls with a weighting of 40% when a competitor’s name was mentioned. 40% where compliance wasn’t met. And 20% where we think it’s a negative call. And bringing all of that in.” And Teams also gives a lot of tools to be able to do that. So, it’s following this whole thing through. Just recording is not enough anymore. There has to be the thought processing, going back to what do I record, how do I record it, when do I record it, and what abilities to give to my actual users or customers.
Rob Scott: Yeah, it sounds super flexible. So, in terms of taking this to market, how do customers get hold of this and what’s the best way to find out more?
Ryan Kahan: The best way is certainly through our website, callcabinet.com. We’re about to … I’m sure by the time this video comes out we’ll have our free trial up and running, which is a true free trial. And our customers or any prospective customers will be able to install and get up and running without even having to speak to us or speak to a salesperson or enter any credit card information. So, we really believe that the product will stand by itself and we’d love people to try it out.
Rob Scott: That’s amazing. So, I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got time for today. However, Ryan, it’s been great talking today. Thank you so much for joining me.
Ryan Kahan: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Rob.
Rob Scott: And thanks to everyone for tuning in. If you’ve got some good takeaways from today’s session, do give us a quick mention on social and subscribe to our channel for more industry news and insights. I’m Rob Scott from UC Today, thanks for watching.
Now that you’ve read what CallCabinet can do for your MS Teams environment, why not schedule a demo to see for yourself?