Recording Your Phone Calls

If you are in one of these states in the link at the end of this article, all parties that are involved with the conversation must consent to being recorded - Texas is NOT one of them by the way.

If you are not in one of those states, then the "one party consent" law applies and the only person who needs to know is you as long as you are a party to the conversation.  Yes, there are some caveats and since this article is only a few paragraphs long, it’s also not completely comprehensive - so tread carefully.

Federal law permits recording telephone calls and in-person conversations with the consent of at least one of the parties. See 18 U.S.C. 2511(2)(d).  Additionally, if you are NOT a party to the conversation, a “one party consent” law will allow you to record when one party to the communication consents – like a call center agent.

Most call centers record the conversations of their agents for training and verification purposes and it is – or should be – in their employee handbook.  You will often hear when calling into a call center “Your call may be recorded for quality purposes”. Guess what, you’ve been notified. To stay on the line is basically consenting to being recorded like clicking “I agree to the Terms and Conditions” splash page (that no one reads!) of Google, Microsoft, Dell etc.  

In my experience, employees who know that their phone conversations are being recorded fall into to 1 of 2 camps; 1) The-Big-Brother-is-watching camp and it carries a certain resentment 2) It-keeps-everyone-honest camp and the employee has a sense that they are protected against unreasonable customer demands.  Which side employees fall on depends largely on the company culture. 

Technically, call recording with most hosted VoIP providers is a feature that comes as part of your overall service or something you add a la carte.  Our service gives you the option to either have it record on-demand or all the time. The audio files are stored on our server for 90 days and can be accessed through your web portal, downloaded and archived on your pc or listened to without downloading.  Owners and managers can have access to all agent recordings while the agents themselves will only be able to review their recordings. 

For more legal stuff, go to this link: http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/recording-phone…