First Credit Services
First Credit Services archives over 50,000 calls a day with RingCentral’s call log APIs
FCS gets the benefit of a more reliable cloud phone system by using RingCentral, combined with “the peace of mind of knowing I’m not losing any of my important call recordings.
Dennis Mudaliar
Business Support Manager, First Credit Services
First Credit Services adopted RingCentral because it was looking for a more reliable cloud-based business phone service. FCS chose to extend the standard RingCentral features through the open APIs of the RingCentral Developer Platform. As a collections agency, First Credit Services needed to be able to archive a couple of years’ worth of call recordings—proof of exactly was and was not said in any conversation with a consumer who might lodge a complaint or a lawsuit—the volume of calls and regulatory duration of archiving called for customization.
Using the RingCentral platform APIs, FCS developed its own solution for downloading call recordings throughout the day and archiving them on cloud storage from Amazon Web Services.
INDUSTRY
Financial Services
HQ
Piscataway, NJ; Mumbai, India
YEAR FOUNDED
1993
EMPLOYEES
300
The challenge
FCS makes collection calls and provides other outsourced business services to its clients, most of whom are health clubs trying to get members to pay their renewal fees. FCS also makes some calls to collect on other debts, such as medical bills. The business has about 300 employees, with the majority of them based in Mumbai, India, and about 30 in New Jersey.
FCS originally considered switching to RingCentral because it was concerned about problems with the reliability of its previous phone service, says Business Support Manager, Dennis Mudaliar. The initial deployment, in August 2015, was to the New Jersey office. When that worked well, FCS decided to adopt it for the whole business. Overall, the transition worked smoothly. But there was one significant problem.
“We make about 50,000 to 55,000 calls in a day, and there was a challenge about how to handle the recordings,” Mudaliar explains. RingCentral allowed FCS to record all those calls, but under its standard terms accounts are limited to 100,000 recordings, which will be retained for up to 90 days. That meant once FCS began running its entire volume of calls through RingCentral, the limit was being exceeded every couple of days. To be safe, FCS really wants to retain them for about two years, and specific recordings might have to be kept for years longer in the case of litigation, he says. While no one will ever review the vast majority of those recordings, they need to be retained just in case they are ever needed.
Fortunately, the RingCentral platform API for call recordings provided the answer: a system for automatically downloading and archiving the audio files and corresponding call logs.
The solution
Using RingCentral’s software development kit for PHP, the FCS information technology team created a script that runs every few hours to index the latest recordings and download the files, about 3.5 to 4 GB of data every day.
The software development project took about three and a half months, starting in the summer of 2016. Initially, there were problems with the download process stalling whenever there was a glitch. So one obstacle the development team had to overcome was writing the error handling code to allow the process to stop and start over when something went wrong, Mudaliar says. Once they got that right, the solution became much more stable. Still to be fleshed out are other aspects of the application, such as a user interface for retrieving specific call records on demand.
With this first API integration under its belt, the development team may also start to look at other possibilities for integration with the RingCentral platform, such as click-to-call dialing from screens in the custom application used by contact center representatives, Mudaliar says.
Fortunately, the RingCentral platform API for call recordings provided the answer: a system for automatically downloading and archiving the audio files and corresponding call logs.
Dennis Mudaliar
Business Support Manager, First Credit Services
The results
Mudaliar says the payoff from the integration is simple: FCS gets the benefit of a more reliable cloud phone system by using RingCentral, combined with “the peace of mind of knowing I’m not losing any of my important call recordings.”