As organisations continue to make large-scale transitions to cloud-based unified communications and videoconferencing, it’s important those that need to record calls for business and regulatory purposes ensure they remain compliant with data protection and privacy legislation. The challenges of doing so have increased radically as workers increasingly work remotely, utilising a range of different devices and telephony options.
All-party consent laws mandate that for all calls to be legally recorded, consent must be obtained from all parties on the call. In an interaction, this can be intrusive and organisations typically used recorded messages to achieve this consent, rather than have workers read through a script repetitively. However, consent is not a one-size-fits-all landscape and recording for different purposes can require different wordings and forms of consent. In addition, regulations vary from country-to-country so it’s important that systems for obtaining consent are aware of where calls originate from in order to play callers the correct message and achieve compliant consent.
Addressing this has been achieved by adding solutions to organisations’ existing telephony estates. This has usually been done in the form of adding a bolt-on appliance to existing infrastructure than can advise either party on a call about the necessary compliance message. A typical example of this is for insurance proposer announcements.
However, as businesses move to cloud, this landscape is changing and companies are starting to turn to solutions that offer application programme interfaces (APIs) to handle the media and announcements required. Adoption of this approach is set to accelerate as the centralised on-premise solutions previously used in large call centres are not readily available to people working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The technological fragmentation and geographic dispersal of workers, especially customer care personnel, is set to continue as lockdowns and social distancing continue.
The emergency response to the pandemic has been impressive with many companies still able to serve customers thanks to quickly pivoting to home-working. However, for organisations, such as financial services providers, lawyers, accountants, and executives, such as those in compliance, risk and human resources, the ability to obtain permission to record calls is an essential legal requirement.
“In many cases workers are making calls without restrictions and are unable to advise the caller if recording is taking place if they are legally required to do so,” said Mitch Dawson at Consentec, which offers an appliance to provide recorded compliance messages and announcements. “This is compounded when employers have no means to identify the location of the other party so they can’t ensure the message is compliant with relevant laws in the caller’s jurisdiction.”
The company offers a cloud-based API targeted at UC and CCaaS vendors who already have the ability to play their own announcements. The API provides the determination on the applicable compliance legislation for the call based on the called or calling parties based on the call data only.
Dawson says Consentec’s appliances have been designed to handle more than 300,000 call set-ups per second over thousands of SIP trunks and support millions of concurrent calls with only modest hardware requirements. The appliances are designed to be on site in the media path and therefore are not subject to the types of delays normally associated with the internet. Dawson added:
“Organisations provide desk phones, soft phones and dealer boards as well as remote access and mobile telephony connectivity, and they need to retain the ability to record across all of these mediums”
“It was therefore important to us to build a solution that was simple to integrate, configure and manage and that gives clients all of the control they expect.”
