Everything You Need to Know About Call Data Legacy Migration

Call data legacy migration consists of moving your recording data from one place to another in order to be able to access it beyond what the system allows.

Under what circumstances will a company need to look at call data legacy migration?

Many organisations will have call recordings spanning decades and accessibility isn’t that simple.  So under what circumstances would an organisation need to consider call data legacy migration?

1. Call recording systems reaching end-of-life: Manufacturers announce a product is now end-of-life and therefore no longer supported.   A timely example is Windows 2008 which will no longer be supported from January 2020.
2. Undergoing a voice recording refresh project: This is likely to occur when new regulations come into effect requiring longer retention periods or if an organisation is no longer satisfied with its current infrastructure.
3. Normalising a legacy environment: Having all recording data in one place.
4. Reducing end of life support cost: Support for legacy systems is significantly higher than for live systems as the risks associated also increase. Reducing or eliminating legacy infrastructures can significantly reduce support costs.
5. Improving ability to manage legacy data: Finding recordings located in multiple systems can be extremely time-consuming. Moving all data into one location will not only save time and reduce operational costs when searching for a specific recording, it will also provide more comprehensive business intelligence.
6. IT driver: Allow compliance to self-service when they need to find specific calls. Saving time and resources.

In all scenarios, call data stored in old systems will be at risk unless it’s migrated into a solution that safeguards its integrity as well as makes it easily accessible for the entirety of its retention period.
With Regulations now requiring banks, insurance companies, financial advisers and many others to record every call, keeping up-to-date archives stretching back for extended periods of time, financial services organisations have never been under more pressure to protect and keep tight control of their data.

When should organisations start approaching call data legacy migration?

Operating systems and manufacturers will generally give customers a year’s notice before retiring a system as it can be a lengthy process to migrate from one solution to another or put systems in place to protect data.
Organisations should aim to start this process in a timely fashion, as not only do they need to get the right solution, but they also need to ensure it is compatible with their current recording infrastructure.
Moreover, it’s important the migration takes place before the system reaches end-of-life as having an operating system that is no longer supported on the network can pose serious security risks.

What is involved when looking into migrating legacy data?

Migrating data takes time. It’s not as easy as deploying a solution and clicking a button. There are a number of important steps that require consideration:

STEP 1 – Understanding your environment:

• Planning meeting to identify which systems need to be upgraded
• Where are the systems located
• What types of interactions are we looking at (voice back-office)
• Is encryption a concern (encryption makes it more challenging – we might need to use RPA)

STEP 2 – Going through the buying process

• Getting everyone that needs to be involved to review and agree on the solution

STEP 3 – Signing the contract

•  Procurement takes time.

STEP 4 – Putting together a project plan for implementing

• Liaising with the solutions provider and internal team on how best to implement the solution.

STEP 5 – Be mindful of unexpected events

STEP 6 – Test, Tailor, Test again, Tailor

STEP 7 – Sign off and deployment

Business System’s Customer Case Study – Tier One Bank

A Tier One Bank with a large live and legacy multivendor recording estate, which included both NICE and Red Box systems, was in need of a solution that would allow them to manage, replay and administer calls as well as ensuring they were able to retain calls for as long as regulations required and access that data as and when needed.

Moreover, they wanted to be able to use analytics to run searches against the calls in order to gain useful business insight. However, most applications were unable to read the call data as the systems were incompatible.

Having a large legacy estate also meant that they were paying large support costs to the manufacturer in order to maintain their systems, making this extremely expensive in the long run.

Drivers for change:

• Normalising their legacy environment and move all call data into one place
• De-risking the legacy environment by eliminating end of life hardware and software
• Reducing end of life support costs
• Improving ability to manage legacy data
• Allow compliance to self-service, reducing time and IT resources

The solution: Wordwatch

Wordwatch is a vendor agnostic solution designed to extract call data from any recording systems (regardless of location, age or vendor) so it can be used in other applications – for example, analytics engines and trade reconstruction tools.

Its key benefits are:

• Reduce total cost of ownership: Migrate database into one portal and keep audio in original format and location, so that you can eliminate the need for costly legacy system support contracts.
• Meet compliance needs: Easily find, access and export call recordings by having a single view of multiple systems and allow your teams to self-serve across recordings.
• Future proof investment: Ability to easily connect to new capture engines ensuring that no matter what solutions and applications are implemented in the future, they can easily be integrated.
• Free yourself from vendor hold: Access all of your data in one place and deploy the right applications for your business regardless of vendor eg. Redbox, NICE or Verint.
• Turn your data into insight: Data has the power to transform your business. However, it’s often inaccessible due to the lack of compatibility between solutions and third-party. applications.
• Manage your recording: Access data from multiple systems in a single view by recorder, site, user, time and all available metadata incorporating live, legacy or mobile.

Wordwatch maintains the integrity of original recordings and ensures full visibility through integrated management and rapid data retrieval. It works by sitting on top of your existing recording infrastructure and safely extracting call data from multiple sources at once, streamlining retrieval and replay. As an agnostic, multi-vendor solution, it is compatible with all the major recording systems, legacy and live, cloud and on-premise, mobile and landline.

Wordwatch maintains the original format and file structure of all of your call metadata when it ports existing files into the new platform, guaranteeing it remains accessible and avoids the risk of corruption during transfer.

At the same time, the sophisticated search facilities can retrieve recordings for playback or extract specific information from any source in rapid time, solving the problem of having all your recordings stored in separate silos.

All data is presented in a single, easy-to-use portal, achieving complete visibility across your call systems via a central interface.

Overall, Wordwatch enables improved call data management across large and complex estates whilst also reducing costs. The safe transfer of all recordings and metadata into a unified portal means support for legacy systems is no longer needed, while your investments are protected should you wish to add new capture systems in the future

Accessing data with Wordwatch:

• Wordwatch has open APIS allowing developers to mould the system to fit within their needs
• Functionality to bulk extract calls – compliance needs access to a set of calls – they can get it done quickly and in one place. (moving from weeks to seconds)
• Access to data in a non-proprietary format (access in mp3)
• Analytics can access information from where the data is stored
• Wordwatch separates itself because it keeps the voice recording data in its original format (other options affect the integrity of the voice recording)

To find out more about Wordwatch and our other market-leading solutions, please get in touch with the Business Systems UK team today.