Since the game-changing release of the first generation iPhone back in 2007, the annual reveal of the newest model is an event that has gathered a following that is borderline fanatical. Since then, Apple has continued to dominate the smartphone industry, raking in a staggering 94% of smartphone industry profits, and their popularity shows little sign of slowing down. In fact today, 395 iPhones are sold in the world every minute. The release of the iPhone 7 was as eagerly awaited as ever, however its reception has already been mixed. A poll from Fortune found that fewer people than ever are actually interested in purchasing the new iPhone. The decision to eliminate the headphone jack has proved controversial, and various techies have claimed it is too similar to the previous generation. Among the displeased are telcos. One particular new feature of the iPhone 7 and iOS 10 could potentially cause trouble for the telecommunications industry.
With the increasing popularity of online communications, VoIP services are constantly growing in demand. WhatsApp recently passed the milestone of 100 million voice calls per day, and Skype now has over 300 million monthly users. The transition away from traditional methods of communication is sure to spell trouble in the future for telcos: and this trouble moves ever-closer upon the release of the iPhone 7. A new feature allows users to answer VoIP calls from the lock screen – a feature that was previously reserved for voice calls only.
Now that Apple has increased the accessibility of VoIP calls for those who invest in the new iPhone, the opportunity for VoIP growth will only increase if this feature is adopted in future evolutions of smartphones. For telcos, an increased popularity of VoIP calls will cause a decrease in their customer usage of voice call minutes. Ultimately, this could drastically affect telco revenues, as customers who make use of this new VoIP accessibility will largely only pay for their used data. This could drastically reduce profits because voice calls are currently responsible for approximately 80% of telco revenue.
The iPhone 7 has also created another problem for telcos. The iPhone 7 has been upgraded to be capable of “lightning fast” speeds, with an LTE-A of up to 450 mbps. The problem is, there are actually very few telcos in the world who can support such speeds. This could create the problem that either iPhone 7 users will be displeased with their telco because they are unable to take advantage of the faster speeds, or telcos will need to work towards expensive upgrading. Either way, the higher speeds of the iPhone 7 could put telcos under pressure, even though they’ve already invested billions of dollars upgrading their networks to provide 4G.
The silver lining
With Apple declaring the latest iPhone as more expensive than its predecessors, telcos can cash in and offer more expensive contracts. Several UK telcos have already announced their pricing options, and EE, Vodafone and O2 have confirmed their higher price plans, forcing consumers to bear the brunt.
Various telecoms have previously voiced their displeasure with VoIP apps, stating that they are in breach of licensing conditions that telecoms themselves have to abide by. With the release of the new iPhone 7 and iOS 10, increased accessibility of VoIP calls is certain to cause further problems for telecoms worldwide.
What’s the solution?
The future success of telecoms may soon depend on their ability to adapt to the shift away from traditional communications, and alter their businesses to fit the unpredictable and ever-changing market. Accepting the increased use of internet based communications, and creating price plans for customers that offer fewer minutes and increased data, is perhaps a logical start point.
Additionally, by deploying new and disruptive services such as Dubber’s Playback, telcos can tap into brand new revenue streams to compensate for the loss of revenue in call minutes. They can even do this whilst maintaining attractive price plans, instead of irritating customers by hiking up the prices of subscriptions and bundles as they have done previously, year after year. Ultimately, innovative and agile service providers will catch the worm.
chloe.sawle@dubber.net14 Sep 2016
APIs began their significant rise in popularity with the launch of Salesforce’s Web API. Soon multiple large corporations were launching APIs, including ebay, Amazon.com and Amazon Web Services. The increase in popularity continued its exponential growth, and now Web APIs can be found everywhere. Communications companies are amongst the many sectors finding interesting uses for launching or using open APIs. Often, a voice and call recording API is used to improve communications, and finding the most cost-effective, scalable and secure solutions for users.
For example Dubber’s call recording solution has been constructed around an open API, allowing companies to alter the product to fit to their specific requirements. By using the Dubber open API, companies can continue building and designing the call recording solution to fit their desired functionality, brand identity, and business plan. Building requirements into our pre-existing product enables companies to save time, money and other resources. For example, Uber use the Google Maps API on their app, rather than spending superfluous time and money creating their own.
Call recording APIs similar to Dubber’s RESTful API have endless possible use cases. They present call recording as a service that can be adapted and progressed to meet the individual needs of users. Here, we list 5 innovative use cases for an open voice and call recording API.
