TSS VAD – a Unified Communications Case Study

TSS Voice and Data are leading providers of fibre, SIP, VOIP and hosted telephony technologies based in the City of London. Currently working with over 80 Financial and Legal Services clients, TSS VAD pride themselves on maintaining close relationships with their clients. In many cases this means working alongside them on a day to day basis to provide a holistic service ensuring systems are working effectively 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year.

Understanding the Challenge

Due to the large number of clients that operate within the Financial Services sector, a big part of TSS VAD’s job is helping their clients find communications solutions that meet the rigorous regulatory demands of the industry to help ensure compliance.

One area where this has proved to be a challenge is meeting the regulatory demands to record certain types of interactions, specifically calls. Whilst this hasn’t been a particularly tricky requirement to meet in the past, the regulation has become more demanding whilst also becoming ever more difficult to fulfil in an effective and convenient way within the current UC landscape with the likes of Microsoft making regular and sizeable changes to their environment.

With no native recording capabilities in Office 365, firms have had to look elsewhere to source high quality recording solutions. A further layer of complexity has been added with the introduction of Microsoft Teams and the associated lack of APIs, leaving a significant functionality hole in the Teams environment.

TSS VAD spotted the need to find a recording solution that would not only meet the regulatory requirements for recording amongst their client base, but also be able to centralise their recordings, provide cloud based options for hosting and storage, and also work seamlessly in the context of their wider environment. It was at this point that TSS VAD reached out to ProcessFlows to start exploring whether or not RECITE, an interoperable UC interactions recorder, could fulfil these specific requirements.

Finding a Solution

After meeting with ProcessFlows, RECITE was found to be perfectly positioned to meet this particular set of requirements by successfully navigating the Microsoft issue, going beyond the needs for regulatory compliance and demonstrating a resilience to future changes in both the IT and regulatory environments.

Navigating the Microsoft Issue

Firstly, as a Microsoft Technologies Partner, RECITE has been built and developed by working closely with Microsoft to develop an interaction recording solution that is Microsoft qualified and tested. In the context of Office 365 and Skype for business this represents a solution that seamlessly integrates with the Microsoft environment to provide a frictionless user experience.

It also means that whilst APIs remain closed to developers, RECITE has developed a fully featured work around for Teams in the form of a client-side recorder. By sitting natively on the users’ device, RECITE circumnavigates the need to be fully integrated into the Teams environment whilst maintaining their expansive feature set and high levels of security.

Moreover, RECITE have also developed an extensive development roadmap that is highly responsive to changes in both the IT and regulatory landscapes making them ready for a multitude of future developments.

Meeting Regulatory Demands in the Financial Sector

With regards to regulatory demands, the likes of MiFID II and GDPR necessitate the secure recording and storage of calls and other interactions, as well as the ability to access and recall those recordings in a timely manner.

RECITE has been developed with these demands in mind and as such is well equipped to meet them. For example, the recording of calls and other UC interactions can be decided and set up centrally. By taking the decision to record or not record a particular interaction out of the hands of users, automatic recording helps to ensure that communications that fall within the demands of these regulatory frameworks are always caught.

Security is also of paramount importance and as such RECITE offers great flexibility to centralise in a cloud based environment providing 256-bit encryption end-to-end. The combination of granular permission levels and auto redaction also helps mitigate internal risks by masking sensitive information from the users that don’t need access.

Future Proofing

In addition to meeting the regulatory demands found within the Financial Sector, RECITE has been developed to remain resilient to a fast changing UC landscape. This can be seen in the work around and development roadmap for Microsoft Teams and beyond, but also in the high levels of interoperability found on the platform. By being able to integrate with virtually every available PBX, UC platform and CRM system out there, RECITE will give you the freedom to change any element of your UC infrastructure secure in the knowledge that your regulatory demands for secure interaction capture will continue to be met.

Scalability and expandability are also central to this. By working seamlessly, whether you have five or 500,000 users, as well as being able to introduce new functionality as of when it is required, RECITE is a system that can grow to always meet a user’s needs.

“We have partnered with ProcessFlows to enhance our call recording offering, especially around Microsoft. There are other solutions that are also of interest, such as SMS that could certainly improve workflow for our customers.”

Patrick O’Neill,

Director at TSS Voice and Data

By partnering with ProcessFlows, TSS VAD have not only been able to incorporate a call recording solution into their portfolio that will meet the pressing needs of clients, but have also developed the expertise to provide a fully managed service for fresh installs and recording system upgrades.