If you record calls, you are holding personal data about the people who rang you. Kenya’s Data Protection Act 2019 has views about that, and the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner is the body with the view that counts.
We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. But a retention policy is a short document, and not having one is harder to explain than having an imperfect one.
Here is what belongs in it.
1. Why you record
Write down the reason. Not “best practice” — an actual purpose.
Common legitimate ones: resolving disputes about what was agreed, coaching agents, meeting an obligation in a regulated sector, confirming instructions on a financial transaction.
The reason matters because everything else follows from it. A recording kept for coaching does not need to live for seven years. A recording of a financial instruction might.
2. What you tell callers
Callers must know. The usual mechanism is a line at the start of the greeting, before the menu: this call may be recorded for quality and training purposes.
Two things make that better. Say why, specifically, rather than the standard phrase. And make sure the same statement appears somewhere written — your privacy notice — so it is not only spoken once.
3. How long you keep them
The principle in the Act is that you do not keep personal data longer than you need it for the purpose you stated.
So the question is not “how long are we allowed” but “how long do we actually need”. Think about it per queue rather than for the whole business:
- Coaching recordings are useful for weeks, not years
- Dispute resolution needs to cover the window in which disputes realistically arise
- Regulated transactions may have their own requirement, and that one is not yours to choose
Write a number against each. Thirty days, ninety days, one year — whatever you can justify. Then make the system enforce it automatically, because a policy that depends on somebody remembering to delete things is not a policy.
4. Who may listen
Limit it by role, and write down which roles.
A supervisor coaching their own team, yes. Everybody in the building, no. And every playback should be logged — who listened, to what, when — so that if the question is ever asked, you can answer it.
Our system does this by default. If yours does not, that is worth knowing before you record anything sensitive.
5. What happens when somebody asks
Under the Act, a person can ask what you hold about them. A recording of their call is part of that.
Decide in advance: who handles such a request, how you find the recording, how you verify the person asking is who they say they are, and how quickly you respond. Doing this on the day the first request arrives is how mistakes happen.
6. What you do not record
Worth stating explicitly, because it shows deliberate thought.
The common one is card details. If you take card payments by phone, either pause the recording while the number is read or do not take card numbers by phone at all. A recording containing card details is a liability you do not want on your server.
A note on recording everything
The default on most systems is to record every call on every queue. It is rarely the right setting.
Recording can be set per team. A sales queue, a collections queue and a general enquiry line have different reasons, different risks and different sensible retention periods. Switching it on selectively is less work than it sounds and gives you a far more defensible position.
The shape of the document
One page. For each queue: why we record, what callers are told, how long we keep it, who may listen, and who handles requests.
Date it. Review it when something changes. Keep it where somebody could actually find it.
The longer discussion of recording and the Act is here. And for anything specific to your sector — particularly if you are regulated — take proper advice rather than ours.