The Business Process

It's not about simply recording mobile voice communications, which can be achieved in various ways - some more 'compliant' than others, some with a better user experience than others and all with greatly varying costs of use. In addition to voice, mobile electronic communications are now core to virtually every organisation's day to day business and must also be taken into account. There is a six stage process which needs to take place, in order to make all of this possible:

1. Intercept and capture
This is the most challenging stage of the process. By its very nature, mobile communication exists within the wireless 'ether' and therefore cannot be routed via a recording device in the sameway that fixed network communications can. In addition intercept and capture must apply not only to all outbound calls and electronic messaging, but also to all incoming communications.

2. Consignment
Once calls and messages have been intercepted and captured, the next stage of the process is to consign them to a device or devices that will record, store and display them.

3. Alerting
There will be many instances where organisations need to know when certain calls are made or messages sent, in real-time, so that they can take immediate action. As such, all communications must be scanned, based on customer-defined rules, so that relevant and useful alerts can be generated.

4. Recording
Electronic messaging is already captured as a data file and simply requires storing, so there is no technical requirement to 'record' these messages. However, with voice calls, these must of course be recorded and converted into data files. Most organisations have legacy recording systems which currently fulfil their requirements for fixed line voice call recording. Therefore, in order to protect and optimise existing investment in this technology, mobile voice capture solutions must be capable of integrating with call recording systems provided by recognised leading manufacturers and system integrators.

5. Storage
Again, most organisations have existing storage vaults and will utilise these in preference to investing in additional separate storage. There may however be a requirement for storage capacity to be increased to accommodate the higher volumes of data.

6. Search and retrieval
Where mobile voice calls are recorded and stored on existing call recording systems, organisations can search, retrieve and playback these calls in exactly the same way as they do their fixed linecalls, via the system's front end GUI. Likewise, mobile electronic messages can be searched and retrieved in the same manner, and from the same source, as existing desk-based messaging.

In order to maintain compliance, it is important that the process used to archive, search and retrieve voice recordings and electronic messages addresses audit trail, duty of care and evidential weight. Failure to ensure this can lead to the recorded information being rendered useless should it be required in the event of litigation.