Recording VoIP Calls

Why record VoIP calls?

As a business owner recording your calls is highly recommended, especially if your business involves financial transactions where you are obliged by law to keep records of conversations that ultimately lead to transactions. Another reason why call recording is beneficial is that it can protect both the business and its customers: since these interactions are stored via recordings both parties can prove their case should a dispute occur.

Although all these comprise the most common explanations as to why calls should be recorded, consider that there are other purposes for using previously recorded conversations between co-workers and customers, too. One such purpose is the training of employees: by listening to these records, staff members can easily learn the tricks of successfully facing any kind of situation, learn the company’s processes, or simply improve their own skills by learning from past examples. In this sense call recording can even be used for employee evaluation, where the business owner or managers can listen to a recorded conversation to evaluate their overall performance and ensure required standards and process flows are being met. This leads to probably the most important use of call recording: quality assurance. By analyzing the calls, businesses are able to decide which areas are in desperate need of improvement and how to better satisfy customers.

“This call may be recorded”

Still, there are other precautions to take as well to ensure that your records are created in compliance with the law. Inform customers that the recorded calls can be shared with them if requested within a certain period of time (usually a year or so) by referring to the number of the call or by giving the name of the operator and the time of the call. It is also important to assure callers that their conversations and personal data won’t be sold to third parties for advertising purposes. But, most importantly, you should make sure that calls are securely stored, whether online or offline, so that nobody besides the authorized employees of the company can access the recordings.

VoIP services with call recording

Since call recording is a key asset for businesses, many cloud phone systems providers include this feature in their services either as part of the subscription or as a pay-only extra. No matter which company you pick – whether it’s MightyCall or Phone.com – you can rest assured that your calls are recorded and stored in a secure and professional manner.

Call recording options

If call recording is not available as part of your VoIP service, there are still plenty of ways to properly record and store inbound and outgoing calls: namely via hosted call recording (cloud-based solutions), software and adapters.

Hosted call recording

Cloud-based services record your calls and store them in the cloud without the need to install software or an app on your device. This is not the only reason why hosted call recording is the most convenient: they are often available with VoIP providers as part of their services. Sometimes it is possible to integrate third party apps into your existing VoIP system and record your calls with that solution, but this option is usually out of question due to the limited integrated features of cloud-based phone systems. And let’s not forget that storing past calls in the cloud requires extra storage space, meaning that you’ll need to pay an additional fee for using this feature.

Self-recording calls

The advantage of having software doing the call recording is that it is possible to record multiple channels at the same time – which comes in handy during conference calls – set the program to remove silent moments, and determine the format, the quality of records and the folder they are saved to. The downside is that call recordings occupy valuable storage space on your computer, plus the software still needs to be configured in order to be able to integrate into your phone system.

Hardware call recording