What is kept, and how to hold on to it

Every conversation is written down so you can read it back, measure quality and answer your customers. Two settings decide what that record contains and how long it survives, and they live together under Visitors & privacy.

Keep conversations word for word, or replace personal details#

The transcript privacy setting has three positions:

• Keep everything word for word. The record is exactly what was said, names and numbers included. This is what every project does until you change it.
• Replace personal details as conversations are stored. Names, phone numbers, email addresses and tax, insurance or bank identifiers are swapped for placeholders on the way into the record, so the stored conversation never contains them. The live conversation is untouched: the caller hears the same agent and gets the same answers.
• Keep the record, replace personal details for quality work. The record stays word for word, and the placeholders are applied only where conversations are read for quality scoring and testing, so that work never sees who the person was.

How far a change reaches#

This is the part worth reading twice, and the card tells you the answer for whichever setting you have:

Replacing as conversations are stored applies from now on. It rewrites the text on the way into the record, so it cannot reach back over conversations you already have. And there is no key that turns a placeholder back into what the person said, so for the conversations it does rewrite, the change is permanent.

Replacing for quality work is the other way round. The record keeps the real words and the placeholders are applied each time a conversation is read that way, so it covers your whole history the moment you set it, and switching it off brings the original view straight back.

Placeholders are a real reduction, not a guarantee. The detector is tuned for Greek and English and catches the common shapes; an unusual spelling or a detail said in an unusual way can survive it. Treat a replaced transcript as harder to identify, not as anonymous.

Freeze a project's records: legal hold#

When something is being investigated, audited or disputed, you need to be sure nothing disappears while it is being looked at. The legal hold switch does that for the whole project.

Placing it needs a reason, which is recorded with it. While it stands:

• Nothing can be deleted, including by an erasure request from the person the record is about.
• Nothing expires. Records are normally removed automatically once they reach the retention age; a hold stops that clock, so what you are holding is still there when somebody asks for it. This is the half most people expect and most systems miss.
• Conversations recorded after the hold are covered too. You do not have to place it again for new traffic.
• Erasure requests that arrive during the hold are not refused and not lost. They wait, and they carry on when the hold is released.

When you place a hold on a project with a lot of history, taking the clock off the records that already exist can take more than one press. The card says so and offers Continue. An unfinished sweep is not a failed hold: deletion is blocked across the project from the moment you place it, whatever the sweep has got to.

Releasing it#

Releasing lets deletion and expiry resume, and it restarts any erasure request that was waiting. The card names the requests it put back in the queue, because releasing a hold restarts somebody's legal deadline and you should see whose.

A record that was held past its own retention age is not destroyed the moment you release it. Releasing gives it back its own clock with a guaranteed minimum left to run, so there is always a window in which to export anything the matter still needs. Ask your administrator how long that window is for your account.

What a hold does not extend#

A hold covers the call record: the conversation, its recording and its delivery history. It does not lengthen the shorter clocks that some derived material keeps of its own accord, such as a chat handover episode or scored answers used for quality reporting. Those are protected from deletion while the hold stands, but they still expire on their own schedule. If a matter needs them, export them early.

Who can do what#

Transcript privacy is yours to set. The legal hold is placed and released by your Voiceland administrator, because a switch that stops a court-ordered record being erased must not be something the account under investigation can lift for itself.