Recording Law :: Modem Spy

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Legality of recording conversations in UK

How are recordings used, are they used in court?

Is recording conversations legal? What is British telephone recording law? It is surprising how seldom a recording is used in court, we almost never hear of it. This is partly because most recordings are used for sales training or note taking. However when it is used for recording agreements in most cases the recording helps to diffuse the dispute, rather than to escalate it. The reason for this is that most disputes escalate because one party thinks that the other party is being difficult, lying, or is not fulfilling what they committed to.

Suppose in your company you have a dispute with a customer about what was agreed on the phone, and you listen back to the recording. There are three possibilities. One is that you can hear that the customer is absolutely right, and so you give in with an easy heart. Another possibility is that you are right and the customers is clearly wrong. You then have a choice of playing the recording to the customer and then normally the customer will back down, or you may still give them what they want, but at least you know that your systems are correct, and the customer knows that you are being generous. The third possibility is that you can hear from the recording that no clear agreement was made; the customer says "I will buy it for ?100, and your agent says "OK, ?110 it is", and the the customer says "that is good, here is my credit card for ?100", and the agent replies "we will charge ?110", and it is possible to hear that the conversation was confused, and so it is much easier to come to a satisfactory outcome.

We heard of a doctor's night service that used to receive complaints from patients which took a great deal of time to resolve. They started recording the calls that they received. Then whenever they had a complaint, they used to say to the patient "we are very sorry that you are not happy, and as a reputable organisation that cares about your health and how we look after you we want to make sure that we do the right things, and do what we say that we do; please come into the surgery, we will listen to the call together and correct whatever it is that we did not do as we said". When the calls were listened together with the patient they could both hear that in many cases the patient had the details wrong, the times wrong, the name of the doctor wrong - so much so that 80% of the complaints just evaporated. Think of the similar savings in time and improvements in customer service that could be made in your organisation.

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See also:
Table of contents.
Recording Law in United States
Canadian Recording Law