Call Recording, Consent and Customer Data
The moment an agent answers a phone, you are handling other people's personal information. That is not a reason to avoid it — your team already does the same thing — but it is a reason to settle four questions before the first call: whether you record, what the caller is told, what lands in the transcript, and how long you keep it.
Recording is off until you turn it on
Manta does not record by default. When you switch it on, the agent plays the notice you configure before anything is stored, and a caller who declines is served with nothing kept — the conversation continues, the booking still happens, no audio and no transcript are retained.
Consent rules vary by jurisdiction and this is not legal advice, but the shape is well known. Some places allow recording with one party's consent, which in practice means yours. Others require every party on the call to agree, which means the notice has to come first and the caller has to be able to say no. Notices are configurable per region so a multi-location business does not have to run one policy everywhere.
What actually lands in a transcript
Assume a transcript contains everything the caller said, because it does. On a normal business line that means names, phone numbers, addresses, appointment times, sometimes a symptom or a vehicle registration or a policy number.
Two categories deserve special handling:
- Payment details. Card numbers go straight to the payment processor and are never stored by us. If your workflow needs a payment on a call, use a link rather than reading digits aloud.
- Sensitive categories. Health, legal and financial detail should be redacted in transcripts where you ask for it, and in most cases these are topics that should escalate to a person anyway.
Everything else is encrypted at rest and visible only to the people you give access to.
Retention: pick a window and enforce it
The most common mistake is keeping everything forever because nobody chose a number. Recordings are useful for training an agent, settling a dispute and reviewing quality — all of which have a shelf life.
Pick a window per workspace and let it expire automatically. Thirty to ninety days covers quality review for most businesses; longer only if a regulator or an insurer requires it. You can delete a workspace's recordings and transcripts at any time, and when you do, the data is purged from our backend within minutes rather than sitting in a queue.
Who can see what
Recordings and transcripts belong to your business, not to us. Manta never sells them, never rents them, and never trains public models on them.
Inside your account, access follows the role. The person reviewing bookings does not need the collections transcripts. Every connected tool is scoped to what its role requires, and every connection is revocable from inside Manta or from the tool itself. If a customer asks you to delete their data, you can find their conversations by number and remove them.
Infrastructure detail — AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit, KMS-backed secret rotation, SOC 2 Type II underway — lives on the security page.
Frequently asked
Do I have to record calls at all?
No. Recording is off until you turn it on, and plenty of businesses run agents with transcripts only, or with neither.
What does the caller hear?
The notice you configure, before anything is stored. You control the wording, and it can differ by region.
What if a caller says no to recording?
The call continues normally and nothing is kept. Declining recording does not mean declining service.
Are card details ever stored?
No. Payment details go straight to the payment processor and are never stored by us.
Can I delete a specific customer's data?
Yes. You can find conversations by number and delete them, or clear a workspace's recordings and transcripts entirely.
Do you train models on my calls?
No. Your recordings, transcripts and customer records are never sold, rented, or used to train public models.