Call Recording Users

The only people that need to be Call Recording users are the people who need to listen to calls, view calls or administer Call Recording. The agents of a call center do not normally need to be users on Call Recording.

So the managers and team leaders must be users. The manager needs to be able to listen the whole group and the team leaders just need to listen to their own team.

The users are set up hierarchically. The manager can have defined ranges or numbers and the team leaders in the group can have just the portion of this group that relates to their own team.

Call Couples

Call Recording records audio and data between pairs of connected telephones or endpoints. An endpoint is anything that can make or receive a call and includes:

  • Virtual Phones where the phone is answered via a computer.
  • Answering machines
  • Interactive Voice Response IVR where the caller has to select options .

Each pair of telephones or endpoints has two separate audio tracks, one track for each direction. The two audio tracks are referred to as a call couple or simply as a couple. Because they are the two halves of a simple conversation they are always stored together as a couple. If they were not kept together then you would only hear half the conversation.

The diagram below shows a simple conversation between a customer and an agent in a call center.

 In a simple conversation there is only one couple and it lasts for the whole conversation.

Related Calls

Where the conversation is put on hold or transferred then there will be more than one couple. So to listen to the whole conversation all the couples must be found.

A consultative, transferred call or conference call is actually a series of these couples.

As soon as the agent puts the customer on hold, for instance to ask a colleague sitting next to them a question, the first couple ends. If the conversation resumes then a new couple is established.

In the diagram above the customer has called agent 1 but agent 1 does not know all the answers to the customer's questions. So agent 1 puts the customer on hold and speaks by phone to agent 2 who is more experienced.

When the agent speaks to the customer after the hold once again a third couple is created.

For more scenarios and how to find the call couples see Playing Transferred and Conference Calls.