Using Call Recording features of your phone system

 When your business interacts with customers through phone calls, every call is a potential opportunity to learn about what customers are seeking and how the business can better serve it’s customers. Looking beyond “quality assurance and training purposes”, some of the other benefits to the business of call recording include:

• Preventing disputes – where the business can record a verbal agreement or negotiation with a customer, the existence of a recording can prevent a dispute arising, simply because everyone can know exactly what was said by all parties. 
• Improving compliance – where the business is required to provide certain information to it’s customers, a recording of that part of each call can assist the business to demonstrate it’s compliance with regulations. 
• Improving call handling processes – recording of calls can be reviewed by staff in a position to make changes to the way calls are handled, and everything from the tone of voice used to the actual content of the calls can provide valuable insights into how the business is assisting customers. 

Customers also benefit from the recording of calls, and for many of the same reasons that businesses benefit. If a customer is not satisfied with how a call was handled, or with their customer service experience generally, the recording provides all the substantiation they could need of what was said, and how it could have been improved. In many cases customers may not think to take advantage of the fact that the call they wish to raise a complaint about was actually recorded!

The recording of calls in Australia is legal, but only under specific circumstances. To make things more complex, each state and territory has it’s own laws and regulations that govern the recording of conversations within their jurisdictions. 

One common element that applies in all states and territories is that at minimum you need the consent of at least one participant in a conversation for a recording to be legal. 

A breakdown of the consent rules that apply in each state is provided below –

To avoid consent issues, we recommend that if you wish to enable the recording of calls you ensure that all customers are advised that their calls may or will be recorded. 

While many business communications systems provide call recording features, there are few that provide the more advanced functionality to allow call recordings to be managed and controlled to suit different situations.

For example, if your business collects sensitive information, such as credit card details or tax file numbers, it may be unacceptable or even illegal to record the part of a conversaton where that information is provided by the customer. However, many phone systems don’t provide the ability to pause or stop and start call recordings.

Some systems also lack the ability to securely delete call recordings where a customer may request for this to happen, and in fact this is often regarded as a requirement of current privacy legislation in Australia.

So, how does your phone system compare?

We have made a list of phone systems that our customers and other businesses use, and identified what level of control over call recording that each provides, see below –

There are many benefits to recording calls between your business team and your customers. If you ensure that your communications platform is setup to be fully compliant with the laws and regulations that apply to you, and if you also check that your systems provide all of the call recording features that you need, we would recommend that you take advantage of the opportunities to better protect yourself, and your clients, from misunderstandings and disputes, and to learn from communications issues to improve your customer service processes.