Recording phone calls and Internet usage is becoming commonplace in the corporate environment. According to the American Management Association, 77 percent of major U.S. firms monitor employee communications.

Within the ever-growing call center industry, call monitoring has been an accepted practice, and now the custom is spreading through the healthcare, financial, and legal industries. Recently passed FSA regulations,  in  insurance & financial services, are forcing companies in these industries to monitor calls to ensure they meet new requirements.

Legal services, another vertical market with call recording demands, monitors the verbal agreements that often pass between lawyer and client during phone conversations. Law firms have begun recording these discussions to note stipulations, verbal requests, authorizations and billing disputes.

"Recording calls encourages the staff to rise to a higher level of vigilance when speaking with a client and promotes company-wide standards for protecting client confidentiality and privacy," says Bob Cordes, director of marketing at Telrex.

Call Monitoring in a VoIP World
For companies faced with new call monitoring responsibilities, introducing call recording features to a PBX is daunting—and expensive. ShoreTel and Telrex have partnered to offer these companies a lower-cost alternative that can be up to half the cost of digital recording solutions.

TelRex has developed CallRex, a packet-based, VoIP call recording and monitoring solution for small and medium-sized companies. The software solution resides on its own standard Windows server and passively "sniffs" packets as they pass through the corporate network. Companies only need a data switch enabled for port mirroring.



Combining the ShoreTel5 IP PBX system with CallRex offers companies a straightforward, cost-effective migration path to VoIP that includes call recording capabilities. CallRex is the only packet-based call recording solution sold by authorized ShoreTel resellers.

"Resellers can offer this powerful solution set that upgrades the customer to IP telephony and solves a company's call recording problem," says Cordes.

The VoIP and call monitoring duo introduces major cost savings for companies seeking this type of solution. Adding call recording features to traditional PBXs can run approximately $1,000 per line due to the costs of purchasing and installing proprietary telephony cards that tap telephone lines and process the digital signals needed for recording calls.

In many cases, the cost of deploying both the ShoreTel VoIP system and Telrex's CallRex is less than adding call monitoring to the PSTN environment.

While the cost benefits are compelling, Telrex customers are realizing other benefits from the monitoring solution. "Improving customer service and introducing consistent interactions with customers are the major advantages of CallRex," says Cordes. "Other key benefits are increased employee productivity and uniform agent training."

VoIP Traffic Monitor
Once a company purchases a CallRex license, Cordes says the call monitoring software takes approximately two to five hours to deploy. For managers, the client interface is loaded on their desktop and displays each direct report's telephone activity. Managers can set CallRex to record all calls, a percentage of the calls randomly, calls from a certain area code, and other customized parameters. CallRex can also record and monitor remote site calls.

While reviewing calls, managers can add notes to the file, flag items to denote an irate customer, a pricing query or other items of interest. Managers can search for calls by entering an area code, words in flag note, time of day, or phone number.

Reviewing these recordings can help ensure a company is following compliance regulations, and they can be a training aid. Managers can apply the learning's from the recordings to improve agents' interactions with customers, train employees and encourage up-selling and cross-selling.

Marching with the Market
With the VoIP gaining momentum daily, Telrex is in excellent position to penetrate a major portion of the small and medium-sized market. The full-featured CallRex maps closely to the needs of these companies, and its affordable cost is sure to be appealing.

By partnering with ShoreTel, the two companies bring an innovative, best-of-breed solution to the growing list of small and medium-size companies that are migrating to VoIP.

"We have a strategic partnership with ShoreTel that allows us to offer a comprehensive, valuable solution to businesses," says Cordes. "Both of our solutions were designed with VoIP in mind, not PSTN, and they solve a pressing problem that many companies face today."