Many businesses, including SMBs, find it beneficial to record phone calls. Among many other benefits, recorded calls can help provide liability protection and can assist with dispute resolution. Customer Service departments can use recorded calls for training and supervision. Some businesses may even be required to record calls in order to comply with industry regulations. Today, I want to take a look at call recording technology as well as some of the legal implications of recording calls.
Who Should Record?
Certain industries may have regulations that carry stiff penalties for failure to comply. In these industries, recording calls becomes cost-effective in defending against allegations of violations. For example:
- Financial Services:
- The Sarbanes-Oxley Act created extensive guidelines for the documentation of business processes and transactions for the financial industry.
- The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) adds some additional privacy requirements with which any call recording system must comply.
- Telemarketing
- The Do-Not-Call Implementation Act requires telemarketing firms to verify their call lists against this database of callers who do not wish to be contacted.
- The Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) governs sales over the telephone and requires specific statements regarding authorization, forms of payment, etc. Fines for failing to comply with the TSR can be as high as $11,000 for each violation. You can start to see how a call recording system can pay for itself very quickly.
- Debt Collection Firms
- The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) governs the methods and behaviors debt collectors can employ in attempting to collect a debt.
Automated vs On-Demand recording
In general, call recording can be automated or on-demand. The appropriate choice will depend on your exact circumstances. On-demand recording may be appropriate for a Customer Service agent who only wants to record the occasional call from an unhappy customer, whereas automated recording may be more appropriate for a Financial Services company that needs to record every call coming in to or originating from their Transactions Department.
In either case, the calls are recorded and saved (typically to a local hard drive) with a time/date stamp. Some call recording systems will allow you to annotate the call while you are on it, to add more information to the call record.
Accessing the Recordings
OK, so now you have recorded some phone calls, how do you go about reviewing a particular call? Most call recording systems will provide a custom application or a web-based user interface that allows you to search for a call based on the origination or destination number, date and time, user annotation and many other search parameters. Once the correct call is found, you can listen to it, download or email the call recording.
Storage Issues
As you can well imagine, recording a large volume of calls can consume large amounts of storage media fairly quickly. Most call recording systems will allow you to archive your recordings on some schedule to more appropriate long-term storage media.
Security and Privacy
Today’s call recording systems have features that help you comply with customer privacy requirements. Typically, access to recordings is controlled by hierarchical security systems to insure that only those with a ‘need to know’ can get to them. Some systems will allow you to define a lifetime for recorded calls to insure that certain calls (for example, those containing credit card information governed by the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) ) are deleted after a certain period of time.
Legal Limitations
Generally speaking, call recording is allowed by law. For example, the FCC has no rules regarding the recording of telephone calls by individuals, just by telephone companies. Most states require only that one party to the call be aware that it is being recorded. A few states require that all parties consent when one party wants to record. I strongly suggest you get professional legal advice before you begin recording to insure you are complying with the laws in your state.
Are you recording calls? Are you in an industry that mandates call recording? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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