If you’ve read some of our previous blogs, you know that Wilmac is a digital technology company that specializes in facilitating, capturing, analyzing, optimizing, and archiving interactions. Our history is rooted in recording voice interactions, and our Enterprise Voice Archiving suite was born from the pain points of customers who we recorded communications for.
A key solution in our EVA suite, Continuity Automated, plays an interesting role in the technology world because it gives you the ability to leverage external tools to gain all the insights you can from your recordings.
In this blog, we’ll cover WHAT Continuity Automated is, HOW it can be used in different environments, and WHY you need it in your organization.
WHAT
What is Continuity Automated?
Third-party platforms for analytics, transcription, business intelligence, reporting, and surveillance can prove to be very useful to companies looking to leverage their voice data. In many cases, the call recording vendors of these companies sell their own tools for these uses, but the capabilities are limited based on the vendor’s design. Because these capture platforms record and store your communications in a proprietary format, it severely limits the external tools you can use. You’re unable to use those third-party platforms and plug them into your recording platform.
Continuity Automated, in metaphorical terms, is the connector between your recording archive and a third-party platform of your choice. It exports audio directly from the archives of most major recording platforms, prepares the extracted audio for ingestion by opening it up into a .wav file format, and forwards it to the third-party platform. This can be done automatically on a regular basis, both on premises and in the cloud.
HOW
How is Continuity Automated used in legacy and production environments?
There are two types of recording environments that Wilmac’s Enterprise Voice Archiving suite serves: legacy and production environments.
A legacy environment is one that is deployed on premises. When you think of legacy, you can picture the servers holding all your data. They take more effort and time to maintain but are the backbone of what recording used to be.
A production environment is where recording is going, which is to the cloud. These environments are much more accessible and easier to manage, especially for enterprise-size companies.
Continuity Automated has flexible deployment options and is typically run in the cloud, meaning that it is mostly used in the production environment. For example, a contact center would be able to deploy Continuity Automated in their CCaaS system. Interactions contact center agents have with customers would be automatically stored in their cloud, and Continuity Automated would initiate the conversion process to export the voice recordings to the third-party platform.
How does Continuity Automated actually work?
At setup, Wilmac engineers analyze the audio to determine file type, encoding, and, if applicable, encryption algorithm. If files are encrypted, the encryption keys are obtained from the capture platform’s database or key management system. The exact process varies depending on the methods employed by the capture platform’s vendor.
Continuity Automated monitors the capture platform’s voice archive. When new voice files appear, the software is automatically triggered to initiate the conversion process. The files are unencrypted by Continuity Automated, if applicable, and then audio is extracted from each proprietary audio file and converted into a standard file format.
In addition to converting audio files, all associated metadata is compiled, normalized, and associated with the converted audio. The open call data is transferred to a third-party application via API (Application Programming Interface) or to a temporary storage location for subsequent ingestion downstream.
WHY
Why should I adopt Continuity Automated in my organization?
Continuity Automated allows you to leverage your voice data beyond the limits of the tools offered to you by your recording vendor.
Many organizations within industries that record calls leverage third party platforms to provide unique insights such as customer satisfaction, agent effectiveness, and other performance metrics. Third-party tools for speech recognition, analytics, and business intelligence can ingest recorded voice files in an open format and then generate reports and analyses which can guide business and marketing decisions for improved quality monitoring. Continuity Automated allows these organizations to gain these insights on a regular basis.
A real-life use case of Continuity Automated came from a large automobile manufacturer who was evaluating a Customer Experience (CX) management platform to leverage for analytics purposes. They soon learned that this platform did not support the native format of their call recording data, which caused them to look into an extraction option from their recording vendor. The cost became so high that they nearly gave up the idea of utilizing the third-party platform for analytics. Wilmac then entered on behalf of the third-party CX organization to deploy Continuity Automated as a cost-effective solution.
Wilmac’s Enterprise Voice Archiving suite is a flexible solution set that is constantly being improved to answer the changing needs of businesses in various industries. To learn more about Continuity Automated and Wilmac’s Enterprise Voice Archiving suite, contact Wilmac.