A traditional form of communication continues to find its way into every aspect of the way we live, work, and play. When we get home, the music, lights, and refrigerators respond to our voice commands, through Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Siri. Smart cars talk to us – giving us driving instructions and, of course, our mobile phones take our voice commands and pop them into our text messaging apps. With mobility, WiFi, and smart phones, monolithic enterprises are turning themselves into distributed organizations with remote offices and always-connected workforces.
It sounds inevitable. However, voice and IP networks powering the modern workplace can become quite complex. Firms must reconcile investments in traditional cellular voice service providers such as AT&T, Verizon, NTT, Orange, BT against those promoted by Voice over IP (VOIP) providers such as Comcast, Cox, and Charter. While other firms seek to deploy the latest voice-enabled collaboration tool, they may still be struggling to free themselves from legacy PBX-based voice technologies. As a result, there are more flavors of voice communication than Baskin Robbins!
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Voice from fixed lines and PSTN
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Voice from cellular networks and 3G IP networks
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Voice embedded in text messagesVOIP calls
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Voice calls from chat-based apps such as Skype for Business, Slack, Teams, Spark, Symphony and more
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Voice conversations from social channels such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, Snapchat and others
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Voice from turrets
Unfortunately, many of these flavors were not designed to mix well together. As a result, firms are often managing multiple voice systems, each with its own technology architecture, integration capabilities, and varying degrees of migration complexity. Each system silo creates additional IT overhead, management hassle, and added risk that an important voice conversation may have not been properly controlled.
What is clear is that regardless of whether you are evaluating Microsoft Skype for Business, Cisco Jabber, Cisco Spark, or Slack, there is a voice component that needs to be captured and controlled to avoid issues with the regulators. In fact, new media and voice streams are specifically named by a variety of regulations, including the soon to be implemented MiFID II that indicates that firms should avoid using any communication channel that the firm is unable to capture.
In the next post, we’ll cover how the our Platform delivers a comprehensive voice capture, compliance, and archiving solution to help firms manage these challenges.
