Home: Predictive dialers :: Call center contact recording

The law regarding call center contact recording

Call center contact recording is used by call centers for call monitoring and calls evaluation. Managers often use recording to enhance agent productivity, analyze the performance of individual agents, groups or even an entire call centre, enabling to spot trends and weaknesses and respond proactively towards them. Recording of conversations is a widespread practice in the industry but in the past few years many customers have complained about the invasion of privacy by recording of calls.

The federal law of United States allows recording a call with the consent of at least one party. This means a person initiating a recording and participating in it does not need to notify the other party of the recordings. The laws of 12 different states require the consent of all the parties involved in a call. According to these law, both parties involved in a conversation should be notified of a recording and if a conference call is initiated the third party should also be notified before a call can be recorded. The states enforcing these laws are California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington.

To abide by the law for call center contact recording many firms do their part in obtaining the caller's consent by including a prerecorded message at the start of incoming calls that states that the call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes. All call centers communicate to their agents that any of the calls could be recorded for quality assurance. Thus both the parties concerned are aware of the recording. Call centers justify recording of calls for quality assurance purposes. If a call center uses the recorded calls for a purpose other than that of quality evaluation, legal action could be initiated.

The international law for contact center contact recording varies from country to country. For example Britain and Canada have single party notification. Many countries do not have any specific laws regarding telecommunication recordings and regulate on case to case basis. It is important for call centers to check with a local attorney on the laws pertaining to call recording for their respective state and country.