Overview of Call Recording

Call Recording is exactly what it sounds like: a feature that allows you to record your inbound and/or outbound calls and save the recordings to your CRM or platform.

Call Recordings are used by smrtPhone clients for a variety of reasons, including:

If disclosure is required, you can train your staff to announce it or set a greeting message in your call flow (for inbound calls) because if you are on a call, you cannot turn the call recording off.

All these setting changes (on/off) are made while you are not on a call. You cannot start/stop the recording mid-call.

Read more about how to modify your Call Flows to include call recording ⇢

As of February 2024, 11 states require two-party consent to legally record a phone call, meaning that everyone involved in the conversation must be made aware and agree to the recording.

One-party consent is required by federal law. Thus, as long as you are a party to the conversation, you might be able to record a phone call or other interaction. Additionally, the statute forbids recording talks with the intention of committing a crime or tort. However, federal laws will be completed by state laws.

Similar to the federal statute, the majority of states have passed legislation requiring one-party consent.

Hence, certain states in the United States have rules regarding call recording that require both parties to be informed of the recording, whereas other states just require one side to know. In a number of states, recording a phone call requires the permission of all parties involved.

For example, in California, Penal Code 637.2 states that violating the telephone recording law can result in a fine of $5,000.

In addition to two primary state statutes, federal law governs telephone recordings: one-party and two-party consent.

38 states and the District of Columbia require one-party consent for recording phone calls and other conversations, while the remaining 11 states have what are known as two-party laws that demand consent from all parties before a conversation can be recorded.

Please be aware of the term two party. If your conversation will take more than 2 people, you need consent from all of them, not only one part. So, even if it is called “two-party consent,” it is in fact all-party consent.

It's important to note that you must abide by the rules of the state you are calling in order to comply with certain requirements, like the Telemarketing Sales Act and the TCPA. Whether that also applies to calls that are recorded is not entirely clear. For example, the law is unclear about which state standards you must abide by while making a phone call from a one-party consent state, like New York, to a two-party consent state, like California.

But it's always advisable to proceed cautiously. We would recommend that all-party consent be obtained as recording calls without proper consent is illegal in some areas.

Learn how to keep your calls compliant ⇢

You can enable or disable the recordings for your incoming calls by accessing your Admin Dashboard > Admin > Call Flows.

Here, you select the flow you wish to disable or enable recordings for, select the edit button (blue phone icon), and edit your Flow accordingly.

This setting is available when you customize your Call Flow and select some of the applets (like Dial Applet or Round Robin Applet).

The Call Recording dropdown sets how the calls will be recorded - from when they start ringing or when they are answered. You can also disable call recording for this portion of the call flow.

You can enable or disable the recordings for your outbound calls by accessing Admin > Account Settings. There's only one setting for managing Outbound recordings (at the Account level, not the User level) in Account Settings.

You can make changes to the Campaign Calls Recording function by accessing your Campaign Settings which are found under each smrtDialer Campaign that you created.

This feature is ON by default, but Account Owner/Users with granted permissions can switch it ON or OFF at any point between dialing sessions by going to smrtDialer > Campaigns > Select the Campaign > Campaign Settings.

Your call recordings can be easily found on your smrtPhone Dashboard. Just go to the upper right corner, under My Account, and click Billing & Logs.

Here, among other information about the calls, you can see the option to listen and/or delete specific recordings.

Your recordings will act exactly as you customize the setup, allowing you to listen to your call recordings and pull up the calls if you use filters like User, Direction, From/To. The recordings are available for you all the time, as long as you do not delete them.

Video Calls store logs of their occurrence. If there is a recording of the video call, it will be visible in the Billing & Logs under Video Logs, the same way as call recordings are displayed.

For smrtDialer Campaigns: each Campaign stores its own list of recordings. So, to see your smrtDialer recordings, access the Campaign you are interested in. On the right-hand part, you will see Campaign's Details found under Settings. Press the 👁 icon to see all Calls and Recordings.

This will open a window with all the calls made in that campaign. You can listen, delete the recording, or push it back to the CRM if needed.

Learn more about using Recordings in your smrtDialer Campaigns ⇢

You can choose to enable the AI Tools for your account and have the recorded calls with a transcript and a summary AI provided.

There are few mandatory settings to do so: to be a Pro subscriber and to enable the AI Tools on the account.

Learn more about AI Tools ⇢

If for any reason, the recording was not pushed to your CRM, you can activate the 🔁 button from both smrtPhone Call Logs or smrtDialer and resend the recording to your CRM.

Be aware that if you activate the Resent button multiple times, the recording will be sent as many times as you click.

Please, be aware that storage fees apply at a rate of $0.0010 / recorded minute.

You can learn more about Managing your recording storage by reading this article here.

You can download the call recording file from the playback screen. Go to Account Menu > Billing & Logs > Call Logs. You can listen, view details of the recording, or delete it.

Once you choose to see details, on the left side you can see: Call ID, Direction, From, To, and Date, and on the right side you can listen to the recording, modify speed, or select download from the playback screen.

If you decide to delete the recordings, please keep in mind that they cannot be accessed anymore. Even if the link is still accessible from the CRM, that entry will be empty.

As long as you keep the recordings in smrtPhone, they are available to listen to and download. Also, they are chargeable as long as they live in smrtPhone.

You can delete smrtPhone call recordings from Call Logs. The smrtDialer recordings can only be deleted altogether from Recording Storage, where you can use bulk deletion and erase a month of recordings.

Each recording can be resynced with the CRM by clicking the 🔁Resync button.

If for any reason the recording was not pushed to your CRM, you can access both Call Logs and Total Calls from smrtDialer and resend it.

Any click on the resync button might either replace the existing recording or create a new entry in your CRM, depending on your integration. You could try refreshing the CRM page before clicking it too many times to avoid creating duplicates of the same recording attached to your Contact in your CRM.