In the business ecosystem, customer experience (CX) forms the heart of the relationship between a company and clients. According to a study, 49% of your customers might leave you due to poor experiences. Hence, you need to prioritize strategies that enhance customer interactions.
One powerful tool to improve CX is call recording. These recordings can help you analyze each interaction and formulate steps for betterment.
With the advent of VoIP technology, recording customer calls and extracting the necessary insights from them has become significantly easier. Most good quality VoIP phone service provider offer call recording as a part of their plans.
However, with so many solutions available in the industry, which are the most effective? Moreover, which call recording functionalities will fulfill your operational requirements?
Let’s answer a few popular questions about VoIP call recording.
What is VoIP Call Recording and How Does it Work?
Call recording is a prominent feature of modern VoIP phone systems that enables users to record incoming or outgoing business calls. Your employees can record their interactions with customers automatically or manually. After the call ends, the recordings are saved and can be accessed from a searchable cloud storage database.
Here is how VoIP calls are recorded and stored:
Step 1: VoIP phones use the analog-digital-analog framework and make calls by breaking the voice data into digital packets to transmit them via the internet.
Step 2: The call recording feature captures these specific data packets from the VoIP network traffic. It then filters out any unrelated data, ensuring only the conversation is saved.
Step 3: The extracted audio data is stored in a digital file format like MP3 or WAV on a designated storage system.
Step 4: After that, you can easily access and manage the audio files from a single dashboard.
Call recording is available as a part of a four-feature suite in most quality VoIP phone services. The complete package also contains call monitoring, call barging, and call whispering.
Why Record VoIP Calls?
Recording customer interactions can unlock a treasure trove of benefits for your business. From boosting customer service to streamlining training, here’s how leveraging your call recordings can help you enhance efficiency:
1. Quality Assurance and Coaching
As a supervisor, you can leverage call recording to objectively assess your teams’ performance. With these assessments, you can create targeted coaching and development plans, ensuring your team consistently delivers exceptional customer experiences. The recordings can also help you identify areas where the agents excel, allowing you to share best practices across the team.
2. Onboarding New Hires
Immersing new hires in real-world scenarios can help make their onboarding more efficient. Through call recordings of past customer interactions, you can showcase best practices in communication and enhance their product knowledge. Additionally, new agents taking over existing customer accounts can use the recordings to quickly catch up with the details.
3. Dispute Resolution
Call recordings provide an impartial record of customer interactions, proving invaluable in resolving disputes. Hence, they can help de-escalate situations and provide a clear picture of what was discussed. Especially in industries with specific regulations regarding customer interactions, call recordings can serve as proof of your compliance with those regulations.
4. Legal Compliance
As a Voip healthcare professional, complying with HIPAA guidelines when interacting with patients can be a challenge. VoIP call recording functionalities can help you ensure legal compliance and mitigate risk within your healthcare practice.
Firstly, you can configure auto-announcement about the call recording in your VoIP phone systems. This way, you can get informed consent from the patient at the outset. Secondly, these systems offer secure cloud storage with encryption, safeguarding Protected Health Information (PHI) in accordance with HIPAA regulations. This comprehensive approach simplifies compliance and protects both your patients’ privacy and your practice’s legal standing.
What Makes a Good Quality VoIP Phone Service?
Now you understand more about the nitty-gritty of VoIP call recording and how it can improve customer interactions. However, there are many quality VoIP phone service providers with different offerings, Quality of Service (QoS), and pricing plans.
So, how do you find a provider that suits your business needs?
Let’s look at a few basic attributes you must keep in mind while selecting your next service provider:
1. Extensive features:
To start with, we recommend choosing a solution with state-of-the-art recording, management, and storage. Here are some features to look for:
- Flexible configurations: A significant functionality to look for in your VoIP communication solution is adjustable configurations. Your employees should be able to record calls on-demand or automatically based on the requirement. They should also be able to start, pause, and stop recording while on the call, without any hassle.
- Live monitoring: As a manager or supervisor, you might need to monitor customer calls for quality assurance or training. Hence, your VoIP communication solution should offer call barge and call whisper functionalities to ease collaboration.
- Call disposition: With call disposition, you can categorize your calls with keywords like sales inquiries and support issues. This simplifies call review, improves agent performance tracking, and lets you identify customer trends – all leading to better decision-making.
- HD voice: Your VoIP communication solution should offer crystal-clear call recordings with HD Voice. This way you can capture every detail of your conversations. With all the details, it gets easier to review calls, identify areas for improvement, and provide better customer service.
- Data security: A secure call recording storage is your conversation archive. It lets you access past interactions whenever needed, facilitating smoother dispute resolution, improved customer service through informed follow-up, and even training based on real call experiences.
Most VoIP providers allow free storage for a certain period (6-13 months). After that, you can either download them or pay extra to keep them longer. Make sure you choose a provider offering maximum security and storage duration at an economical price.
2. Higher Uptime:
Reliable uptime is mission-critical for any business. A VoIP provider with a near 100% uptime (like Acefone) can help you ensure minimal service disruptions. This way, you minimize the risk of missed calls and potential revenue loss. Ultimately, fewer missed calls lead to a more productive workflow for your team and a better customer experience.