- Telcos: Telecommunications service providers around the world have already chosen Dubber’s call recording software, and are currently reaping the benefits of our native cloud based solution. For service providers, an open voice and call recording API can be used to integrate our call recording product into their existing service, allowing them to deploy our service as part of a bundle that includes their other communications software. They are also able to benefit from our revolutionary service whilst maintaining their own brand identity.
- End user businesses: An article by Forbes writes that the chances of selling a product to an existing customer is between 60-70%, whilst the probability of selling a product to a new customer is just 5-20%, thus highlighting the importance of looking after and retaining your current customers. An infographic by Provide Support Blog suggests that 56-70% of customers will return to your service if you resolve their complaint. Good customer service and speedy dispute resolution are therefore essential to the success of a business. Call recording can help with training, dispute resolution, quality assurance and more, ultimately improving a company’s customer service. Going further, a voice and call recording API can aid integration into company CRMs, enabling customer service departments to attach recorded calls to customer data, helping to improve customer service and dispute resolution strategies over time by gaining a clear snapshot of results through detailed customer reports.
- Aiding employees with disabilities such as Autism: According to a guide written by Autism Speaks, 1 in 5 Americans have a disability. In business, the guide quotes from a national survey of consumer attitudes that 87% of Americans would prefer to give their business to companies who hire employees with disabilities. In fact, it has been found that employees with disabilities are just as productive as their peers, and have attendances that are equal to or higher. Autistic employees are one example: they make excellent employees and contributions to a company, but sometimes become stressed by the social aspects of a workplace. A service such as Dubber’s Sentiment can aid companies in hiring employees with Autism. Employees would be able to work from home or in an environment they are comfortable in, and take part in conferences and meetings via VoIP services. Sentiment could then analyze their mood, by identifying the emotional responses of the speaker through examining tone of voice, speed of speech and stress levels. Like a Shazam for human emotion. Sentiment could be operated during VoIP communications to help employers monitor the emotional responses of their employees, and ensure they are happy and comfortable.
- Reactive Keywords for call centres: Using call recording to maximise the quality of customer service and ensure returning customers has never been easier than with call recording. Using an intelligent and open voice and call recording API, call centres can track keywords or phrases, and organise customer communications. For example, using Dubber’s Zoe keywords could be implemented into existing systems using Dubber’s RESTful API, aiding customer service by creating specific reactions for keywords. For instance, the phrase “I want to speak to your manager” could reactively trigger an email to the manager alerting them, or the word “complaint”, could reactively trigger a notification to the complaints department allowing them to take immediate action.
- Risk protection audit for Banks: Banks are subject to comprehensive internal audits that play crucial roles in the ongoing maintenance and assessment of their internal processes, control and management. Using a voice and call recording API and intelligent search functions could aid this process. By highlighting and tagging certain words or phrases and creating smart transcription, automatic responses in internal inspections could be generated, which would significantly speed up the audit process.
chloe.sawle@dubber.net13 Sep 2016
BroadSoft provides Unified Communications and Collaboration services to operators all over the world. Put simply, BroadWorks helps operators to provide unified communications services needed by enterprise customers globally. The call recording protocol used by BroadWorks has been integrated into the very core of Dubber, allowing us to work together in perfect harmony. Without being too technical, here we describe how this partnership benefits the call recording services Dubber can provide to our users.
BroadWorks embraced a new global call recording standard when they created their SIPREC interface. The interface essentially provides a link between the service provider’s telephony environment and the recording platform, allowing companies who provide call recording solutions access to users’ conversations. If the user decides to record their calls, this interface enables them to utilise call recording software. It is the SIPREC protocol that forms the basis of Dubber’s construction. Our call recording solution has been designed to interface with the SIPREC platforms, enabling us to provide call recording to any platform that already deploys SIPREC. BroadSoft is the perfect partner for Dubber, helping our call recording solution to achieve new levels of functionality and service to our users. BroadSoft themselves have acknowledged the harmonious union as Dubber passed their rigorous interoperability tests to become accredited: “The Dubber platform and SaaS business model complement the BroadSoft technologies”.
This partnership developed further in May this year, when BroadSoft chose Dubber to be their official partner for Audio Call Recording as part of their fully managed service for Japanese telecoms, BroadCloud. This development is something Dubber has eagerly awaited, as it provides an exciting development for our growing global scope. We will soon provide our call recording solutions in association with BroadSoft’s managed service in Japan, improving our service in yet another region.
