Accurate records of voice conversations – and their related data – are crucial to fuelling financial services compliance. Best practice extends beyond direct regulatory mandates to how data is stored and captured.

Current call recording solutions on applications and devices fail to address the full spectrum of compliance requirements faced by financial services organisations. Their approach to data retention and security increases risks rather than meeting the challenges set out by regulators.

The solution is Unified Call Recording which takes place inside service provider networks and popular solutions such as WebEx Calling and Microsoft Teams. And, as a bonus, enterprises can eliminate the costs of legacy platforms.

Risk and compliance managers who want to take a more proactive approach to meeting regulations and engendering trust in their customers will be looking for more than basic record keeping solutions. Providers need to be offering AI, transcription, real-time search, automated alerts and APIs as standard. Here are six critical features that should be considered in any compliant call recording solution.

Six critical features every financial services organisation should look for

Retention periods

Regulations such as the GDPR state that organisations must not keep data for longer than is necessary for the purpose the data was obtained for. It is best practice to not keep personal data for longer than is necessary and businesses need to be able to justify how long they store personal data. Financial services institutions require the ability to set retention periods in order to define the length of time that recorded calls are stored for, and to automate their deletion once this time period has been reached.

Unlimited secure storage

Is your data being stored with market-leading AES-256 encryption? Industry leading security practices are crucial. Most legacy call recording solutions require on premise storage at an incremental cost to the service and the more you store, the more it costs. By using Universal Call Recording and storing data in a Voice Intelligence Cloud, enterprises benefit from infinite storage at no additional cost – all provisioned with a click. And, by deploying the platform across dedicated regional data centres with geographic redundancy, organisations can be assured of data sovereignty.

Access permissions

In order to protect data, financial institutions need to ensure that they can restrict access to personal information such as recorded calls, depending on the role the user has been allocated. Depending on the information security policy of the firm, not every user whose calls are recorded should have access to them, or may only be allowed to listen to their calls and nobody else’s. Administrator permissions should be available so that supervisors and management with appropriate authority can access recordings.

Instant retrieval

Audit and compliance investigations require real-time access to data. Legacy call recording platforms depend on SQL searches often taking many minutes to render results. Instead, require that your Voice Intelligence Cloud provides immediate and secure access to all recordings – with search delivering results in real-time. Users should be able to search for calls using data including the date, time, and call participants. By choosing a solution with added voice AI, recorded calls can even be retrieved by searching for words spoken during a conversation. All recordings should be available for instant retrieval, playback, and secure download, with appropriate permission settings.

Call metadata

Compliance with financial services regulations relies on transparency, so call recording solutions should include call metadata alongside each conversation for a detailed record of customer interactions. This provides full transparency in the case of a request for information from a regulator. Ensure your solution provides rich call metadata – including timestamps on conversations – to allow for quick and easy search and retrieval of information. This gives firms the upper hand in compliance and risk management. Voice AI that can detect keywords and send tailored alerts to management makes it quicker and easier to detect and deter suspicious trading activities to prevent penalties from regulators.

Legal hold

Legal hold is an important feature that allows users to tag single or multiple recordings as held. These recordings can be played, downloaded, and shared as any other recording; but cannot be deleted under any circumstances. Held recordings remain even after their retention period expires, if the user associated with that recording is deleted, or if the storage period expires. This ensures that recordings required for legal reasons will always remain available for review.

This week Russell Evans, Dubber’s global head of sales and channels looks at the most common challenge faced by resellers today – how to maximise revenue and reduce the prospect of churn in the booming demand for communications services.

Resellers of communications services – from mobile and SIP connections to UC, Teams, and more – have seen a Covid-driven boom in demand for services. The shift to the Cloud has been matched by an equal demand for data enriched AI to automate processes, gain extra functionality, and work more efficiently. Resellers that can demonstrate not simply the efficiency of the connection but also how to extract more value from every connection are winning more and seeing less churn.

So what does the new reseller playbook for resellers look like?

