How can we record employee cell phone calls?

PhoneUP’s primary purpose is to record all the enterprise communication channels for security and customer service quality management.

However, employees don’t always talk to clients using business endpoints (desk phones or softphones). Of course, when it comes to a contact center, there are no alternatives to work phones. But client interactions are notlimited to the contact center environment – for example, your sales managers talk to your clients, and frequently do that on cell phones.

Is it possible to record mobile conversations between managers and clients and have those recordings available in a unified recording system? Yes, it is!

What is FMC?

Alright, so the goal is recording of employees’ mobile calls, but not all of them, only work-related ones. Personal call recording is prohibited. How can we distinguish between work-related and personal mobile calls?

All leading operators offer a FMC (Fixed-Mobile Convergence) service for businesses. In simple terms, and with some variations depending on the operator, it works like this…

Suppose I have an internal phone number 111, and all calls to that number reach my desk phone. With FMC option I can assign 111 number to my mobile also, and then:

1. My colleague can call me on extension 111, and both my desk phone and mobile phone will ring. I can answer regardless of whether I am in the office or not.

2. I can also dial my colleague’s internal extension, for example, 222, from my mobile. However, to indicate that this is a business call, I need to dial it with a prefix, for example, *222. If the prefix is used the operator sends this call to our company network (a trunk is configured between the operator and our IP PBX), and our IP PBX, as usual, routes the call to my colleague with extension 222.

3. I can also make an outgoing business call to a client. For this, I need to dial the client’s number with the same prefix, for example, *4151234567, instead of simply dialing +4151234567. This call also goes through our enterprise IP PBX.

4. My personal calls remain private – all calls received on my number are treated as personal, and any outgoing calls made to standard +X XXX XXX XXXX numbers are considered personal.

Such a combination of mobile and enterprise communication has numerous advantages – single number reach, call cost savings, and so on. However, our focus is on mobile calls recording.

How to Record “Business FMC-calls”

The previous section explained the difference between personal and business mobile calls: we use a prefix.

It would be logical to assume that telecom operators, when selling the FMC service, offer an optional call recording feature for business calls. And that is indeed the case. These calls can be recorded and stored in the operator’s cloud.

However, most medium and large companies need to have call recordings on their own servers, here are just a few of the reasons:

1. legal compliance (for certain industries)

2. elevated security requirements to recording storage, such as:

• granular access control

• user activity audit (tracking who downloaded, listened to, or deleted recordings)

• data and media encryption

3. integration with DLP system

4. integration with an on-premise speech analytics or quality management solution.

So, here are two possible alternatives:

1. Record FMC calls using a proprietary recording system. The key is that, as outlined in points 2 and 3 of the previous section, “enterprise mobile calls” are routed through the IP PBX. This means they can be recorded (SIPREC, SPAN, “active” recording methods).

2. FMC calls are recorded in the operator’s cloud, and the on-premise recording system fetches recordings from the cloud to store them locally.

PhoneUP supports both approaches:

1. it integrates with all leading PBXs for call recording

2. it provides connectors to external storages to grab the recordings from third-party systems

Naturally, a hybrid approach is also possible, if the client’s network topology requires it.