Call loggers record the details of calls made or received, so they may be reviewed later. Almost every telephone system is equipped with a call logging port, also referred to as station message detailed recording. This means, the telephone system will log the details of all calls made or received on this port. The degree of detail depends on the type of telephone system. Some provide only basic reporting while others report almost every detail about the call, also referred to as ‘cradle to grave’ reporting.

At any call center, loggers will pile up huge amounts of data due to the continual data streams. To get the best out of this data, good call logging systems provide data-mining tools to help organize the data into useable-report formats.

Call logging started out of legal compulsions while servicing sectors like the insurance and health care. But, these days it is considered vital for all outbound transactions where invoicing or billing is involved. Besides, outsourcers are increasingly using call logging to provide value-added services such as intelligent marketing inputs, by mining the historical data.

Call monitoring, as against call logging, refers to the realtime monitoring of calls to ensure quality levels in service delivery. Call monitoring also plays an important role in winning the customers’ confidence, allowing them to monitor calls and assess service levels before awarding contracts.

Return on investment is based on how much optimization the application can bring on various call center metrics, such as: average call handling time, first-call resolution rates, customer satisfaction due to improved quality of interaction, and SLA delivery.

Technology Options

Call logging and call monitoring is basically dependent on the kind of technology platform on which the ACD and phone is based. Therefore the technology is either TDM or IP. The logger is termed as analog or digital, based on the voice cards it uses to capture and record the voice. Incoming and outgoing calls are tapped either at the extension (or the co-line), or by transferring the calls to the voice equipment in conference mode. However, the second method is neither efficient nor cost effective.

The advantage, and the differentiating factor, of digital voice loggers is their voice quality. They provide high-quality recording by using noise-reduction filters and automatic gain control. Apart from this, digital loggers make life easy while playing back or monitoring a call, due to the inherent feature of digital systems.

Apart from the basic underlying technology, what distinguishes a product is the way applications are built over the base technology. That way call monitoring along with recording can let the manager listen to the live calls. There are new technologies available that are totally independent of the network and the PBX. They use a network of their own!

Once recorded, calls need to be archived. This is usually done using CD burners, DVD-RAMs, magneto-optical disks, and DDS3 DAT drives.