1. Sell more than the utility and connection: What if the content created in every conversation was a source of insights and alerts? Unified Call Recording – available on the products you are selling today does just that – it converts the conversation to data to create beautiful transcriptions, sentiment analysis, real-time search and more.
2. Create more value: That data becomes a source of immense value for your customers, ending not knowing what was said across the business. Sales leaders get an immediate read on every customer’s conversation. Customer service leaders can understand customer sentiment in real-time. Compliance managers get a secure and protected record of conversations and can instantly be alerted as to when to undertake investigations.
3. Differentiate your offering and increase your value: While others sell Apps and connections, you are now differentiated, exposing the value of every conversation across the business. You stand-out because you are talking to the business outcomes the solution is meant to drive. Your relationship with your customer is elevated, driven by your ability to create quantifiable business benefits. You will occupy the space of trusted advisor for your clients.
4. Unlock the power of voice data: Call recording helps businesses meet their compliance mandates, but it does so much more. Customers are crucial for any sustainable business. Voice data helps them gain greater visibility of transactions taking place within their business, and it provides the data for customer service employees to help with dispute resolution, leading to reduced churn and improved customer experiences.

1. Target the burning needs: Every Enterprise in regulated industries – and most undertaking crucial conversations in which orders are taken, material information exchanged and issues are resolved – have a requirement to both record calls and manage voice data in compliant ways. Unified Call Recording isn’t just a way of selling more to your existing customers, it’s a natural add-on to every new connection.

Fuel big data: Big Data only captures a small proportion of data generated by a company. While companies have seen the value of big data, they are missing out on a huge chunk of data that is left uncaptured from voice calls. Imagine the value of combining both online and voice data to gain a holistic customer picture. Businesses can use these insights to inform new product lines, aid in cross-selling, and gain a better understanding of the reasons behind their customer’s decisions. Exporting this data to visualisation tools such as Google Data Studio, makes it easier than ever to extract these insights. More and more businesses are realising this, and using this voice data intelligence to gain a competitive advantage.

Aragon Research has recognised Dubber as a global conversational AI leader, with a report detailing Dubber’s visionary and innovative approach to using AI to generate conversational intelligence.

Dubber has been recognised as a “Hot Vendor in Conversational AI” in the 2021 report by Aragon Research, Inc. The Conversational-AI market is experiencing significant growth and is expected to record a CAGR of 30.2% (through to 2024) driven by the needs of businesses of all sizes for greater customer, people and revenue intelligence.

The report identified Dubber’s ability to derive business value from voice data and provide easy to follow transcription and sentiment analysis of crucial conversations by sales reps, customer support personnel, and others, mentioned as standout features.

Conversational intelligence benefits

Dubber’s conversational intelligence enables both internal and external benefits for businesses.

Conversational intelligence enables revenue programs such as sales, customer success, and customer loyalty. Real-time text and speech-based insights can help sales reps improve information accuracy, productivity, streamline communication between managers and employees, and drive continuous learning throughout the enterprise.

Internally, it’s often used to promote employee engagement and performance through coaching, learning, training, assisting, and more diligent recording and archiving of important enterprise knowledge, such as the knowledge stored in meetings. When the entire meeting is recorded, critical insights and intelligence is unlocked. Meeting recording and transcription paired with insights can drive a more unified, engaged and knowledgeable workforce.

Let Dubber Conversation AI do the work

Dubber Conversational AI comes ready to run with the ability to develop AI training specific to your institution.

• Industry-leading transcription with auto-language detection
• AI-enriched sentiment, tone and emotion signals
• Automate data loss and misuse monitoring Deep-learning and ML-based policies automate the detection of leakage risks in what was said, shown, or shared. Create your own custom, company-specific policies.
• AI-powered alerts on risks move you beyond random sampling and transcript searches
• Workflow automation for automating the next best action and processes based on conversational data

Dubber offers service and solution providers, government agencies and businesses the ability to compliantly record conversations in the cloud, without hardware or storage.