The BroadWorks motto is “simplify, accelerate, innovate”, and through our collaboration, that is exactly what Dubber has achieved for call recording services.
Simplify
Dubber’s partnership with BroadWorks simplifies call recording for our users by:
- Limiting your admin. The only administration needed to start using our recording services is a simple sign up to the BroadWorks interface
- Automatic call recording: Dubber captures calls through the SIPREC interface directly from the BroadWorks system
- Processing of data: all relevant metadata is efficiently processed, stored and presented through the Dubber Cloud Application
- No hardware headaches for end users or service providers
- No need for maintenance, upgrades or limited scalability or storage
Accelerate
Dubber’s partnership with BroadWorks accelerates call recording for our users by:
- Rapid deployment: the SIPREC link between BroadWorks carriers and Dubber speeds deployment of our call recording to users. Your service could be up and running in mere hours!
- Automatically provisioning Call Recording for BroadWorks users
- Limited administration and setup
- Hassle free testing: Dubber’s Lab operates as a call recording sandbox, allowing carriers to test our services by connecting BroadWorks lab systems to Dubber in a matter of minutes
Innovate
Dubber’s partnership with BroadWorks innovates call recording for our users by:
- Allowing unlimited scalability: Dubber’s connection to BroadWorks operates from a cloud platform, allowing elasticity of call recording services to users for the first time
- Creative ways of accessing the Big Voice Data: through the BroadWorks API allows association between Dubber users and their phone data
- Specially constructed high availability of every component of Dubber
- Meeting PCI-DSS compliance: all BroadWorks users can benefit from Dubber’s ability to help users meet PCI-DSS compliance through secure access to recordings and encryption technologies, download and sharing controls, complex password authentication, pause and resume functions during exchange of sensitive information, ability to tag recordings as ‘sensitive’, and finally DTMF masking and muting
- Global service: the partnership enables Dubber to deploy call recording worldwide: interconnect points are available to maintain a guaranteed level of quality between the service provider’s SIPREC enabled deployment and Dubber’s cloud infrastructure. New locations can be requested.
- Support for VoiP, IM and Video capture
The accreditation by BroadSoft has allowed Dubber to revolutionise BroadWorks call recording technology for service providers, by providing a service for end users that has never before been possible. As with everything we do, Dubber works to innovate our services in areas which have previously been stagnant for essentially decades. In pursuit of this challenge, we are always looking to partner with industry leaders such as BroadSoft, and through these relationships, bring improved service to both our end users and the clients of these industry leaders.
chloe.sawle@dubber.net31 Aug 2016
Laws and regulations put in place to protect consumers have been a large driving force behind recording communications between businesses and their customer. As remote communication overtakes face to face human interaction, it’s paramount to have procedures in place to ensure people are who they say they are at other the end of the line and also to make sure that the communication is safely recorded to resolve any incidents in future.
We’ve all come across the common line when you’re waiting to get through to a customer service agent: “This call maybe recorded for monitoring and training purposes.”. However some organisations may be recording calls to follow regulations, which you might not be aware of. Here’s are some key industries who are keeping their consumers safe through intelligent communications recording:
Contact Centres (Non-financial)
The most common use case for call recording regulations is seen in contact centres where customer service resolve an array of users’ issues. For training purposes and to resolve potential disputes, calls often get recorded at call centres. According to Ofcom’s (the UK’s communications regulator) guidance for recording calls in the UK, contact centres who look to monitor, record calls and communications are required to adhere to a combination of UK & EU legislation which includes but is not limited to:
- Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (“RIPA”).
- Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice)(Interception of Communications) Regulations 2000 (“LBP Regulations”).
- Data Protection Act 1998.
- Telecommunications (Data Protection and Privacy) Regulations 1999.
- Human Rights Act 1998.
To summarise the legislation, a home or business user may record communications without permission of the correspondent as long as they do not share the data with a third party, where then they would need to have their consent.
Additionally through the aforementioned LBP Regulations. A business can monitor and record communications as long as they are for a series of laid out circumstances such as preventing or detecting crime or to measure quality. The purpose of most other legislation is to avoid misuse and abuse of recordings.
Financial Services
According to the UK’s financial regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) a series of financial firms are bound by law to record and safely store their communications. These call recording regulations were put in place to “tackle market abuse by identifying and punishing those responsible”.
To begin with, only some financial services companies are required to adhere to call recording. For example retail finance advisors, mortgage brokers, insurance brokers and some others are not required to capture their communications. More stringent rules apply to firms which are in a highly influential position such as investment advisors and stock brokers.
