Limited Experience
Purchasing Officers, IT personnel, Sales Engineers, VPs and other company administrative staff that may engage in the onboarding of an enterprise call recording platform often have the same questions.
After all, though their business may require an enterprise call recording solution for compliance or quality assurance, they generally have limited experience with call recording. This inexperience can make it rather difficult to evaluate the differences between competing platforms or determine which platform will best meet their needs.
Inevitably, the first question many onboarders ask is: what’s the key thing to look for? – or what is the most important feature of an enterprise call recording platform?
A Replatforming Market
It’s a rare thing to find a heavily regulated business onboarding an enterprise call recording platform for the first time. Because call recording is so essential to many of these businesses, most already have some form of solution in place.
Thus, the organizations looking to onboard a call recording platform are usually either starting to realize the value of recording data or companies that are unhappy with their current solution. In the latter case, the onboarding team will likely have a very solid idea of what they dislike about their existing platform and will use it to determine what they are looking for in their next solution.
But this approach may prove more challenging than it seems. For example, if a company’s issue with their enterprise call recording platform is that it doesn’t properly integrate with another critical software platform they use, they would certainly seek out a more compatible solution. But in doing so, it’s possible that other operational challenges might arise, bringing the company right back to square one.
Hostage Data
We frequently encounter businesses that use legacy on-premise recording systems but want to move to a cloud-based platform instead. Usually, they want to add new locations or offer employees remote work options and can only do so through their platform by adding additional on-premise systems at great expense.
Unfortunately, these outmoded systems record only in proprietary formats, rendering their data useless outside of the platform. This amounts to a trap for those who rely on such systems for regulatory compliance. They cannot simply migrate their data to the cloud or share it across their enterprise because it is in an unreadable format. And since industry regulations dictate that compliance recording data must be kept for up to 7 years, many face the “Hobson’s choice” of either keeping their legacy platform or onboarding a new platform and maintaining both for seven years.
CallCabinet actually offers a data liberation solution for those facing this dilemma.
One Feature to Rule them All
While knowledge of these challenges may make the prospect of onboarding a new enterprise call recording solution seem daunting, they actually all point to what constitutes the most important feature of these platforms: versatility.
Enterprise call recording platforms are usually marketed on the strength of features like voice analytics or price; these features pale in comparison to the importance of versatility.
Why? Because, as the examples above illustrate, enterprise call recording is always a long-term solution. That means that businesses will inevitably have to contend with the element of time, a factor frequently overlooked while vetting potential platforms.
While it is necessary to assess how an enterprise call recording solution will fit with your company’s software and processes today, consideration should also be given to what tomorrow may bring. After all, businesses today are constantly learning the value of being agile and adapting to change.
Will your company grow? Will it diversify? How will your business evolve over time? Versatility allows us to leave these unanswerable questions unanswered.
For example, few had foreseen the upheaval caused by the global pandemic of 2020 or the resultant worldwide shift toward remote work that has followed it. But the organizations that were best able to adapt are the ones remaining in business today.
Compatible with Tomorrow
Expanding on why versatility is paramount in an enterprise call recording platform, consider the many hardware and software systems a modern business uses. How many of them were in place five years ago? How many will remain in place for five years hence? How will each evolve over time, and how will it affect the other systems that integrate with them?
A properly versatile solution should be able to abide change in any form and offer easy updating to allow it to accommodate any potential incompatibilities that may arise in the future. A business cannot defend itself against change; versatility is the only defense against the future.
For example, to adapt to the shift to remote work cited above, many enterprises adopted Microsoft Teams as a unified communications (UC) platform to bring remote workers together in a shared virtual workspace. While Teams is an excellent UC solution, it does not offer compliant recording, and many enterprise recording platforms were simply not designed to support the variety of different devices it operates on.
Versatile platforms like CallCabinet were already capable of supporting Microsoft Teams. However, this was not true of all call recording solutions.
Versatility in the Channel
Naturally, many of the same questions enterprises have about onboarding an enterprise call recording platform will be directed to channel resellers. Many businesses rely upon the experience and expertise of channel providers to guide them to the best solutions for their needs.
Here, again, versatility is paramount. Channel resellers cannot afford to proffer poorly-compatible “dead-end” solutions if they wish to retain their customers and sell additional solutions in the future. Nor can they afford to sell solutions that are overly involved or require complex integrations. Versatility becomes simplicity, making it easy for enterprises to adopt.
There are a variety of enterprise call recording solutions that provide rich features and functionality for contact centers and enterprises in all kinds of industries, but precious few can offer the highest degree of versatility today’s businesses need most.