Dubber Unified Conversational Recording and Voice Intelligence Cloud can scale to fit any size business and allows access to previously untapped voice data. Voice, video and chat conversations are transcribed and enriched with AI-powered insights and are available on a phone or browser.

Dubber processes billions of minutes of recorded voice data and transforms that data into intelligence for 1,000s of businesses. Dubber solutions are native to Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom, and networks such as AT&T, Verizon, Telstra and Cox Communications.

“Dubber’s tremendous network of service and solution providers, as well as our partners, has allowed us to the ability to unlock the potential of conversational data into meaningful intelligence for customers,” said James Slaney, COO, Dubber. “Our inclusion in the ‘Hot Vendors in Conversational AI’ report is reflective of the power of conversational recording for business insights and certainly a rewarding recognition of the incredible year of growth and progress Dubber has had.”

Everyone should be able to access their voice data – no matter the size of their business. Unified Call Recording and voice AI doesn’t need big budgets for up-front spending, or a big office to store bulky on-premise recording equipment. Even small business owners can see great return on investment when they start recording their calls.

1. Gain greater visibility and easily resolve disputes

Phone calls remain the dominant form of business conversation. Email, chat, and messaging are all good for quick transactional communications but, especially with the increase in remote working, the most important conversations happen on voice or video calls. Unfortunately the data from those conversations is lost as soon as the call ends.

If the call was recorded from your service provider network (with no hardware or software to install), it could be replayed from anywhere, you could review a full transcript, and receive alerts and reports on customer satisfaction based on the sentiment of calls.

Imagine you are Chris, who has run his building business for decades and is slowly handing responsibility to his two sons as he edges towards retirement. He still wants to keep track of his team and their jobs as he trains the new company directors and sometimes worries about who has committed what and at what price.

By recording conversations across all company phones, Chris has greater visibility while letting his sons take leadership over the business operations. Easy to digest call transcripts allow him to quickly assess upcoming commitments and sentiment analysis shows how happy customers are. Chris can even search by keyword for specific jobs and set up alerts for negative sentiment to ensure that any unsatisfied customers are followed up with.

While call transcripts provide Chris with peace of mind, the rest of the team also benefit from having proof of their conversations. When it comes to final invoices, they have the reassurance of knowing exactly what was agreed between them and the customer and are protected in the case of any disputes.

2. Train staff in proven sales techniques

The phone is one of a sales rep’s most important tools as they build their relationship with existing customers and nurture leads towards a sale. Sales people hone their pitches and techniques to a fine art and adapt their messaging depending on the product and the contact. In an ideal world, they’d be able to pass this knowledge onto new team members, but this can be difficult unless they listen into every conversation. By recording calls, sales leaders can isolate successful sales pitches and use these as the basis for staff training.

Alex is the owner of a tech startup that is focused on driving growth. Alex has recently employed a number of new sales staff and is keen for them all to get behind the company messaging with effective sales pitches that turn leads into customers.

By recording calls, Alex can repurpose conversational content for coaching new team members. Sentiment analysis of recordings can identify happy customers, and this data can be cross-referenced with the status of leads and deals to find the top performing messaging. This data also makes it easy for Alex to measure the achievements of the team and reward their hard work.

3. Improve customer experience through data-driven insights

Salesforce is the source of truth for sales people, who use it to track their interactions with their customers. Imagine if those interactions were available within Salesforce itself. You could recap a conversation, refer to a transcript, and see who else at the business has spoken to your contact and know exactly how they feel about the brand and at what stage of the purchase journey they are at.

Charlie owns a fashion brand and has a sales team that works with department stores and online retailers to stock the brand. Charlie is interested in how data can inform business decisions but is a complete beginner when it comes to data science. With a free Google Data Studio account, Charlie can use templates to see reporting from sales calls and get a quick insight into how the team is performing.

By integrating recorded calls with Salesforce, Charlie can see a more granular view of sales interactions. Sentiment analysis can give a report of customer satisfaction at a call level, while Charlie can also set up reporting for how wholesale customers are feeling about the brand by week or by month. One staff member might spend more time on the phone than others, and by viewing this data alongside their sales performance Charlie can see that these longer conversations build relationships with customers. By applying this knowledge to the rest of the business, Charlie can improve customer retention.

