Is Call Monitoring an Invasion of Privacy?

As a consumer, you’ve probably asked yourself the following questions at least once when you’ve called a business or received a sales call:

• “Who can monitor my calls?”
• “Where are my calls private?”
• “How often are my calls monitored?”

And as a business owner, you’ve probably heard of cases involving companies that have had to pay large sums of money to consumers who claim they invaded their privacy by recording and monitoring their phone calls. With that in mind, you may find yourself wondering, “Is call monitoring an invasion of privacy that can cost me a lot of money?”

The Answers

Clearly, both consumers and business owners have reasons to be concerned about call monitoring. Consumers don’t want the personal information they provide to a customer service representative to be shared with countless other individuals, and companies certainly don’t want to be sued for recording and/or monitoring calls improperly. While both parties have their concerns, call monitoring, when done respectfully and within the confines of the law, is not something that should invoke fear in either shoppers or business owners.

The key to preventing your company’s call monitoring from invading a person’s privacy is to ensure you adhere to the law. But following federal law exclusively isn’t enough — you must also follow the dictates of state law.

While that may seem simple enough on the surface, it’s not. Privacy laws typically vary by state, as do the standards for adhering to these laws. To add to the difficulty, many state laws differ from federal regulations. For example, a federal law may make it permissible for a call to be monitored if one party agrees to it being recorded, but a state law may make it illegal to record a given exchange unless everyone who’s participating in the call gives their consent to it being monitored.

Even if all parties agree to allow a call to be recorded, the issue of whether call monitoring is legal may still not be resolved if the conversation is considered confidential. That’s because what’s considered to be a confidential conversation is often predicated on certain factors, such as whether the conversation took place outdoors where others could easily overhear what was said.

One of the smartest things businesses can do to avoid being accused of invading a caller’s privacy is to thoroughly examine and follow the state and federal call monitoring laws that apply to the locations of their callers, as well as the regulations that prevail where their call recording equipment is located. It’s also wise to provide advance notification that a call may be recorded or monitored for training purposes at the start of every call and to implement a system that can provide proof that callers received this notification every time they called your company.

Contact 800response for Vanity Phone Numbers and Call Monitoring

When you work with 800response, you’ll enjoy having a vanity phone number for your business that gives you access to an advanced call monitoring system. Our system produces 18 call tracking reports that can help you monitor call volumes, identify the sources of your calls and track other key performance indicators. You’ll also benefit from missed call reports, SaaS speech analytics, and more.

Contact 800response online or call us at 1-800-NEW-SALE to learn more about our state-of-the-art call monitoring system today!