The type of calls that need to be recorded are specifically outlined as ones which:
- conclude an agreement with any client or with another regulated firm on behalf of a client;
or
- are conducted with a professional client or eligible counterparty with a view to concluding an agreement.
Payment Card Industry (PCI Compliance)
On the back of an earlier initiative by VISA, in 2004, the major card companies aligned to form the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI DSS). On December 15th 2004, the PCI DSS 1.0 was released. Over the following years PCI DSS has evolved to not only provide greater security to the industry, but also to accommodate new technology advancements and is today the global data security standard for payment cards.
If your organisation is looking be PCI compliant then as part of the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), you’ll be facing the issue of recording sensitive authentication data (SAD) when taking payments through the phone or other devices.
It is a violation of PCI DSS requirement 3.2 to store any SAD, including card validation codes and values, after authorisation – even if the data has been fully encrypted. It is therefore prohibited to use any form of digital audio recording (using formats such as wav, mp3 etc) to store CAV2, CVC2, CVV2 or CID codes after authorisation if that data can be queried; recognising that multiple tools exist that potentially could query a variety of digital recordings.
Dubber or similar services, could assist organisations to become PCI DSS compliant when it comes to recording their communication. Dubber does this in two ways:
- Dubber’s PCI integration technology with Automated Pause/Resume helps a customer to comply with the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This is accomplished by automatically muting and unmuting a recording when pre-defined system events are detected.
- The Dubber PCI Payment Node can easily implement PCI compliant payments using the new Dubber PCI Payment Node. During a call, a PCI compliance transaction is required and the process is triggered by agent. At that point the agent transfers call to the PCI Payment Node (hotkey or phone number) the Node scripts take over, requesting the relevant details (e.g. amount, card number etc). The captured payment details are sent automatically to the merchant for completion. Once the transaction is completed, the caller is connected back with the agent to complete the call.
If you’re looking to implement call recording and you’re not sure about the relevant compliance which you’ll need to adhere to, contact your industry authority for further information on specific regulations and legislations.
rachel.ko@dubber.net15 Aug 2016
At Dubber we’re excited to announce a new partnership with a leading, UK based Computer Telephony provider, Mondago. Mondago specialise in providing unified communication solutions with a strong emphasis on CRM integration to manufacturers and providers of telephone systems.
Through Dubber and Mondago’s new partnership, Mondago’s flagship Go Integrator product is now able to provide as simple, automated pause and resume of calls being recorded, using Dubber’s cloud based service. A simple change in browser URL or PC client window can be used to automatically send a pause and resume command to the call recorder avoiding the need for the user to manually undertake this action using the handset keyboard. This feature is particularly useful for agents taking credit card type details over the phone.
“As Dubber has passed BroadSoft’s rigorous interoperability tests, we were able to quickly update our popular Go Integrator product to include this additional functionality. This means additional value-add to our customers, with minimal effort.” Rob Cox – Commercial Director at Mondago
“We’re excited to be integrated with such an innovative product suite and adding value to a network of users through Mondago. This partnership demonstrates the extent which cloud telephony is evolving and growing as we know it.” James Slaney – Global Manager at Dubber
For more information about this partnership, or if you’d like to find out how you can benefit from these services, just drop us a note through this form.
aleksandra.domagala@dubber.net04 Aug 2016
Even though it was a shock to the system, the effects of Brexit are not yet visible throughout majority of industries. The sterling has dropped against the dollar and some property finance organisations have paused investments. Apart from that, it’s business as usual for most of us. And those who are invested in trade with EU, are waiting to see what kind of a deal UK’s newly appointed Prime Minister, Theresa May, will close with the Union.
So as everyone is looking closely at what kind of trade deals UK and EU will close, is anyone actually looking at what will happen to all of our data and what kind of laws citizens of UK will be protected by when it comes to their personal information being exploited by the Cloud giants like Facebook and Google?
Trade agreements between governments are notorious for taking up to a decade to complete. Even though the EU members and UK would like to start the divorce process as quick as possible, we can boldly assume the UK will end up with a deal similar to what Norway got.
When it comes to our data, as long as the UK is still part of the European Union, we’re protected by EU laws and safe guarded from the by the giants under the Safe Harbour succeeding successor agreement called Privacy Shield. As mentioned in the agreement, this new framework will come into force practice from this Summer. But after Theresa May triggers Article 50, what will happen then?
In a very unlikely scenario, the data giants will pack up their UK offices and move to an EU member state and the data policies that protect them and their customers remains the same.