4. Reduce churn with customisable automated alerts

Call recording is vital for legal firms to store a secure record of their conversations with clients. But these calls could provide valuable insights rather than being locked away with no further action. The data held within these conversations could provide the information required to increase client satisfaction and loyalty.

Ruth runs a family law firm, with her two daughters employed as divorce lawyers. Ruth spends a lot of time trying to win big clients and maintain good relationships with her existing clients. She wants to make sure that the firm is providing excellent service to keep her clients happy and loyal.

With automated alerts, calls are automatically flagged for review. Ruth can set up custom parameters for notifications, either via email or to automate processes in software such as a CRM tool using an API. She might want all calls with negative sentiment to be sent to her inbox so she can check whether there is anything she needs to follow up on, or there might be a particular client she is worried may leave in favour of a competitor and so set an alert for any calls to or from their number.

Call transcripts provide a simple and easy way to review key conversational content and detect unhappy clients and Ruth can even review these when she is at home, or travelling between client meetings. With her secure login and specific permissions, she can access calls from any location or device.

5. Stop taking notes with instant call and meeting transcripts

Dispersed workforces are more common now than ever before, and communication is being put to the test. Sharing information with team members via email and Slack can lose nuance and tone but involving a huge team in client conversations can be unwieldy and lead to interruptions and sidetracking.

Robin is the owner of a content agency with a roster of freelance copywriters, graphic designers, and video creators. Robin spends most of the day meeting clients to get a detailed brief of their needs and chooses the appropriate member of the team to create the required content.

By recording client calls and meetings, Robin doesn’t need to take notes and can really be in the moment with clients and have time to think and ask all the right questions – safe in the knowledge that a full transcript of the conversation will be waiting. Working with a dispersed workforce, Robin relies on being able to share details of jobs with the team of content creators. With secure sharing, conversations can be accessed by the freelancer undertaking a job so they know exactly what is required.

All of this is possible with Dubber. Are you a small business owner thinking about getting call recording? Speak to a member of our team today for advice on the right subscription for you.

Any business in a highly regulated industry will understand the extra compliance measures they need to take to ensure they meet the required standards.

This is particularly true in the financial services industry. With more than 80% of business interactions being voice, businesses place themselves at risk if these crucial conversations are not properly captured. Customer disputes may take longer to resolve leading to customer’s losing trust in their financial institutions, expensive lawsuits, and brand damage.

But how can businesses efficiently and seamlessly prevent many of these issues escalating and damaging reputation, regulatory fines, and worse?

The answer is Unified Call Recording (UCR) and voice data analytics.

UCR allows businesses to meet compliance mandates by implementing Dubber into their telephony and UC systems. Here are five ways that Financial Services can use Dubber to mitigate any compliance risks to their business.

1. Fraud detection – While financial institutions have regulations in place to detect inappropriate or fraudulent behaviour, UCR and voice analytics provides them with a holistic overview of all customer interactions across the business. Breaches of policy can be alerted immediately. Investigations conducted using real-time search. Insightful call transcriptions provide the ability to analyse these interactions for any discrepancies or anomalies in behaviour.

2. Know your customer (KYC) – Call recordings provide a full record of a financial institution’s dealings with the customer, satisfying the major criteria of correctly identifying the individual customer or entity. Dubber features such keyword search allows Team Leaders to audit these calls to ensure that proper KYC procedures were adhered to when dealing with the customer. Dubber’s sentiment analysis also provides businesses with an understanding of how a customer feels about their business helping them to modify the way they service that customer.

3. Increasing transparency with auditors and regulators – Call recording not only benefits clients, but also financial advisers, and the corporate bodies who regulate the industry. Dubber’s API’s enable financial adviser’s to automatically transfer call recordings to their relevant client files, eliminating the need to manually take notes and ensuring all information pertaining to that client is held in the one file. This allows internal compliance teams to conduct audits and investigations more efficiently by allowing them to view all customer interactions in the one file.

