Many companies that record voice traffic are required to store the date for five or more years. But what if you upgrade your recorder? What should you do with your legacy voice data – migrate it to your new platform so that all of your voice data can be accessed from one location or maintain it separately?

Each legacy data situation is unique and it’s not a simple decision. Here are fundamental issues that you need to consider as you develop your Company’s voice data (and all data for that matter) strategy:

Single Pane of Glass – Consolidating legacy recordings from multiple systems into a single dashboard reduces the time required to evaluate data across systems and you can leverage today’s analytics tools. You will need to compare the costs of consolidation to the long-term operational benefits that come from migration.

Legacy System Maintenance Costs – Maintaining a legacy system is more than just paying the electric bill. Software licensing and Usage & Maintenance (UM) fees provide necessary patches and security updates to ensure the health of a system. Licensing and UM fees can be very significant.

Protection From Obsolescence – When legacy call reporting platforms reach end of lifetime (EOL), many of them will go unsupported by the original equipment manufacturer and sometimes the manufacturer will go belly up.

Media Degradation – Some sites do still archive to tape, and those tapes degrade over time making some of them unplayable. Some degradation can be slowed by how the media is stored but as we all know – father time is undefeated.

Production Capabilities – Searching for, then producing, data from one system is ideal. Producing call data from systems of two or more different generations or manufacturers is cumbersome and inefficient.

Increased Demand for Voice Data – There is a potential increased internal demand for this data. With the advent of AI-driven analytic tools, it is now easier to incorporate voice data into analyses for customer service, marketing, sales, and product offerings.