The NSA, Telephony Metadata, and Your Business

If you’re up-to-date with recent NSA news, as I’m sure most of you are, telephony metadata should be a familiar term. Even though so many people have heard the term, most do not know exactly what it means or what sort of information can be derived from it.

Telephony metadata (literally “data about data”) is the information about the phone call, not the phone call itself. The NSA cannot listen to actual phone conversations without a warrant. The kind of information that they are recording is about phone calls: where and when they took place, for how long and with whom. They are able to record this kind of data because it is classified as transactional, therefore no warrant is needed.

This metadata alone, though, is enough for the NSA to piece together behavior patterns about people based on their phone’s metadata for the supposed sake of national security. Don’t worry; I won’t bore you with my opinion on the NSA’s wisdom. The point of bringing up the NSA and metadata is to realize how powerful telephony metadata is and if the NSA can use it so effectively, why can’t your business?

Keep this in mind: the information about a call is as important as the call itself.

Accurate records on telephony metadata can keep a business healthy. By analyzing the metadata phone records you can see on a large scale the day and time phone lines are the busiest, analyze which branch of your organization is receiving the most phone traffic, and see which customers are making those calls.

You can pull some NSA surveillance tactics by seeing how often your representatives are making personal phone calls to their grandmas by tracking the length of a phone conversation with a client not recorded in the CRM. It is definitely more ethical to do this for a business, especially if the employees are made aware. I highly recommend transparency.

This data will help you learn the behaviors of your customers and employees so that you can be like the NSA analyzing patterns. Truly, upon this macroscopic analysis of telephony metadata, business processes will improve and revenue will increase. Most businesses focus on microscopic telephone analysis like listening to the actual phone conversation while forgetting about phone data on a large scale –- don’t make that mistake.

Don’t stop your telephone data analysis there, though. Create a full-fledged phone record portfolio using other tools and information so that you can greatly increase your business’s phone productivity.

As aforementioned, microscopic phone record keeping has to do with the actual phone conversation. There are tools provided by VoIP business phone systems that have coaching features for enhanced training and record keeping for individual employees. Barge lets a manager listen to an employee’s conversation without notification; and Whisper allows a manager to actually make suggestions and comments while an employee is on the phone.

Integrating your business phone system with core business applications like ERP, CRM, or ATS increases record- and note-keeping accuracy so that your employees don’t have to worry about recording something wrong and can focus on different, more important tasks.

As you can see, accurate phone records from the metadata level to the conversational level are an integral part of increasing a company’s productivity. And we all know that increased productivity leads to increased revenue, and who wouldn’t want that?