4. Acting in the client’s best interest – Any institution providing financial advice must act in the client’s best interest. Unified Call Recording safeguards both the client and the adviser, ensuring any issues of miscommunication or claims of inappropriate advice are eliminated and client disputes can be resolved faster. Dubber’s Legal Hold feature also protects both the business and the customer by ensuring that selected call recordings can never be deleted, further helping businesses with client disputes.

5. Client data management – Local Privacy Laws may specify that businesses only hold on to customer data for a specified period of time. Dubber’s data retention feature allows businesses to comply with their local privacy laws by allowing call recordings to be automatically deleted after a specific period of time. This ensures businesses are only storing relevant information, and not unnecessarily holding on to customer data, minimising risks for both the business and the customer.

Dubber’s Unified Call Recording and Voice Data Intelligence has a myriad of use cases for any heavily regulated business. Schedule a time to meet with a Dubber sales representative to learn more about financial services applications.

Dispersed workforces, remote call centres, and increasing customer and employee connections across mobile devices. These are just a few of the impacts of COVID-19. Hallway conversations, listening in, and on premise systems once gave leaders some insight to the conversations taking place between employees, customers, and suppliers. For many that has become difficult, if not impossible. Costly and limited on-premise call and conversation capture can’t keep up. A move from legacy call recording to the cloud has become a priority.

With a remote workforce, enterprises are asking how to capture crucial conversations. The number of IP connections has grown rapidly with more calls occurring remotely than on premise. However, regulatory demands remain in place: requiring secure, long-term storage of calls. Enterprises are looking for keyword reporting, sentiment analysis, and accurate and accessible transcriptions to quickly view call data, and receive custom alerts.

Accelerating to the cloud

This change is reflected in the broader shift to cloud-based solutions. Where this was once part of a longer-term digital transformation strategy, it has now become accelerated. 93% of IT decision makers are moving their cloud adoption programmes forward. Budgets will be shifted towards cloud solutions that facilitate our new way of working, with 52% seeing an increase due to the pandemic.

Optimised for remote work

We created Dubber to enable any business conversation to be captured and converted to actionable insights, no matter where it takes place. We couldn’t have imagined a scenario like COVID-19, where a dispersed workforce would make cloud call recording so critical.

With automated provisioning and no need for on-premise equipment or management, we make it easy for businesses looking to move to the cloud. We can even migrate historic recordings to cloud storage to ensure minimal risk and disruption as this change takes place. From then on, businesses can be assured that their communications can continue as normal, no matter where their employees are working from.

Business insights from a dispersed workforce

While our cloud call recording means that compliance mandates can still be met regardless of where staff are working from, this is just the beginning. Our voice AI is where businesses see real value. They are identifying opportunities to reduce churn, sharpening investment decisions, and improving the quality of conversations with customers. All this from the data held within their voice calls.

Four voice data imperatives

1. Call recording isn’t the answer. It’s an answer, but not the answer. Voice data remains one of the great untapped opportunities in the enterprise. To unlock the data within is where the answers lie.
2. AI isn’t just a convenient buzzword. When talking about AI, most call recording vendors are referring to transcription. This is just the first step. The real imperative at the heart of Dubber is using AI to enable advanced analytics, workflow management, sentiment analysis, and more.
3. Break free of application, storage and device silos. Legacy call recording platforms imposed high-costs, limited storage, and restricted call capture. This only gave enterprises a partial view of what was happening, and locked data into proprietary dashboards. Our open API, data exporter, and application integrations allow you to use call data across your business.
4. Secure your voice data. We capture voice data at the network level, and secure it with market-leading technology. Recording to local storage or application clouds outside of your control is high risk. Your voice data is as important as any other data, and should be protected.

The voice data revolution is just getting started. Getting your voice data strategy right today sets you up for long-term success and will help bridge the distance created by COVID-19.