Recording Mobile Phone Calls
A White paper by Xarios 0845 373 6880
[email protected] www.xarios.com
Contents Contents .................................................................................................... 2 Introduction ............................................................................................... 3 Executive Summary ..................................................................................... 4 Regulations, Rules and Regulations! .............................................................. 5 UK Law ................................................................................................... 5 Data Protection ........................................................................................ 5 OFCOM ................................................................................................... 5 The FSA and the new rules on mobile recording .............................................. 7 The new rules .......................................................................................... 7 Deadline ................................................................................................. 7 What are the various technical solutions to the problem? ................................. 8 Hosted dial through system ....................................................................... 8 Local Recording on the smartphone ............................................................ 8 Conference call Smartphone Application ..................................................... 8 What are the problems with smartphone applications? ..................................... 9 Control of the operating system ................................................................. 9 Are there any issues with the network operator? .......................................... 9 What kind of device could answer the call at HQ? .......................................... 10 Updating the Call Recorder database ........................................................ 10 Interrogating a Blackberry BES server ................................................... 10 Updating a web page .......................................................................... 11 Using DTMF on the inbound call ............................................................ 11 Conclusion................................................................................................ 11 About Xarios Ltd .................................................................................... 12
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Introduction Call recording equipment in contact centres is subject to a range of government legal and regulatory conditions driven on the one hand by the need to record financial advice given to consumers required by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), and on the other hand by The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, the government act which provides a business with the right to record calls to monitor staff activities and clarifies the rights of employees. On the 14th November 2011, new rules levied by the FSA come into force that require FSA regulated companies to record calls on staff mobile phones as well as the fixed line calls to their call centres. This creates a technical minefield for an IT manager who now needs to work out how to achieve this in the face of a range of mobile networks and smartphone devices, some of which are capable of the task and some of which (at the time of writing) are not. This white paper seeks to explain what the issues are, the various ways in which mobile calls might be recorded and provides information on the specific legislation concerned. Xarios customers already record calls in their fixed line contact centres ranging from 8 to 800 trunk lines. Our objective is to provide a single user interface for our clients to search and playback both fixed line and mobile calls from the same place whilst maintaining the existing FSA requirements to encrypt and store the call data.
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Executive Summary The Financial Services Association (FSA) has lifted the restriction on mobile Phone calls under the scope of their regulations for recording communications with clients. This means that from Monday 14th November 2011 companies that are regulated by the FSA and currently record calls on their office PBX will need to record calls made on staff mobile phones as well as fixed lines. This presents serious technical challenges for these companies since their staff may use a range of mobile Smartphones and calls that take place on these phones are not connected to the company HQ. There are several ways that call recording vendors have approached a solution to the problem and currently the most straight forward solution seems to be the use of a mobile Smartphone application on the Blackberry platform to conference all calls in and out on the mobile to the company‟s office/Contact Centre PBX. This enables the existing call recorder to trap the call recording and inherit the tracking of the calls by logging that mobile‟s caller ID in its database. The solution is then enhanced by collecting additional data from the application to augment the data in the call recorder database with information about the third party caller ID and the direction of the call. At the time of writing Xarios supplies the Blackberry application and can also deliver Pro services to make the additional data available to a third party call recorder. If the customer uses a Xarios call recorder Xarios supply an off-theshelf module to deliver the data synchronisation. When completed the project will deliver all the FSA requirements identified in their regulations.
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Regulations, Rules and Regulations! With the primary objective of protection for the consumer, the government has established several regulatory bodies that impose the rules covering a range of issues including telephone call recording.
UK Law There are, in fact two main aspects of call recording: 1. The physical act of recording and monitoring of calls and 2. The storage and handling of the resulting recordings (the data) The Regulations of Investigatory Powers Act was passed in July 2000. This is the legal framework covering the recording and monitoring of telephone calls. It states requirements with Lawful Business Practice Regulations are complied with on behalf of sender and recipient. The Lawful Business Practice Regulations came into force in October 2000. This identifies situations when an organisation may record a conversation. It shows how a business provides evidence of a transaction that is used to meet quality standards or check that targets are being met. For more details see: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/ukpga_20000023_en_1 http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2000/20002699.htm
Data Protection When a call has been recorded it is covered by the Data Protection Act, 1998. The recorded call comes under the form of private data stored electronically (Part II of the Data Protection Act 1998 section 7 - Rights of Data subjects and others). See the following for more details: http://www.ico.gov.uk/what_we_cover/data_protection.aspx
OFCOM OFCOM, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industry states: “you have to take reasonable steps to ensure both parties are aware that the call may be monitored or recorded to demonstrate, if required, that you have done so”. “Reasonable steps” are not defined by legislation or by OFCOM. It has to be decided by the company what is reasonable. In practice it would make sense to inform both parties in a clear and concise manner and understand the policy of what is recorded and under what conditions (Part II of the Data Protection Act 1998 section 7 – Rights of Data subjects and others). It is not illegal to make a recording or listen to it as long as you have taken the “reasonable steps” to let both parties know that a recording is taking place. This does not cover employers recording private calls made by employees. Steps should be taken to notify customers that a recording is taking place. Customers can be notified by a simple message at the beginning of the call (e.g.
