Most calling software today offers integrated ‘compliance’ features, but 99.99% of their customers would fail a compliance audit. This is because most compliance features were designed for communications in the 1980’s and today’s standards require a combination of technology AND training to succeed.

In this article, we’ll cover why these legacy techniques fail and share the one call recording compliance tactic to rule them all.

How common ‘tricks’ fail:

If you’ve asked your conversation intelligence or calling vendor how to be compliant when recording calls, there’s a good chance that they gave you a pretty big disclaimer following some generic advice — “we can’t advise you but here is what other customers do…”

Almost all of these tips have massive gaps in their logic:

  • Area code based disablement: with this technique, your software automatically turns off call recording based on the area code they are dialing into. This assumes that the person you’re calling is actually in the state that their number is tied to, which is almost certainly wrong in the day of mobile phones and VOIP services (customers can be traveling, working remotely, etc)
  • Adding copy to your Calendar Invite or Email Signature: two party consent requires that the other parties be notified explicitly on the call. You can’t make the assumption that they viewed your calendar invite or email signature. This would easily fail any test.
  • Adding the word ‘Recorder’ to your AI recording Bot: Systems like Chorus.ai, Gong.io, Voicera and Jimminy allow you to customize the way your call recording bot looks by adding the word ‘recorder’ into the name of your fake meeting participant. The customer can easily claim that they didn’t see it or know what it means.

Starting to see a pattern? The laws are pretty ironclad that there needs to be a clear verbal confirmation that the call recording being recorded.

The key to compliance: Disclosure, not Consent

What few people realize is that the term ‘Two Party Consent’ is very misleading. Call recording laws actually require DISCLOSURE that the call is being recorded, not CONSENT. The moment you tell a prospect the call is being recorded, they have a choice to stay on the call or hang up. By opting to stay on the call, they are implicitly giving consent to the call being recorded.

This is a subtle but important difference. It means that rather than burdening your prospect with a scary question (“do I really want this call recorded”) at the start of the conversation, you can simply disclose that recording is happening and be compliant for the rest of the call. This puts the burden on the prospect of having to bring up the objection only in key parts of the conversation where confidentiality truly matters, which is almost never (most clients would require an NDA for truly sensitive data anyway).

The ultimate disclosure script

Out of the 10M+ calls we’ve processed through our platform in recent years, we’ve found one script to be the simplest and most effective of them all. It’s a simple phrase that you can train your reps to execute at the beginning of every call, and 99.99% of prospects will not hang up or decline recording.

“Hi, this is Erol from Truly calling you on a recorded line. How are you?”
Here is a link to a recording sharing how this is executed, covering the tone, inflection and speed at which this phrase is announced.

If you are cold calling into a prospect, chances are that their first question will be, “I’m sorry, who?” At that point, you can go into the normal cold call script and the prospect will likely not even be thinking about the call recording disclosure- after all, what could they possibly say that’s sensitive in an initial cold call.

If it’s a prospect or customer that your company already has rapport with, they will almost always assume it’s company policy (after all, most call recording is with fairly junior inside sales reps, and it makes sense why they’d be recorded)

Is this all I have to do?

Well, this is the part where we need to say “this doesn’t constitute legal advice” but the fact is that even with the strategy above, there will be times when you aren’t compliant and you’ll want to prove that you have efforts in place to make this a priority. By having controls for this, you can minimize your risk to almost zero:

Technical features/tools (all possible in Truly’s platform) include:

  • Data Retention Policies: ensure full deletion of recordings across all systems beyond a certain time, configurable by User Role.
  • Transcription Based Policy Monitoring: ensure that the appropriate script(s) are being run at the right stage of the call and funnel.
  • Trigger custom workflows based on this information.

One Sided Call Recording: ensure that only the rep side of the call is recorded. This is the only formula designed to be compliant 100% of the time.

Have we convinced you?

Now for the shameless plug… at Truly, our mission is the help our customers Learn From Every Conversation. Talk time is one of the most powerful and yet most difficult measures to track given the many ways in which customers and reps communicate. If you want to better understand and manage your reps’ time, we’d love to speak with you! Contact us today.