Microsoft’s Upcoming Conference Mode Release: What You Need to Know Now.

We recently sat down with Kiran Kodali, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft heading up compliance call recording, to discuss the upcoming release of their Conference Mode feature. In this short video, Numonix’s Mike Levy and Kiran discuss the transition from Transfer Mode to Conference Mode and why it’s an important evolution; what customers should be prepared to do now, before the release; and what the general state of readiness is amongst the various providers.

Here’s the full transcript of the call:

Michael Levy: So there’s been a lot of discussion, I think it’s quite a few years now, about conference mode being so important to call queues and, you know, the previous support only for transfer mode for recording. So just prepping before there’s some major changes, I thought I’d invite my good friend Kiran from Microsoft onto an informal discussion, just giving you a little bit of information about what is going on at the moment and then hopefully update you in due course what is the final result. So Kiran, thank you, I appreciate your time and maybe you can start by giving a little background to transfer mode and conference mode, where we are and where we’re going to.

Kiran Kodali: Yeah, super excited about this release, it’s been a long time coming. Essentially, call queues operates in two modes, conference mode and transfer mode. Transfer mode has been the traditional way for a caller to call in and then the call queue to be able to transfer the call to the agent.

It’s a two-step process, there are certain aspects around it like delays and such that we’ll talk about some of the limitations. And so we have conference mode, the other one is when the caller calls into the call queue, the agent is brought in to a conference that gets set up. It’s a lot quicker, it puts all the participants in together and so those are essentially, it’s more about how the call flows work in the back end.

So those are essentially the two differences. Transfer mode essentially was the acceptable way for things to be used with compliance recording from the recording and the metadata being able to be captured properly. Conference mode, on the other hand, with compliance recording had its own challenges because when you think about a conference, participants getting added and the metadata may not actually be very apparent to the bot that gets invited.

So who’s recording, what’s being recorded and such. So there was not a clear-cut support for call queues in that regard and then we had various limitations around how the announcements are made for call queues and compliance recording, what kind of metadata is identified and all the delays around it. So with the new support for call queues, it’s intentionally designed to support compliance recording.

So conference mode is expected to work seamlessly with the rich metadata sharing around participant info and such to the partner solution.

Michael Levy: That’s music to my ears because some of the pitfalls in the past was the lack of metadata, call direction, there were so many issues and what’s nice is I know we’ve spoken in the past is this metadata besides just the fact that you can target an inbound queue is giving the metadata allows us also to use filters on those inbound queues which will be very very beneficial to us. So maybe I can and I know now obviously being privy in the programme is that we’re at a very crucial time now that recording companies we’ve done the work necessary to support a conference mode for call queues and inbound queues and now there’s a preview available.

I’m not sure if you want to just talk to the preview. We have some customers now that are in the preview so things are looking positive towards hopefully the eventual rollout. Maybe you want to talk a little bit about preparation and what people are going to be able or what people have to do to be ready for call queues.

Kiran Kodali Yeah as I was mentioning it’s been a long time coming. We’ve enabled our partners for the preview first to ensure that the integration happens and the solutions are prepared and now we are entering into customer preview and we’ve recently enabled our first cohort of tenants for the call queue support. So with that what customers will be able to do is assign a compliance recording policy or I would rather say compliance recording setting to a call queue directly and with that comes a lot of so there is a lot of administrative burden that usually happens in a contact centre space around managing agents, policy settings as such.

What this feature now enables is to ease that burden and to assign the settings directly on the queue level. So that also enables basically all of the agents to be recorded that are part of the call queue and also being selective around which call queues that you’re able to record. So if a user is part of both call queues A and B, if you choose to record just call queue A only that calls to that call queue will be recorded even if a user is another call queue it won’t be recorded.

Michael Levy This is for inbound queue calling, if someone is an agent and still needs to make outbound or peer-to-peer calls the typical mechanism of assigning a policy directly to the user would still be applicable?

Kiran Kodali: Yeah, users still have the choice to or admins still have the choice to assign a policy directly to the user and make outbound calls. The outbound call capability through the call queue will be something that will be coming as a fast follow-up but at this time for the preview it is inbound only through the call queue but yes the admins have the flexibility to assign a policy directly to the user and have the personal calls to the agents recorded as well as outgoing calls.

Michael Levy: The state of readiness in general – how is it looking between all the providers? It’s looking pretty good right or more activity on some than others?

Kiran Kodali: We’re excited to ensure that the launch happens soon around in the next month or two. We are on track so quite excited to let all of our customers leverage this feature.

Michael Levy: Well yeah I can just say for ourselves we’ve been ready for some time as you know discussing with with you it’s been a very important addition to our portfolio although we have been able to target call queues ourselves we’ve surprised some people but this will just make the ability to use conference mode which I think is the key feature that we have a lot of people really really excited about because it was a topic of contention in the past but really excited thank you Kiran I really appreciate your your time on this.

Is there anything else you want to add or you’re good?

Kiran Kodali: Yeah we are working hard to ensure compliance recording is a top-level feature that customers are able to rely on and deliver everything on time so call queues is something that customers have been really asking for and excited to get it out.

Michael Levy: Brilliant, thank you so much Kiran and then to all of our partners and customers we are ready for you so keep watching the space.