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“calls may be recorded for quality and training purposes”) or a statement on a brochure or website. See the following for more details: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/
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The FSA and the new rules on mobile recording The Financial Services Authority regulate “financial markets” but have a stated aim to “help retail consumers achieve a fair deal” ( http://www.fsa.gov.uk ). See the following for more detailed information: http://www.fsa.gov.uk/pubs/policy/ps08_01.pdf These regulations set out the rights and requirements of businesses and individuals to record calls but once the call is recorded, and depending on the content of the conversation, the resulting “data” stored electronically may be subject to the Data Protection Act. The FSA also states that call recordings must be “easily accessible” for auditing purposes. Until now the FSA rules have been restricted to fixed lines at the contact centres of regulated companies.
The new rules In March 2011 the FSA released http://www.fsa.gov.uk/pubs/cp/cp10_07.pdf which removed the exemption on the requirement to record mobile phone calls as well as fixed line calls. Here is the key extract from the document that states the requirement: “Proposed changes to tapping rules We propose to extend the current taping obligations to require the recording and storage of all „relevant communications‟ made with, sent from or received on mobile phones. We propose to apply this rule only to those mobile phones that are issued by firms for business purposes. To support this, we also propose to introduce a new rule requiring firms to take reasonable steps to ensure that such communications do not take place on private communication equipment which firms cannot record mainly for privacy reasons. This includes private mobiles, private handheld mobile electronic communication devices as well as and private non-mobile electronic communication devices.”
Deadline Its simple; these calls need to be recorded from Monday 14th November 2011. The FSA made the original decision in the last quarter of 2010 and they have given businesses a 12 month “transition” period in order to deploy a solution.
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What are the various technical solutions to the problem? There are several ways in which the problem has been tackled, not all with 100% success.
Hosted dial through system This solution involves getting your staff to call a number (the hosted vendor) and when the call is answered to then dial the other party after which the system connects the calls together and records the conversation. It is then possible to log onto the hosted website and search and playback the resulting recordings. Some suppliers are simplifying the idea by installing dedicated SIM cards that automatically route the call via their servers. Some of the obvious issues are: a. The data will be stored (if only temporarily) on shared servers. b. Inbound calls must also pass through the hosted system and therefore mobile numbers will probably need to be changed.
Local Recording on the smartphone There are several applications on the App Store for the various mobile platforms to record the calls onto the storage media on the smartphones themselves. Key issues for this option include: a. With media storage requirements of up to 200k per minute of talk time (a typical call would consume 2MBits of disk space), there are a limited number of devices that can cope. b. Typically the applications don‟t encrypt the data. c. Again the data is at risk whilst it remains on the smartphone. d. In order to get the data off the smartphone and into a manageable environment where they are “easily accessible” there needs to be another application written to transfer the data to the head office systems along with the call logging data associated with the call.
Conference call Smartphone Application By far the most elegant solution appears to be the installation of a smartphone application that sets up a conference call any time a mobile call takes place and connects both parties to a device at the corporate HQ that answers that call with silence. As a consequence this call inherits the organisation‟s existing call recording infrastructure. That is to say the conference leg of the call is connected to a fixed line and/or a PBX extension that is already being recorded by the existing fixed line recorder. Even if there is no mechanism to synchronise data between the recording application and the fixed line recorder, it is possible to search and
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playback calls since the caller ID of the staff mobile phone will be tracked in the same way as a normal inbound call to the HQ from that smartphone.
What are the problems with smartphone applications? Despite the fact that using a smartphone application is possible, there are restrictions – it‟s not all plain sailing!
Control of the operating system The big four platforms are Blackberry (RIM), Android (Google), HTC (Microsoft) and iPhone (Apple). The issue surrounding automatically creating a conference call using a smartphone application is that an inbound call is a random event that is not initiated by a smartphone application. Consequently the GSM phone software on iPhone and HTC platform in particular locks out the rest of the operating system and prevents another application from taking control and creating the conference call. On the other hand Android and Blackberry do permit control (although at the time of writing Google appear to be considering locking the operating system down in the future to gain more control over deployment).
