- BrightArrow ExecutiveAssistant Call Recording
With so many new ExecutiveAssistant features being added and discussed recently, it’s been awhile since I last updated you about one of the product’s core features: Call Recording.
Over the years, ExecutiveAssistant Call Recording has grown and expanded, both in terms of functionality as well as robustness. The essence to call recording is that you set up the NBX to route calls through the ExecutiveAssistant server and its associated “conference bridge” technology. That enables the audio of the calls to remain securely scrambled on the network, but streams the audio to disk as needed for recording purposes. It also allows the recording of any calls, including calls on non-NBX phones or even remote (cell) phones.
Many of the competing IP phone systems only offer packet sniffers as their recording mechanism. Sniffing is a simple idea as long as the customer has the appropriate equipment to deliver necessary port mirroring on the switch. Unfortunately for those systems, the typical way of delivering sniffing is to configure the phone system to unscramble or un-encrypt the audio on the network (thus opening up the system for unauthorized sniffer-based spyware). Packet sniffing doesn’t allow recording of calls to/from cell phones, analog phones, or calls on the other side of a VTL – but ExecutiveAssistant call recording can record those devices. In addition, because packet-sniffing is a read-only approach, it becomes virtually impossible to be in compliance with taping laws for many states.
3Com NBX Uniquely Allows Organizations to Record Legally
Please understand that I am not an attorney and would never offer legal advice – you should be consulting an attorney in your state or province to identify the laws and associated penalties. Instead, I am relaying (in a non-legal sense) opinions stated on Web sites that detail taping laws (like http://www.rcfp.org/taping/). In that site, for example, you will see that the states of California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington require consent by all parties for calls to be recorded. In addition, any organizations that call from one-party states to those states list above probably need the consent of all parties, because it is typically advised that you follow the laws of the stricter state in inter-state calls. In other words, if the organization will ever call any of the above states, then they need a mechanism by which the call recipient knows the call is being recorded.
Implied consent of all parties is fairly easy when calls are coming into an auto-attendant or a call center. Most organizations take care of that by including a “your call may be recorded” in the incoming greeting.
Consent of all parties is trickier, however, for DID incoming calls, and is extremely difficult for outbound calls. Many offices that need to record calls want to record all types of calls, including calls coming into DID’s as well as outbound calls. Depending on the phone system and how it manages DID’s, many systems are not well-equipped to play a warning before passing the DID call off to the employee’s telephone.
When it comes to outbound calls, the 3Com NBX with ExecutiveAssistant is uniquely qualified in its feature of including a periodic beep to cover legal requirements of all-party-consent for outbound calls. ExecutiveAssistant has an option to play a background periodic beep tone when a call is being recorded, or is even on-demand for its retroactive record feature.
The potential criminal penalties for not following the taping laws listed in the Web sites include stiff fines and imprisonment in many states. Call recording is a powerful and useful tool, and once you start using it for business you find it irreplaceable, but it also is a tool that should be used legally. The ability of empowering your customers to obey the law provides you with a competitive sales advantage over other phone systems.
Recent Enhancements with ExecutiveAssistant Call Recording
For those of you who haven’t worked with ExecutiveAssistant call recording recently, I thought I’d update you on the nuts and bolts of some of the recent changes, the bulk of which were designed to make the recording mechanism seamless and reliable: - With NBX R6.0 and CDR R6.0.7 (and using the latest ExecutiveAssistant) the CDR reports are now automatically scrubbed to remove the references to WAV phones that affected some of the reports in earlier versions.
- An ExecutiveAssistant installation typically includes the installation of the Sentry Service on a different PC (can be a shared PC that is always running but need not be logged in), to ensure call coverage for inbound and extension-to-extension recorded calls. With earlier R6.0 releases of the NBX, there was a problem relying on the Sentry Service with calls from the NBX auto-attendant that were to be recorded, but that was fixed with NBX R6.0.41.
- In some cases, sites reported audio problems or latencies when calls were routed through the EA server. This is not a problem with the software, but instead of the environment – it is a correctable condition. When such conditions have been reported to and investigated by 3Com, they have been corrected by doing one (or more) of the following:
- On the server, turn off real-time virus scanning, software firewalls, hyper-threading and spyware scanning (instead you can have it do a nightly scan)
- On the switch, make sure that packets coming out of the server are explicitly Tagged as Voice – particular important in a VLAN environment
- Put the EA server explicitly on the same switch as the NBX
- Turn off hyper-threading if using an Intel processor
- Make sure you haven’t exceeded your recommended CPU speed for the number of Media Ports installed - Parking recorded calls did not originally play music-on-hold. Also, a Parked call that timed out wasn’t reporting as such to the Parker to whom it returned. Those have both now been corrected.
- Several years ago, Caller ID was not displayed in the LCD display with recorded calls. That was corrected starting with Version R5.0.6 of the NBX. If you are not seeing Caller ID, make sure your TSP version is compatible with your NBX version, and that you have the telephone extensions listed in the TSP.
- Outbound Caller ID Presentation was not displaying for outbound calls going through recording. That is now corrected with the concept of a Personal Media Port.
- Earlier versions of the 3Com Media Ports were not as reliable as the current Media Ports. 3Com has reworked the drivers to be able to handle high-volume call centers, without failing. In addition, ExecutiveAssistant has built-in mechanisms to make sure calls still flow even if the server goes down for normal “Windows” reasons.
- You can now record outbound calls from your cell phone (in addition to the inbound cell phone call recording that was always available with Find Me Follow Me) with the help of a new feature for allowing you to call into the NBX and out again through an NBX trunk.
- The system can now automatically compress the recordings to .WMA format, which takes only about 65KB/minute of storage.
http://www.brightarrow.com/sales/EA/3Com_ExecutiveAssistant_Recording_Technical_Guidelines_Ver_5.00.85.pdf
You also can get a detailed sales brochure for call recording, at:
http://www.brightarrow.com/3Com_NBX_Call%20Recording_5.00.pdf
If you are using ExecutiveAssistant Call Recording, I would highly recommend that they upgrade to the latest version to take advantage of the above improvements and optimizations. If you have had the product for over one year, they will need to purchase a Maintenance Agreement to be upgraded, but those agreements are very reasonably priced – please contact your reseller (or BrightArrow) for specifics.
No comments:
Post a Comment