About phone recorders

Phone Recorder, Call Recorder, Telephone Conversation Recording: What is it called?

We have called this section phone recorders, but people call it many things: call recording , telephone recording, phone recording, call recorder, telephone recorder, phone recorder, phone recorders, call recorders, phone call recording, telephone surveillance, telephone recorders, telephone taps, recording calls, recording telephone calls, but whatever you call it, we do it all.

Where to connect

Picture a chain that runs between your handset (or headset) and your local BT telephone exchange in the UK. Potentially you can connect your telephone recording device anywhere along that chain. You can make the connection:

• Between the handset or headset and the base of the phone
• Between the base of the phone and the wall socket
• Into the wall socket
• Along the cable between the wall socket and your comms.room (the place where your BT or cable outside lines come into the building)
• In the comms. room on the extensions side of your PBX
• On the BT side of your PBX

Advantages of recording on the extension side:
If you record on the extension side of the PBX you will be able to record calls made between extensions. If you record on the line side you will not be able to record calls made between extensions.

Advantages of recording on the outside line side:
Most businesses have more extensions than they have outside lines, so to record every call made into or out of the company would need less lines recorded if the outside lines are recorded rather than every extension.

What to record on to

This can depend upon how long you want to keep the recordings for:

• DVD is good for the highest capacity recording per disk of around 900 hours, but is only available on centralised recording solutions in the comms. room
• DAT tape is still available, but is becoming less popular with the growth of DVD. It can have a higher capacity per tape than DVD, but access time and maintenance are both greater. Again, it is only available on centralised recording solutions in the comms. room
• CD has a high capacity of around 175 hours per disk. At the moment it is only available on the Retell 175 analogue phone.
• MiniDisc offers very high audio quality and it is easy to move around a call centre. Fairly easy to name tracks to find them for training sessions, and tracks can be edited to make it easy to get to the key part of a call for a training session
• You can record onto a telephone recorder and then transfer those recordings over your LAN to your own hard drives and back up systems.
• Recording directly onto your own PC is inexpensive and makes it easy to label recordings and to sort them to make it easy to find them later by customer name etc. You would back up the recordings as part of your normal back up procedure
• Cassettes are still very popular as they are familiar, inexpensive, good for training as they can be listened to on other machines such as in the car, and good for recording issues, such as problems with one particular supplier.

If whatever it is that might go wrong will go wrong within a day, then you only need the recording capacity of a day's calls. But if you might want to go back a year to listen to a call, then you need the capacity to store all those calls.

Why record

If you only have one problem person, and you know which phone you are going to make the calls to them on, or that they will phone you on, then a low capacity system such as a cassette is fine; you would just switch on the recorder when you make or receive a call with that person.
Again, for the odd bit of training, then a cassette or MiniDisc is fine.
However, if the calls that you need to listen to could take place on any phone at any time, then you need to be able to record all calls to make sure that you record the ones that you will need in the future, whichever ones they are.

How to find a recording

Where you connect can affect how you can search for a recording.

• If you record on the outside line side with suitable equipment, then typically each recording will be labelled, and therefore can be searched for by, date, time, called no. and dialled no. in (if Called ID is turned on by BT, and if the caller has not surpressed it). You may be able to compare the call information with your company's database so that you can interpret a call as being to a particular person. Note that BT in the UK calls Caller ID on analogue lines Caller Display.
• If you record on an analogue extension you can certainly record by date and time, but called no. and dialled no. in would depend upon the phone system
• If you record from the cable between the phone and the headset you cannot pick up caller ID or dialled no., but by recording on the PC you can search by date and time. Because the PC is in front of you, you can also type in notes on the calls through which you can search later. The most sophisticated way though is possible if you have to do something on your computer screen to talk to your customer, such as to bring up their record, or if the computer screen pops their information anyway. Then it is easy to integrate that information with the call, so that you can search for recordings by customer name, what they ordered, the sales person, or any other information that is in your own existing computer system.

Issues with 'agent oberve recording'

Your phone system may call it agent observe, silent monitoring or barge in. Whatever it is called, it is a function of the phone system that enables a supervisor to punch in a code to their phone along with an agent's extension, and so to listen to that agent's calls without the agent or the customer being aware during the call that it is being observed.

Retell can provide single line recording equipment that can record from the supervisor's headset. However the issue that normally occurs is that the phone system is not designed with recording in mind, so that the supervisor's headset's microphone is still live, even though neither the agent nor the customer can hear them. This means that simple ways of connecting to the telephone will record the agent, the customer AND noises or conversations that the supervisor has around her desk. These extra noises make it hard to hear the conversation and not good enough sound for use in training sessions.

Retell's Intelligent Recording Interface has been designed to eliminate these noises from the supervisor's microphone, as it has a lockable mute button that stops the microphone from working. Some phone systems have the intelligence to realise that the supervisor's microphone is no longer there, and will there log the supervisor off their phone. However the Intelligent Recording Interface has been designed with this in mind, and it eliminates the supervisor's microphone from the circuit in a way that the phone system cannot detect.

Please contact us to discuss the possibilities, so that you make the right decision for yourself.