Global call recording specialist CyberTech now has offices in 10 countries, distribution deals in 50 and global support agreements in 160 individual territories. The company was founded in Holland and is now celebrating its 25th anniversary. According to UK Director of Sales, James King, the channel is key to success.
CyberTech's growth story mirrors the changes in the market for voice recording over the last quarter of a century. King noted: "When I joined the voice recording market it was very much about box shifting, and there was little data that could be attached to calls. Now things have changed dramatically. You can do much more with the recordings because you have much more to identify them with."
Unlike companies that have diversified over the years into many areas, specialisation is key to CyberTech's strength. Voice recording is the foundation of its portfolio of solutions, but the multi-media offering of CyberTech includes solutions that record and analyse not only voice (telephony and radio) but also screens. As a result of its focus, CyberTech claims an 80 per cent share of the UK Ambulance Service market, approximately 40 per cent of the Police Market and is gaining dominance in the UK and global financial markets. This tight strategy means that CyberTech relies on its relationships with key channel partners. "The requirement for good channel relationships is so much more important now," says King. "Because the solutions are so much more deeply integrated than they were when you were just tapping off a line."
King argues that this means CyberTech's solution is more flexible and easily customisable to suit a client's needs than most. "Because we have bespoke development teams that are very reactive and a lot less expensive than our competitors to deploy, we can work on integrations with customer databases and CRM platforms to improve search functionality and provide data mining facilities," added King.
Call recording is increasingly ubiquitous, says King, for two reasons. It's a market driven by the need for compliance by financial firms, but cheap, manageable storage and ease of use means that more companies are seeing the benefits of using recording for conflict resolution and training purposes. "A lot of organisations can get a rapid RoI just by changing the way they handle voice recording," King explains. "One organisation, a major travel company, implemented one of our solutions through a partner that was in excess of £100,000 of new business. They expected to receive a return on investment within 12 months based on reducing write-offs. That's outside the softer benefits around improved support and training for their employees which are more difficult to measure."
The next big shift in the market is being driven by the need to comply with Payment Card Industry Data Standard Security (PCI DSS) requirements. CyberTech is in the consultation group of the Financial Services Association and participates in workshops around the issue of mobile phone recording for stock traders. "There are many more applications of mobile phone recording outside of the compliance driven market," added King. "There's the public safety market - being able to record 999 calls and so on - where voice recording began, but the commercial and public sector applications are many and widespread. A social worker, for example, might want the safety of having their calls recorded while at appointments. The police or a mobile salesforce can all benefit too."
For channel partners, says King, adding voice recording to their portfolio is an easy way to increase revenue without expanding the customer base, by upselling a tool that has proven benefits. "We've wrapped around our recordings a very intuitive and fully integrated performance suite," he says. "One of the key benefits is that it will find calls for you based on a certain criteria. End users can spend more time having an effect on any problems they uncover, rather than just finding them in the first place."
Despite a long history in what was until recently a very niche sector of the industry, King still relishes the day-to-day activity and the variety call recording offers. "We have very diverse markets, and lots of different channel partners offering lots of different technologies," he commented. "You certainly don't get bored, that's for sure. I remember one day being in an undertakers in the morning, a global financial centre by lunchtime and a contact centre by the end of the day. I don't know many places where you can get that kind of diversity."