3 Years on - 5 questions to ask on mobile phone recording

There has been a flurry of press releases in recent months announcing new mobile recording solutions and new partnerships in place to sell and deploy them. The technology has moved on significantly in the three years since firms have been under obligation to record mobile phone calls.

With more choice, comes more questions and added complexity to the decision making process, so when it’s time to make a selection on mobile phone recording here are five questions we are commonly asked that we thought we’d share with you.

1. Do you want mobile call recording to integrate with your existing voice recording infrastructure?

Do you want to be able to leverage your existing landline call recording solution, whether that’s NICE, Red Box, Verint or any others, by streaming mobile recordings into those platforms? This means that you’ll be able to effectively find and replay your mobile call recordings from within your existing landline recording application, providing one centralised point of access and negating the need for logging into two separate systems. If the answer is ‘yes’ this may narrow your options down as different mobile call recording solutions offer different integration options depending on the accreditations they have received and relationships they have in place with traditional call recording vendors.

2. Is it important that you can consolidate all voice recordings in one secure central area?

If you have a more complex call recording estate spread across different offices, incorporating different technology platforms and don’t want to be limited to any one mobile call recording solution – alternative options exist that still facilitate a single point of access. Portal technology is now being used by some financial firms to act as a simple interface for all their recording engines. The portal can replay any call whether that’s landline, legacy, mobile or hosted, from any number of different systems all from one centralised, secure and easy to access web portal. For the very first time you effectively have a compliant recording portal, streamlining all recordings in one place for simple, less labour intensive retrieval and playback.

3. How should you deploy it and how will this stack up against your retention policy?

Many of the mobile call recording solutions available today can be deployed on either an on-premise, hosted or even hybrid basis. Some companies may prefer to outsource the handling of their mobile call recording and push responsibility to the supplier to manage this service on a hosted basis. If this is the case you need to think about storage costs. If your internal policies dictate you need to store mobile phone recordings for 3 to 4 years a hosted solution may no longer seem viable when you compare the costs of retaining your calls on your own internal hard disk drive versus data warehouse storage costs.  

4. Is roaming and user experience important to you?

Roaming and routing considerations need to be taken into account not only for financial reasons but also for quality of user experience. Can the solution you are considering replicate the positive experience you have had using the technology in the UK whilst the user is doing business in Singapore? Most mobile call recording suppliers should be willing to provide you with some trial handsets to test over a period of time and be geared up for roaming so that you can make sure it will deliver the seamless user experience your traders will expect.

5. How does this decision fit in with your mobile device management plans?

Do you have a BYOD policy that require some controls to be put in place? Are you using Blackberry’s which are already locked down to a certain degree or are you working with iPhones and Samsung’s and if so what are the implications for ensuring a tamper proof mobile recording solution that meets the needs of your IT security protocols?