Why Record Telephone Calls?

2011-11-08 10:54:56

We are all used to telephone calls being recorded when you call up your bank, electricity and gas suppliers or any large organisation which operates a call centre environment. However, with call recording technology becoming more affordable you can now record phone calls in your home or office and store the recorded calls on your PC.

Now your first question may be ‘Why would I want to record telephone calls?, well below are just some suggestions;

Recording Meetings or Conference Calls

Many businesses in the current economic environment are looking for alternatives to face to face meetings between employees at different sites as the travelling costs coupled with the time out of the office whilst travelling is an expense that most companies can ill afford. Conference calls or telephone meetings are becoming increasingly popular and what better way to accurately record the meeting than by recording the call. Recording the meeting in this way negates the need for recording minutes and ensures an accurate account of what has been discussed is available for everybody.

Training and Monitoring for Employees

Large call centres have been recording telephone conversations for years and then using the recorded calls to help develop staff by working through what they have done well and the improvements they can make. Image the improvement a typical SME could make to all aspects of their business by using these same techniques with their staff.

Staff Protection

Some customers can become abusive on the phone or in extreme cases begin to make nuisance phone calls. Recording such phone calls can be useful if legal action is needed. On the flip side to this, if a customer makes a complaint regarding a staff member being unprofessional or abusive towards them you won’t simply have to rely on the customer’s word for this as the incident will have been recorded and can then be saved and played back to both parties if required.

Compliance with Regulations

A number of industries, particularly those in the financial services sector are required to record and store certain calls for a period of time. Large organisations will have software that has been developed specifically for this purpose and that integrates with their computing systems. Smaller businesses must look for their own solutions, ideally ones that are both effective and affordable.

Is Call Recording Legal?

There are a number of regulations that govern call recording activity and full details are available from the OFTEL website. The key points however are summarised below;

For Home Users;

Call recording is not prohibited providing the recording is for their own use and will not be made available to a third party.

For Business Users;

To see that quality standard are being met in the interests of national security.
To prevent of detect crime and to investigate the unauthorised use of the phone system.
The secure the effective operation of the phone system.
To provide evidence of business transactions.

The Intelligent Recording Digital Call Recorder

Historically sophisticated telephone call recording equipment was limited to large call centres and SMEs had to rely on the simple telephone answering machine. Those days are now gone as both stand alone and PC integrated telephone recording devices are available at affordable prices but are packed full of functions you would only expect to see in a much larger and more expensive system.

The digital telephone voice recorder from intelligent recording is ideal for small and home based businesses and individual users in business and corporate environments.

With over 340 hours of storage on a standard 2gb memory card the digital telephone voice recorder can be used as a stand-alone unit (No PC needed) or in conjunction with the XTR desktop software that is supplied with the product. The software allows recordings to be transferred from the SD card to your PC where it can be managed and archived.

For full specifications and details of the digital voice recorder please click on the link below.

Take a look at the Digital Telephone Voice Recorder