Looking to record your call center calls? Don’t make these mistakes:

 

1. Using the wrong technology

There are 3 places you can record your calls:

1. On the agent’s workstation
2. On the server
3. On the trunks

Unless you want to be searching through multiple files on multiple agent workstations, you’re going to want to record everything on the back end. Server based recording allows you to link recordings to specific call records. Trunk-based recording normally doesn’t link call records to recordings, but it can if you are using the right software.

2. Underdimensioning your hardware

On a server, each channel records at 64kbps. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you have a call center with 200 agents all recording, that’s 200 channels and 13Mbps of data transfer. If you’ve got a low-end server with slower hard drives, you’re going to overload it. If you have anything else on that server, it’s going to respond slowly. If you’re going to buy a recording server, get some 10,000 RPM disks, or an SSD.

200 agents at 26Mbps will fill your drive with almost 6GB worth of calls per hour. That will fill the drives fairly quickly. Depending on how long you need to save your recordings, you’re going to need more storage space. Luckily, you can offload them after-hours onto fairly cheap storage.

3. Not having good retention policies

Disk space costs. Losing a lawsuit because you deleted a recording also costs. You’re going to want to find a balance in there somewhere. In most cases, you don’t need to keep recordings of answering machines and wrong numbers for very long. However, you’ll want to keep your sales for much longer, especially if the customer forgets what they ordered.

Professional-grade call center software can make it easy to avoid all of these mistakes. When considering what software to use, don’t forget about your recordings.