12 September 2023

Call recording services: a big opportunity?

For telcos, call recording represents an increasingly significant tranche of their business, reflected in the fact that the market for Call Recording Solutions is projected to grow at a CAGR of 12.8% between 2023 and 2030 according to analyst firm Reliable Business Insights^[1].

Among the factors driving this surge are demand for customer insights, the need to comply with regulatory standards, and the increasing adoption of cloud-based solutions. Call recording solutions help companies to improve customer service and sales processes as well as providing helpful insights into customer behaviour that can be used to improve overall business operations. They also help consumers to defend their interests.

Analysis by another firm, Zion Research, echoes these findings. It says the global audio communication monitoring market should reach a value of approximately USD 3,040.36 million this year having grown at a CAGR of 22% over the past half decade^[2]. It seems certain that the trend will continue. While telco / MNO call recording isn’t broken out, there are several reasons why they will likely play an increasingly important role – making network-based call recording a key service they should offer.

Breaking down the market

Traditionally, and for now it’s still mostly the case, call recording has been the domain of the enterprise. Business call recording is deployed mainly for staff training, quality assurance, and compliance reasons because it confers obvious benefits in all three areas. The latter (compliance) is unavoidable use case, anyway, as meeting the requirements of regulations such as MiFID II isn’t negotiable.

MiFID is applicable to all businesses undertaking certain activities within the EU (so, even if the business is in the US, if they have business activities in the EU, they must adhere to it) and there are comparable regulations in the US, Australia and most other countries. Where such regulations apply, recording becomes obligatory with files needing to be stored for a specified number of years.

There’s another, newer opportunity for call recording too and that lies in the emerging domain of consumer call recording where the technology can act as a sort of “insurance policy” for customers. To give one example, a consumer might want to record an important call with their insurance company so that, if disputes subsequently arose, they’d have a record of previous interactions. They would likely want to store these files, too, for at least some period, even if doing so was not mandated for reasons of compliance. From a technology perspective, consumer call recording mirrors business call recording, even though the underlying motivations may be different. For telcos and MNOs, that’s a plus.

The opportunity

For the mobile service provider, recording both B2B and B2C calls are value added services that can be offered because most such calls are conducted over mobile. While call recording solutions for other commonly used channels (What’s App, Teams) are already in place, for mobile this generally isn’t the case. The compelling reason to change that is that operators can charge fees for the service ranging from a basic consumer offer, perhaps €5 per month, to a full-blown business service, perhaps ten times that or even more, depending on the full scope of the offering.

The challenge

For the call recording opportunity to be exploited, what needs to happen? In particular, what challenges does the mobile service provider face in addressing market demand because it’s using mobile handsets that arguably the majority of calls are now made?

For a start, call recording needs to be handled seamlessly in the network, so the end user (business or consumer) doesn’t have to do anything and doesn’t need an application to initiate recording. As such, the solution deployed must also allow all calls to be recorded according to any rules pre-defined for the service, with no real-time intervention required.

The challenge is achieving this in a standards-based way. The most common approach today is to leverage the SIPREC recording protocol (Session Initiation Protocol Recording) so that information about the communication session can be shared between the Session Recording Client (SRC) in the network, and Session Recording Server (SRS) which forms part of the recording and storage platform.

Because the SIPREC protocol facilitates this, by permitting recording systems to passively receive and record media streams without directly participating in the call setup or media negotiation process, it's a foundational piece for operators seeking to offer a call recording service.

The Gintel solution

Gintel’s SIPREC Session Recording Client delivers a solution, enabling compatibility with any SIPREC compliant call recording, storage (and, as an increasingly common demand, analysis) platform. It interacts with the SBC in SIPREC sessions and can be deployed as a stand-alone IMS application that can be used independent of other B2B services while sitting alongside any other IMS application servers.

Session recording (and storage, processing, etc) is provided by a SIPREC-compliant third party with Gintel’s solution handing the call metadata on to the chosen recording platform. It’s fully standards compliant, and forwards/backwards compatible with other services.

Gintel also directly handles the mobile / fixed integration, ensuring delivery of the call recording service across the MNO or telco network. Its value extends to proven integration with a growing range of third-party recording platforms, so mobile service providers can hand pick the right partners for the service they wish to launch, while the voice enablement from their networks is taken care of directly.

Talk to Gintel

If you want to leverage the call recording opportunity and tap demand for call recording services, Gintel can help. We’re experienced in helping mobile service providers take the necessary steps, and if needed also helping them to shift to a SIPREC-compliant solution which we can enable as a standalone IMS application server, compliant to your own network and roadmap.

^[1] https://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/news/prime-pr-wire/call-recording-solutions-market-share-market-size-and-value-analysis-with-growing-12-8-cagr-during-period-2023-to-2030

^[2] https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/report/audio-communication-monitoring-market

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