A more likely scenario is that in the short term, UK will adopt new data protection laws which mirror EU laws and anyone operating in the kingdom will be bound to and protected by these regulations.
Lastly, UK is likely to agree to a deal which means even though it’s not a full member, it will be treated as a second-class member where it will have access to tariff-free trade with EU, and would have to agree, at least on an interim basis, to Free Movement for citizens of member states, and not to rock the boat and keep the giants happy, enjoy the EU’s data protection laws and the new Privacy Shield agreement with US.
chloe.sawle@dubber.net18 Jul 2016
The British public have spoken and they want out (of the European Union). In the months running up to the June 23rd referendum the sterling took a plunge but made a bullish recovery ’til the the night of voting. Following the success of Vote Leave, as it was announced throughout the night and morning of 24th, we’ve seen the FTSE 100 and the GBP take huge dives.
With both now being slowly on the mend, it makes me wonder, how is rest of the economy going to react to this within short and medium terms. When it comes to Telcos and service providers, where can we see drastic changes in the near future?
Relocation, Roaming, International Calls and Spectrums
When it comes to mobile carriers and large telecommunication organisations, there are four major areas we can speculate about, and these are the ones we’ll be discussing here. First will be major providers considering moving their European headquarters outside of UK.
We can draw from Mr Colao, Vodafone’s CEO hinting that FTSE 100 companies such as Vodafone could move their headquarters if the free movement of people and capital was restricted. Freedom of movement may become more regulated in a UK outside of EU, but will movement of capital will ever become restrictive enough for companies such as Vodafone to consider relocating their headquarters?
Second is international calls. On the back of Britain leaving the EU, we might see another Scottish referendum in order for the Scots to leave the UK and apply for an individual EU membership. In basic terms, a phone call from Scotland to England would then count as an international call and the new costs imposed on consumers.
Next area of concern is roaming charges. The European Commission recently ruled in favour of abolishing roaming charges by June 2017. Companies like Vodafone and Three have already been rolling this offer to their customers. By the time UK has triggered Article 50 and spent the next two years negotiating a deal to exit the EU, we might see roaming charges snapped back into place for UK customers, travelling through Europe.
Regarding the fourth area of change, according to Bird & Bird, following Brexit, the UK is not going to be subject to decisions and regulations set by the Commission on spectrum allocations and use across the EU. Most likely UK will cooperate with member states and neighbouring countries, however regulatory divergence may rise between UK and EU in respect of regulations of OTT services. UK may take a more liberal approach on these services that could help add to stagnant revenue streams of carriers and telcos in west Europe.
For the year ended 31 March 2016, Vodafone reported organic group revenue growth of 2.3%. Most of this growth came from outside the company’s European area of operations. Vodafone’s service revenue from its African, Middle Eastern and Asia-Pacific operations grew at 6.9% year-on-year. European service revenue shrank by 0.6% on an organic basis for the period and UK service revenue contracted by 0.3% for the period.
Telcos are not Brexit ready
In a recent poll by Pinsent Masons, an international law firm, has highlighted that only 35% of telecommunication firms polled have a clear plan for dealing with impact of UK leaving EU.
In addition a recent survey by TechUK of 277 technology business leaders found 70% were in favour of staying in the EU, with only 15% supporting a Brexit. More than 90% of those in favour of leaving the EU said it would give the UK more flexibility in a global economy, and 64% believed it would make the UK more globally competitive. Here we can argue that the main disadvantages of staying in the EU would be around red tapes and regulations enforced by EU on UK innovation and growth in these areas.
To summarise, nearly in each area where a door is closed by UK leaving the EU, a new one may open through opportunity, innovation and investment. A lot will come down to the negotiations in the next two years, who the Conservative party will nominate to lead the country through these negotiations and how quickly the nation can unify and back the majority decision in the referendum. As roaming and spectrum rules could become British, it is very likely that they will mirror the European approach in these instances and we won’t see any immediate benefits from a new ‘free market’ that is to be the new UK.
chloe.sawle@dubber.net16 Jul 2016
Dubber Annual Report 30 June 2016
aleksandra.domagala@dubber.net30 Jun 2016
Additional Information – AVC One for Call Recording
aleksandra.domagala@dubber.net16 Jun 2016A snapshot into the evolution of unified communications and call recording through the last two centuries. From the first telephone operators to new generation of communication recording intelligence.
chloe.sawle@dubber.net14 Jun 2016