This privacy notice explains how and for what purposes we process our call recordings. It applies to incoming and outgoing calls from the Council’s Customer Services Team.
The purpose of this policy is to ensure that our call recording processes and procedures are compliant with the Data Protection Act (DPA) / General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) legislation, including retention periods and the reasons for recording.
Use of call recording
Call recordings will be used for the following purposes;
- Help identify staff training needs and help improve team performance
- Help protect staff from abusive or nuisance calls
- Assist in complaint/dispute resolution
- Assist in quality control to ensure accuracy of information provided
- Assist in monitoring Customer Service processes
- Assist in customer demand analysis – to measure and improve the quality of the customer experience
Which calls will be recorded?
This policy applies to all Contact Centre staff including those working from home.
This includes:
- All incoming and outgoing calls made by the Customer Services team
- Transfers (the call segment between Customer Contact Advisor and Rochford Council Colleague)
Call recording will stop when:
- A customer has been transferred to our automatic telephone payment line
- The Customer Service Advisor terminates the call
- The customer terminates the call
- A customer has been transferred to a Council officer or separate organisation
Storage of call recordings
Calls will be recorded and stored within the Council’s call recording system with restricted access and can only be accessed via an authorised Manager.
Recordings constitute the personal data of both the caller and the advisor. Therefore, they will be managed in such a way that the rights of data subjects (caller and advisor) can be fulfilled, and all the obligations of the data controller (Rochford District Council) are observed.
Retention of call recordings
Recordings will be stored securely and retained for a period of 90 days after which they will be automatically deleted. Any recordings which may need to be used for the purposes of longer-term investigations that have been extracted from the system, will be kept in a secure place for as long as deemed necessary by the authorising Manager.
How we inform our customers that we record calls
All customers are advised as part of the corporate welcome message that calls are recorded.
A caller may request that their call is not recorded. In this situation, the caller will normally be advised to contact Rochford Council by an alternative channel.
Requesting access or deletion of a call recording
Calls recordings are no longer available after 3 months. Customers wishing to request access to their call(s) or to have these deleted from the system, must submit their request following the Subject Access Request process.
This privacy notice was last updated in April 2025.