By Cedric Boltman, Channel Executive at Jasco Enterprise and Donna Obeid, Managing Partner at Forelogix.

There are a few logos or companies that pop into your head when you think of a bulletproof brand - brands that are seemingly untouchable, representing success, innovation and strong market share. These are the brands that people want to be a part of, whether it’s making use of their products or services, or being a part of the teams that fuel these brands.

Most companies aspire to build their brand into a household name with a solid reputation. This takes developing a culture that supports growth and team integration, and that is backed by a firm belief in everything that the business stands for. Culture is key. A company’s culture influences its sustainability and societal impact, drives performance, and engenders an environment that is primed for innovation and success.

That being said, how can you establish what your business’ culture is, how your business brand is perceived, and how to build on it in such a way that it becomes one of the “untouchables”? Understanding your business’s reputation and perceived market value requires knowing what people think of your brand - how they interact with it, and how they interact about it.

Interaction recording can give you valuable insight into status of your brand. Analysing and drawing reports from the interactions between staff and customers, between colleagues, and between the general public and your brand – (such as on social media) - can give you a litmus result of your brand value.

Beyond a method to keep records and a risk management mechanism, your interaction recording and management tool offers you the ability to ascertain and cultivate your brand’s reputation and value, optimise operational performance and attain organisational transcendence.

At its most basic, your interaction recording and management system serves as a records management tool and is used for risk management. However, it should not only fall to the risk manager to choose which system you use. As a performance management tool, interaction recording is the premise of operational and executive management. As a cultural transformation tool, it is a consideration for C-Suite executives, and as a mechanism to achieve organisational transcendence, your interaction recording and management system becomes the concern of the board and all shareholders.

When these functions stack up, one can see that each function supports the next - much like a hierarchical structure (picture below). 

Records management

With the IDC predicting that business-to-business and business-to customer transactions over the Internet will reach 450 billion per day by 2020, and that enterprises will overtake consumers as the primary creators of data, it’s easy to see why data - and the recording of it - is so critical. Interaction records become the data which your business can analyse and use to take a multitude of measurements - and it’s critical that your tool is capable of managing and storing the predicted quantity of data, with ease.

Risk management

With the right records, your business can better prepare for and mitigate risks, such as disputes and regulatory adherence. It also helps to manage the risk of underperformance, and an unfavourable culture.

Performance management

It’s not always easy to see where the weak points are in your business, or identify how to strengthen them. Interaction recording, however, can help you pinpoint exactly where your business is underperforming so you can develop an action plan to correct this. Whether the performance hiccup lies with poor service offered by your customer service department, or a negative attitude hampering collaboration in your project teams, analysis of your interaction recordings can be used to increase efficiency and productivity. It also helps maintain effective monitoring of KPIs. Think of interaction recording as a tool to enhance user experience, improve customer satisfaction scores, measure sales effectiveness and improve the learning and training process.

Cultural transformation

It stands to reason that if you are able to identify areas of underperformance, so can you leverage interaction recording to test the cultural temperature of your business and plan accordingly.

Cultural transformation becomes more challenging when it comes to large group interactions management and organisational alignment. When a multinational group wants to disseminate decisions and key communication messages to stakeholders around the globe, the only way to do it is through sophisticated interaction recordings.

The more sophisticated the interaction recordings and management are, the more integrated the group becomes and the more value can be driven from the cross-subsidiaries alignment.

Organisational transcendence - as we discussed in the introduction to this piece, transcendence is the drive; the state of untouchability that every business wishes to attain. With the preceding bases in place, and the ability to actively test, measure and improve upon performance and culture, your organisation is able to shift how the world perceives it.

You have the ability in your hands, through the right interaction recording and management tool, to manage how your business is perceived and its impact on the world at large. Your interaction recording and management tool empowers you to see where your business is and take it to where you want it to be: at the top.