Transcripts are what you read. Recordings are what settles arguments — about what was promised, what was agreed, and whether a complaint has merit. They are also the single most sensitive artefact your calling programme produces.
Your bucket, not ours
Recordings can be written straight to your own object storage — S3 or Cloudflare R2, one active at a time. This is worth doing even when it is inconvenient, for three reasons.
- The data stays under your control. Your bucket, your region, your access policy, your lifecycle rules.
- Retention becomes yours to set. Legal say seven years, or privacy say ninety days — either way it is a policy you own rather than one you inherit.
- Leaving is possible. If you ever move platforms, the audio is already where you want it.
How playback stays private
The bucket is not public, so a stored URL will not open in a browser. Playback goes through a short-lived pre-signed link generated on request. That is deliberate: a permanent link to a recording is a permanent leak waiting to be pasted into a chat thread.
If you are integrating, fetch the signed URL when you need it rather than storing it — it is meant to expire.
Retention: pick a number and enforce it
The failure mode is not choosing badly. It is never choosing, and keeping everything forever because deleting felt risky. Five years later you are holding tens of thousands of recordings of people's voices with no policy and no idea what is in them.
Set an explicit retention window. The platform has a default; a workspace can set something stricter, and a sweep enforces it. Ninety days covers almost every dispute that will ever arise from a screening call. Longer than a year needs a specific reason you could say out loud.
Tell people
If a call is recorded, the agent should say so in the opening line. It is one clause — "this call is recorded for quality" — and it removes an entire category of problem later.
The corollary: if someone objects, that must be actionable. An agent that says a call is recorded and then cannot stop is worse than one that never mentioned it.
What to actually do with them
Most recordings are never listened to, and that is fine — their value is being available. The exception worth building a habit around: listen to five calls from every new agent's first batch, end to end. Transcripts hide tone, pacing and awkward pauses, and those are exactly what you are trying to get right early.