The problems with recorded telephone conversations being compliant and legally admissible in court, as well as being affordable, has long-been the bug-bear for all members of the financial community, from the small independent financial adviser to the multi-officed lender or packager.
24Talk have announced a joint venture between themselves and Verbal Store Limited creating the operation of VerbalStore ASP. The Application Service Provider will offer clients interested in voice recording and monitoring a pay-as-you-go service, enabling small to medium sized companies to benefit from contact centre grade voice recording and monitoring technology.
The ASP will enable users to subscribe, log-on to a remote server and benefit from full functionality voice recording and monitoring as if they were a contact centre. The single user functionality will include record start/stop, system query, playback and archival of data for a minimum of six months. Longer storage options are available if required. For multiple-user accounts an additional supervisor access function is available, enabling supervisors to login and real-time monitor recordings from their users, as well as query calls, playback and export files to .wav format. The service is fully compliant with data protection acts. Recordings made through the VerbalStore service are encrypted, tamper-resistant and admissible in court.
Traditionally contact centres have benefited from voice recording by being able to capture valuable customer interactions, and then store and playback when needed. These systems have been hardware based, making it difficult for users to log-on remotely and benefit from full functionality. Whilst the investment has been heavy, and usage constraints making recording inflexible, users have benefited in the areas of authorisation/verification, dispute resolution, capturing details, dictation, data mining, completing records, performance evaluation and more.
According to VerbalStore Director Stephen Sinclair “I have been in the voice recording industry for some 15 years now. Over the years I've met with many companies looking to utilise voice recording but feeling ignored by the traditional system vendors, whose systems have been incapable of scaling down to meet with the unique budgets and needs of single users. With the offering of this ASP service we hope to let those companies and users know, we’ve listened.”
The technology behind this service has been in contact centre usage, benefiting organizations around the world. It is unique in that it is capable of scaling from one user, unlike other offerings.
“In putting together our packaging, tariff plan and service offering we’ve made the service flexible enough to cater to the occasional home user as well as the heavy-usage multi-national corporation” adds Aviva Weinstein, Operations Director for VerbalStore. “We’ve gone a step beyond the contact centre recording arena by thinking users are looking to record more than just phone calls. Have a microphone near your pc? You could record a meeting, dictation or even a consultation. Have your PA playback and exact minutes can be transcribed. Even better, share the recording by sending the participants a .wav file by email moments after your discussion has ended.”
Chris Budd, Managing Director of 24Talk adds “subscribers these days are looking for maximum features, tailored services and the least amount of confusion in selecting services. It seemed a natural fit to then offer customers voice recording and monitoring capabilities. Even better though, you do not have to be a 24Talk subscriber to use this service, although 24Talk customers will be offered special rates for this service.”
