News26 May 2021Thomas Simoneit

Privacy by default

Why anonymization and data protection matter so much for call recordings Conversations in customer care have been recorded for documentation and quality improvement purposes for decades.

Advances in the automated transcription of phone calls have brought new attention to data protection and data sovereignty: what exactly happens to phone calls once they exist as text, along with the personal information they contain?

The employees' perspective

When it comes to call recording and transcription, employees and their representatives are often critical and skeptical, and rightly so. Can personal assessments be made based on individual calls? Who can listen to these calls, and now also read them? How is the data processed further, and how long are recordings and transcripts retained? These are just a few of the questions that need to be addressed.

Many of these concerns can be resolved with CreaLog's technologies for securely anonymizing employees. Here are a few examples:

Employee names and other personal data are automatically detected and immediately masked with noise in the call recording, or replaced with placeholders such as asterisks in the transcription.
Individual digits or digit sequences, such as phone numbers or extensions, can also be filtered out and then anonymized or removed from the recordings.
In smaller service teams, colleagues can often be recognized easily by their voice. To rule this out, the voice in call recordings can be distorted by altering pitch and speed, so that it can no longer be traced back to an individual employee.

The callers' perspective

GDPR-compliant data processing matters just as much to callers, and it strengthens customers' trust in a company. After all, no one wants their personal data stored indefinitely for quality management purposes. Here are a few examples of personal customer data that can be identified and anonymized directly during the recording or transcription process:

Names, phone numbers, dates of birth, and addresses,
Social security numbers and health information,
Account balances or outstanding payments,
Passwords, PINs, and many other sensitive and private details.

Conclusion

For its call recording and transcription solutions, CreaLog offers a wide range of options for operating them in a GDPR-compliant way and in line with existing works agreements. We build in privacy by default, and we are happy to advise you on implementing it at your company.