Are there any issues with the network operator? In short .... no, as long as the tariff on the mobile user‟s phone supports the conference feature. However, there is a potential issue when users travel abroad. When they are abroad they are technically outside of the auspices of the FSA but if they conduct business to a caller inside the UK then they must comply. The difficulty comes when they stray into countries whose legislation is at odds with the FSA regulations. Switzerland, for example forbids the recording of mobile telephone calls on their network and although the mobile will typically change from a UK network operator to an alternative in the country they land, the idea of conferencing a call to the corporate HQ means that the recording itself did not take place in the country where the mobile is located. Just a practical tip, if your staff do roam abroad and still conduct FSA governed business there, make sure the number configured in the conference application uses the “+44” prefix to indicate UK since different countries use different international access codes (e.g. Europe uses 00 whereas the USA & Canada use 011).
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What kind of device could answer the call at HQ? Most PBX systems contain a Voicemail / Auto Attendant that can be configured to play a caller announcement such as “Welcome to ACME Co. Please dial the extension number of the person you require”. That system can be configured to answer the call and simply repeat a silent recording. As an alternative, Xarios have an option to connect the call recorder to the phone system with a range of port types including ISDN30 trunk side, SIP VoIP (Trunk or extension side) and Analogue extension side. In the case of trunk side recording the system will simply answer the call and facilitate the recording of the call on the inbound trunks already being recorded. In the case of an extension side device, the existing call recorder will use the extension answering device itself to record the call. The key planning criteria to consider is whether the HQ PBX has sufficient spare inbound trunks to receive the conference calls in addition to the day-to-day use of trunks on the PBX. For example, if it‟s possible that ten mobile phone users may concurrently connect to the PBX with conference calls, and the existing system records an ISDN30 circuit, there is a possibility that a second ISDN30 would be required and consequently an upgrade to the call recorder to support two circuits. This is likely to be a difficult issue to assess since there is typically no real time view of concurrent calls provided by the mobile network operators the way that Contact Centre ACD systems can produce a report on fixed line systems. The best solution is to produce a report for the ratio of peak hour trunk utilisation to contact centre staff (which is often 1:1) and then compare the average monthly talk time of a contact centre agent with a typical mobile user. If the mobile user talk time is 50% of the contact centre agent you may assume that 50% of your mobile users might be concurrently connected to the PBX in the peak hour.
Updating the Call Recorder database A “nice to have” is the ability to automate the process of updating the fixed line call recorder with the Call Data Records (CDRs) associated with the mobile call. The key data elements that improve the view of the data are: a. The caller ID of the third party in the mobile call. b. The direction of the call to the mobile. c. Discriminating between an inbound call to the mobile and a normal inbound call from the mobile to the PBX at the HQ. There are of course multiple techniques possible for this piece of the jigsaw.
Interrogating a Blackberry BES server If the platform proposed is Blackberry, the BES server stores a database of calls made by Blackberry devices configured.
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The fixed line call recorder could interrogate this database to match the BES record with the corresponding record on the call recorder database. When the record is found, the direction field could be updated with “mobile Outbound” or “mobile Inbound” and the “called party” and “calling party” fields could be updated to accurately represent the mobile call.
Updating a web page An alternative technique is for the mobile application to update a web page at the end of the call (e.g. www.xarios.com/mobilecalls.aspx) and for the call recorder to interrogate the page in the same way as above.
Using DTMF on the inbound call If the call recorder answering device is used rather than the existing PBX voicemail, it will be possible to configure the device to answer the call and then to listen for a string of dialled digits in given format to collect the data required. Xarios Support all three techniques!
Conclusion The subject can be a difficult technology problem and it makes sense to engage with a supplier capable of providing you with a consultative approach. The Xarios professional services team can advise your contact centre with the integration project and take the headaches away from your compliance issues.
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About Xarios Ltd Xarios Ltd is an independent software development company specialising in telephony oriented software applications. The Xarios call recorder can support sites from 8 to 800 trunk lines with or without the compliance module delivering a range of features designed to address a call centre‟s requirement to comply with the various regulations surrounding call recording. With development offices in Manchester, and Beijing and support offices in Phoenix USA, the company is a Microsoft Gold Partner and has attained the ISO 9000-3 quality standard for software development in addition to accreditations for API integration to various PBX manufacturers. Standard products include Call Recording, CTI and CRM integration and Progressive diallers. The company also designs a range of bespoke applications such as IVR and custom CRM integration. See www.xarios.com for more details
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