The 5 Keys to Record Calls in a Legal and Safe Way

In recent times, any type of company, but especially contact centers, law firms or financial institutions need to record calls, store them and retrieve them for multiple reasons, either by legal imperative, for security reasons, to analyze the quality of a telephone service or to improve business intelligence. 

Although a priori may seem like a simple decision, there are different aspects to take into account to ensure good practice in recording and storing calls by a company.

Legal and Privacy Issues

At present, all companies have personal information of their clients. This means that the files that deal with the recordings comply with a series of conditions that guarantee the rights of the users and the real security of the information, that is to say, conditions of legality with respect to the user and guarantees that the data is safe.

In order to carry out the recordings of calls involving the client and the worker, it will be necessary for the company to take into account the following actions to comply with the Organic Law on the Protection of Personal Data (OLPPD):

1. Legality of the recordings: it is important to take into account that there must be a legal basis that enables the company to carry them out, so that the reasons for the calls must always be indicated: verification of contracts made by telephone, satisfaction surveys, improve service quality, or solve problems.

2. Registration of the file in the SADP: it should be remembered that the recordings will generate a structured file of data, so the file must be declared in the Spanish Agency for Data Protection (or in any case modify the current file of clients and workers including the “voice” data).

3. External company that makes the recordings: if the recordings are made by an external company, a contract must be established for the controller, in which the aspects established by the data protection regulations and responsibilities of both parties are defined (OLPPD, article 12).

4. Legal notice: the company must comply with the legal notice and obtain the consent of both the client and the worker. On the one hand, the client must be informed that the call will be recorded for security reasons, that in compliance with the OLPPD, the content of the recording will be included in a file owned by the company and that at any moment he can exercise his right Access, rectification, cancellation and opposition through a free telephone or email. If the customer objects to it, recording cannot be performed. On the other hand, the workers must be informed that for the development of their functions in the customer service department the calls will be recorded.

5. Security measures: it will be necessary to establish whether the recordings may contain high level data (health, trade union membership, religion, beliefs, sexual life, ideology, racial origin, data collected for police purposes, etc.), since this would mean having to apply the high level security measures to the recordings file established by the OLPPD Development Regulation: activate a log of accesses, audits every two years, encryption of data in telecommunications and encryption of backups and external location.

Secure Call Recording Tools

Today, there are different systems and applications to solve this need. Among them, cloud communication systems have been erected in a simple and effective solution, since they facilitate the registration, storage, search and reproduction of all calls or that each organization needs at any time.

Call recording on a virtual PBX or contact center in the cloud offers six major advantages to businesses: 

1. There is no investment in equipment or software licenses, and recording functionality is generally included in the monthly fees for the service.

2. There is no capacity limit on the number of calls that can be stored in the cloud.

3. Companies have guaranteed availability of recordings at all times thanks to backups on different servers or datacenters.

4. The recordings can be made from any location or company headquarters and consulted from any device.

5. All calls by default, or only those parts of the call that need to be saved, can be recorded.

6. Recordings are securely stored thanks to the encryption of IP voice communications.

Call recording is, therefore, a differential functionality of cloud telephony systems, essential for companies that need to recover conversations with customers or suppliers, whether for legal reasons, security, improvement of customer service of business intelligence.