A Business That's Small Can Record Your Call

Small and midsize businesses (SMB) often get lost in the hubbub of the market's latest contact center-specific releases, which many times are focused on the enterprise-grade sweet spot—more seats, prestige, and sometimes more dollars.

CallCopy, a Columbus, Ohio-based provider of call recording and quality monitoring solutions, is trying to change all that, with the unveiling of its latest call-recording release, called Essential, specifically intended for small businesses. CallCopy Essential is a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) call-recording solution which, according to CallCopy President and CEO Ray Bohac, gives small businesses the same opportunities for nailing high-quality customer service as their larger counterparts.

"We want to see more businesses take advantage of the value of call recording," he explains. "We had smaller companies start contacting us that really had a business need for [this type of solution]. Now, we’re-opening up new avenues for these [organizations]."

Bohac says that his company developed its VoIP offering in-house, and stresses that it can easily scale for large enterprises as well as for SMBs. "We don’t just do plain recording...A lot of competing products just look for absence and presence of audio," he asserts. "Ours looks at communication between the phone and the phone system, which gives the end user a better subset of data."

According to Bohac and information he provided to CRM magazine, Essential also includes features such as: the ability to save calls as .WAV or MP3 files and to export those files by email, file transfer protocol, or hard disk; enabling agents and administrators to flag and add personal bookmarks to calls for training purposes;user security to ensure restricted access to recordings; and prioritizing recording schedules to maximize recording-channel capacity.

If these sound like features that are commonly found in enterprise-grade call-recording solutions, Bohac says that’s exactly the point. "We’re allowing the small-business customer to start to use the tools the enterprises have [used] for years," he says. "We brought as many features as we could without the need to [add] support like in [a larger] business system—like the fact that Essential can run on a single server."

Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, agrees with Bohac’s conclusion that SMBs need the same level of features and functionality as the larger players. "[The SMB space] is a very underpenetrated marketplace because the issue’s been that they need recording and complete quality assurance, but the challenge is to have right-sized, right-price offerings for them," she explains. "It’s so much better than if you start with something really big, pull out capabilities, and then say ‘Here’s something you can afford.’ That’s not what people want."

Flying in the face of that antiquated notion, Fluss says CallCopy is well suited to provide this type of targeted offering. "Most importantly…[the company] understands small and midsize organizations," she adds. "It’s not as if it's trying to play down the solution."

Looking ahead, Fluss says she expects to see more evolution among solutions that have their sights set on SMBs. "[There will be] more verticalized SMB solutions, so it won’t just be a one-size-fits-all [offering]," she predicts. "[We also] expect more packaged offerings across the board that tackle one [particular business issue]. There’s a big push in the marketplace coming from end users to make these solutions easier to use, install, and implement, and that’s what we will see."