How to Manage Call Data Across Multiple Systems

Financial services organisations have never been under more pressure to maintain tight control over their data.  Regulations now require banks, insurance companies, financial advisers and many others to record every call, keeping up-to-date archives stretching back for extended periods. Driven by the agenda pressing for greater transparency in financial sectors, organisations must be able to retrieve and access information from individual calls on demand in order to remain compliant.

For large companies running multiple operations, perhaps in several different locations, the demands on managing call data create a huge logistical challenge. The call volumes involved are often huge and reside in multiple systems, making it difficult, time consuming and costly to find and retrieve data.

When legacy systems are involved that weren’t designed to be integrated with other platforms, access can become extremely difficult to manage.

The answer lies in having a platform-agnostic solution which can sit on top of multiple systems and interrogate data simultaneously. Wordwatch can save organisations significant amounts of time and money by processing call capture data from numerous sources, both live and legacy, drawing it all together into a single interface.

Here is a closer look at why a centralised call data management system like Wordwatch is becoming a must-have for financial services providers and banks.

The regulatory landscape

In Europe, the introduction of the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) has made it compulsory for investment firms to record, store and make available on demand data from all communications relating to “services, activities and transactions” carried out by the company.

This applies to electronic communications (so email, instant messaging, video calls etc) as well as to telephone records. It also applies to whatever system the communication was made on, whether it be a cloud-based, on-premise, mobile, live or legacy solution.

In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has interpreted these rules as applying specifically to banks, stock brokers, investment managers and derivatives traders, although as a matter of best practice it is encouraging the adoption of these principles by all financial services firms.

More broadly, as part of its ongoing efforts to better regulate the culture of the industry, the FCA is taking a more proactive role in holding individuals in senior leadership positions accountable for compliance breaches. That in itself has created a renewed interest in operational visibility at the highest levels. Organisations are increasingly leaning on call management and retrieval platforms to protect themselves, which include technologies such as speech and text analytics used to ‘red flag’ risky behaviours.

The legacy challenge

In most cases, large organisations with multiple contact centres looking to improve handling and visibility of call data first need to upgrade and integrate their call recording infrastructure. It is common for organisations to run a large number of different systems across different branches of their operations – some older, on-premise legacy systems andsome more recent cloud-based solutions.

This presents a number of challenges for unifying call data management, including:

• Compatibility of the different platforms.
• Dealing with multiple vendors when seeking a solution for integrating them all.
• Dealing with multiple support contracts when trying to put the solution in place.
• Training staff to carry out analytics across multiple platforms.

The other issue is that, with the requirement to keep call data for extended periods of time, old recordings still matter. There is no longer the option just to wipe the slate clean, implement a new up-to-date recording solution across the board and disregard what was saved on the previous system. Even if you do go for the expensive option of a full system upgrade, old audio files must be ported over, with their integrity and accessibility preserved.

Companies are therefore stuck between something of a rock and a hard place. If they leave all of their call data in their original platforms, legacy systems included, efficient recovery and interrogation becomes difficult. If they try to transfer all recordings over into a new system, they risk making some of the numerous different file types they have stored inaccessible.

Managing call data with Wordwatch

Wordwatch offers a third way, one which 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.

Unlike most new recording systems, 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 avoiding the risk of corruption in 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.

From a compliance point of view, Wordwatch ticks all the boxes required by MiFID II and FCA regulations. If a request comes in from a regulatory authority to interrogate a particular conversation or transaction from a specific time, Wordwatch allows companies to search metadata of recordings across multiple platforms to find the ones they need quickly and efficiently. The solution also assists with long-term storage, while improved visibility helps with accountability, training and continuous improvement.
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.

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