Decide how to record your phone calls

Before you begin

Choosing the most appropriate recording mode for your phone system is important for the stability of your recording solution. Make sure you make an informed decision using the expertise of network engineers and solution architects. With this topic we would like to help network engineers, IT managers and decision makers fully understand the pros and cons of the each recording method and clearly highlight the issues regarding different telephony solutions.

There are two basic recording methods:

• passive recording - network monitoring (e.g. SPAN port in Cisco terminology) based solution that uses the actual network traffic to record phone calls
• central recording - sometimes called active recording uses features in the phone system to record calls (e.g. in an Avaya system the Media Gateway resources can send the recording streams to the recorder)

In addition, the Verba solution can provide the following additional functions:

• screen recording - where the a contact center agent's desktop is recorded during phone calls into a highly compressed video file
• dial-in recording - provides a recording function, where any phone can call a recording line that starts recording immediately (e.g. if it is part of a three party conference, this will records the call)
• silent monitoring - allows listening into ongoing conversations, without disturbing the phone call

Supported call recording modes in different phone systems

See the lists below to understand what functions are supported by the Verba Recording System in various phone systems.