3. Excellent customer support:
To ensure peace of mind for yourself and your team choose a reliable VoIP provider offering 24/7 support. This is because with support-oriented solutions like Acefone, you have experts ready to troubleshoot and solve your problems. All you have to do is to reach out to them via call, chat, or email.
With instant resolution available 24/7, you can prevent unnecessary delays and downtime, and keep your customers happier.
4. Affordability:
While a feature-rich service might be tempting, it’s crucial to ensure its cost aligns with your resource budget. Make sure the providers you are considering offer a range of plans with varying features and pricing structures. By matching your needs to your budget, you will be able to optimize efficiency without carving a hole in the company’s pocket.
Top 5 Quality VoIP Phone Services for Call Recording
1. Acefone
Acefone is a leading cloud communications solution provider with over 5,000 happy customers worldwide. With Acefone’s comprehensive solutions, you get high-quality VoIP phone services along with advanced call functionalities like call barge, whisper, live monitoring, and an easy-to-use recording system.
Popular Features
- Automatic recording
- Call announcement
- HD voice
- Call whisper
- Call barge
- Voicemail to email
- Recording management on a single dashboard
- Detailed reports
Pricing
- Business: $14.99 per user, per month + $5 per user, per month add-on charge for call recording (3-users minimum)
- Premium: $16.99 per user, per month (3 users minimum) Compare plans
Free Trial
Available on all plans (Get yours now)
Best for
Acefone’s cloud telephony solutions are the right fit for startups, small businesses and enterprises looking for a comprehensive and economical cloud-based business communication solution.
2. Nextiva
Nextiva is an all-in-one business communication platform that offers a suite of tools designed to streamline operations and enhance customer engagement.
Popular Features
- On-demand and automatic call recording options
- Call barge-in
- Free storage for 6 months
- Call analytics
Pricing
- Essential: $18.95
- Professional: $22.95
- Enterprise: $32.95
Call recording is included only in the Enterprise plan.
Free Trial
Not Available
Best for
The Enterprise plan (only one inclusive of the recording feature) is ideal for companies with larger teams and higher budgets.
3. RingCentral
RingCentral offers a cloud-based UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) solution that scales with businesses of all sizes.
Popular Features
- On-demand and automatic call recording options
- Default or custom call recording announcements
- Call monitoring
- Call recording
- Call forwarding
Pricing (Phone System)
- Core: $20 per user, per month
- Advanced: $25 per user, per month
- Ultra: $35 per user, per month
The Core plan includes only on-demand call recording, where the admin with phone system permissions must manually start and stop the recording. The Advanced and Ultra plans include both automatic and on-demand recording functionalities.
Free Trial
Available for 14 days
Best for
Medium and large businesses looking for a comprehensive communication solution.
4. Vonage
Vonage offers a scalable cloud-based phone system for businesses. You can choose from over 50 built-in features and add on extras like call recording to create a tailored solution for your company’s needs.
Popular Features
- Automatic and on-demand call recording
- Call tagging
- Call monitoring
- Password protected recordings
- Detailed call logs on demand
Pricing (Unified Communications Solution)
- Mobile: $13.99 per month, per line
- Premium: $20.99 per month, per line
- Advanced: $27.99 per month, per line (+ $4.99 per month for on-demand call recording)
Vonage offers call recording in 2 plans. For small team requirements, you can get it as an add-on with the Advanced plan. Alternatively, for higher volume recording needs, you can opt for their VBC Company Call Recording suite at $ 49.99 per month.
Free Trial
Not Available
Best for
Enterprises with large teams.
5. Dialpad
Dialpad is a cloud-based communication solution that offers call, text, and video meeting functionalities on a unified hub. The platform leverages AI to provide features like real-time call transcription and coaching to help improve customer interactions.
Popular Features
- Automatic call recording
- Call and voicemail logs
- Real-time voice transcription and sentiment analysis
- Call parking
- Call barging, whisper and takeover
Pricing
- Standard: $15 per user, per month
- Pro: $25 per user, per month
- Enterprise: Contact for quote
Free Trial
Available for 14 days
Best for
Small, medium, and large enterprises.
Conclusion
VoIP Call recording can help you gain key insights into interactions, improve agent performance, and build a happy customer base. With the list of 5 good quality VoIP phone service providers mentioned above, you can maximize the benefits of call recording, storage, and management. Want to learn more about the benefits of VoIP call recording for your business? Talk to the experts at Acefone today!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
VoIP prices differ according to service providers. Acefone offers quality VoIP phone services at flexible plans starting from $10.99/ user/ month.
You can record a VoIP call either through third-party recording software or a comprehensive cloud telephony solution. Third-party software is suitable if you have an established VoIP infrastructure without call recording functionality. However, if you are starting afresh, a comprehensive cloud-telephony solution like Acefone will be the best. This is because you can make and record calls and save the recordings using a single platform.
Recording your VoIP calls can help you monitor the quality of customer interactions, implement improvement frameworks and train new executives.
Yes, you can easily monitor ongoing and past VoIP calls. For monitoring interactions in real time, you will require features like call whispering and barging. For past interactions, you can review and analyze call recordings.
The duration for call recording retention differs according to providers. At Acefone, your recordings are stored for one month without any charges. After that, you can purchase the storage for extended use.