Call Recording Best Practices and Guidelines
When it comes to improving your company’s sales performance, there are only a few approaches that offer an excellent return on investment. One of the best, however – especially for any company that conducts much of its business over the phone – is call recording. However, using call recording requires close adherence to legal regulations concerning privacy and disclosure.Here’s what you should know about call recording guidelines and best practices for call centers and any other related businesses where phone conversations are a core component.
Table of Contents
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- The Goals of Call Recording
- Best Practices for Creating a Call Recording Disclaimer
- Legal Considerations with Recording Voice and Video Communications
- Compliant Call Recording Disclaimer Methods
- Ways to Achieve Compliance and Agent Performance with Speech Analytics
- Methods for Receiving Consent From Both Customers and Agents
- The Last Word on Leveraging Call Recording to Your Company’s Benefit
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The Goals of Call Recording
The overall goal of call recording is to improve workflow for your company. Whether it’s used to document outbound calls made by your sales staff or inbound customer inquiries fielded by your customer support department, call recording is invaluable for record-keeping, quality assurance, resolving potential disputes, and evaluating employee performance with an eye toward improvement, and advanced data trend analysis.
Taken separately, all of these goals are integral to your company’s overall productivity. Together, however, using call recording to meet and exceed these goals have the potential to paint an even bigger picture. Thanks to advanced call recording software platforms that leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural networks, it’s easier than ever to meet these goals – as long as your company covers its legal responsibilities when it comes to recording sales and customer service calls.
Best Practices for Creating a Call Recording Disclaimer
In order to be able to reap the rewards that call recording can provide a company, there are some important steps that must be taken first. The primary task you face is to design a call recording disclaimer that can be referenced by customers.
There are a variety of ways that you can disclose call recording to your customers, such as:
- Playing a pre-recorded disclaimer statement before they speak to a live agent.
- Asking for permission to record the call
- Alerting those on the call that the conversation is being recorded through the use of an audible beep or other faint tone or beep that repeats periodically throughout the conversation.
However, not all disclosure or disclaimer methods are legal in every state.
Legal Considerations with Recording Voice and Video Communications
On a national level, legal considerations for call recording are straightforward: federal law states that call recording is legal as long as one party grants consent to being recorded. However, because each individual state in the US has the right to pass specific laws that address the requirements for legal call recording, there are many different legal considerations when it comes to recording voice and video communications.
States that require two-party consent (sometimes referred to as “all-party consent”) for legal call recording necessitate that the other person on the line is given the opportunity to either agree or decline to be recorded before a conversation occurs. Currently, there are 14 states in the union that have two-party call recording consent laws on the books. These states include:
- California
- Connecticut
- Florida
- Hawaii
- Illinois
- Maryland
- Michigan
- Montana
- Nebraska
- Nevada
- Pennslyvania
- Washington.
Compliant Call Recording Disclaimer Methods
To ensure your call recording disclaimer is compliant, you may need to consult the specific laws of each state you will be either making calls to or receiving calls from. However, there are some guidelines you can use, especially those that arose out of a 2006 Supreme Court ruling originating from a call recording case from California, which is an all-party consent state.
Kearney v. Salomon Smith Barney, Inc. set an important precedent that all parties to a call must be informed at the beginning of the call that it is being recorded. Suitable methods for providing this information cited by the court include having a pre-recorded message that states something along the lines of “this call may be recorded for quality and training purposes”. Non-automated methods include agents stating that they are speaking on a recorded line or asking if they have the other participant’s express permission to record are also sufficient, as is the aforementioned periodic faint beep or tone.
The rewards of call recording for your company are manifold, especially when combined with advanced AI-powered conversation analysis software.
Ways to Achieve Compliance and Agent Performance with Speech Analytics
Ensuring that you meet your legal obligations for call recording opens up nearly limitless opportunities to begin reaping the benefits that recording sales and customer service calls can have for your company. Now, you have the opportunity to review calls to ensure that your agents are in compliance with your company’s phone policies. Additionally, you can review calls to ensure the performance of your agents meets minimum productivity thresholds as well.
However, analyzing recorded calls can be time-consuming, especially in larger companies with a significantly sized workforce. When you have dozens or even hundreds of sales staff or customer service representatives fielding calls, it soon becomes impossible to analyze these calls efficiently. This is why using advanced AI software with speech analytics is practically a requirement for unleashing the potential benefits of call recording. These capabilities use advanced speech recognition algorithms to sort through high volumes of recorded calls quickly, flagging just those that are necessary for further review by supervisors.
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Methods for Receiving Consent From Both Customers and Agents
A final word needs to be said on receiving consent to record calls from both customers and agents. Obtaining informed consent on the part of your agents is relatively easy, as it is not a complex process to tell your phone agents that all their calls are being recorded for training and quality assurance purposes. Prospective employees who do not want to be subject to being recorded are therefore free to seek a different role, either within your company or elsewhere.
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However, practical methods for receiving consent from customers can be more complex. If your company does not use automated, pre-recorded messages that inform customers that their call will be recorded, then the most effective method to receive a customer’s consent is to have an agent directly ask them for it at the beginning of the call. Additionally, ensuring your agents keep to an approved script that highlights the positive benefits of call recording such as quality control will increase the likelihood that the customer will give their consent.
Ways Your Sales Team Will Benefit From Call Recording Software
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Sophisticated analytical tools added to your call recording will make opportunities clear.
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