Answering Services near you

Start with who has to agree before the microphone is switched on. Section 2511 of title 18 leaves participants free to capture conversations they are themselves taking part in: its ban on interception does not reach someone outside law enforcement who is either in the conversation or has been given permission beforehand by somebody who is, provided the recording is not being made to commit a crime or a tort. An answering service leans on exactly that, because its agent is on the line.

A number of states demand more than one voice agreeing. Under California's Penal Code section 632, intentionally putting an amplifying or recording device on a confidential communication without permission from everyone taking part is a criminal offence, and the section names the telephone expressly. It defines confidentiality by the expectations of the speakers: a conversation carried on where a party reasonably wants it kept between them qualifies, while one held somewhere they could reasonably expect to be overheard or recorded does not. Anything captured in breach of the section is inadmissible as evidence.

The practical rule that falls out of this is simple to state and easy to forget. When a call crosses state lines, the safe course is to follow the stricter of the rules that could apply, which in practice means obtaining consent from everyone on the call. That is why the recorded announcement at the start of the call exists: a clear disclosure before recording begins, followed by the caller continuing, is how most services obtain it. Ask your provider to play you their actual announcement, tell you at what point in the call it plays, and explain what happens when a caller objects.

A telephone service that takes patient calls is handling protected health information on behalf of a health care provider, and that pulls it into the HIPAA framework as a business associate rather than as an ordinary vendor.

CMS explains that HIPAA covered entities include health plans, clearinghouses and providers who submit HIPAA transactions such as claims electronically, listing doctors, clinics, psychologists, dentists, chiropractors, nursing homes and pharmacies among them. On the vendor relationship, CMS states that if a covered entity engages a business associate to help carry out its health care activities and functions, the covered entity must have a written business associate contract or other arrangement with the business associate that establishes specifically what the business associate has been engaged to do and requires the business associate to comply with HIPAA.

CMS gives examples of business associates including a third-party administrator assisting a health plan with claims processing, a consultant performing utilization reviews for a hospital, and an independent medical transcriptionist providing transcription services to a physician. An answering service taking symptom descriptions, appointment requests and callback numbers for a practice is squarely in the same territory. Ask for the signed contract before the first call is answered, and ask specifically how message content is stored, for how long, and who at the service can read it.

Inbound answering and outbound calling are legally different activities. Once a service places calls on your behalf to sell something, the Federal Trade Commission's Telemarketing Sales Rule enters the picture, and the FTC publishes detailed compliance guidance covering who must comply, the exemptions and partial exemptions, the disclosures sellers and telemarketers must make, and the prompt oral disclosures required in outbound calls.

The FTC also administers the National Do Not Call Registry provisions of that rule, with published guidance for telemarketers and sellers on how the registry provisions work, including the circumstances in which calls may still be placed. Separate federal telephone consumer protection requirements are enforced by the Federal Communications Commission and apply to automated dialling, prerecorded messages and calls to mobile numbers, so a service offering outbound campaigns should be able to explain how it addresses both regimes.

Liability does not conveniently stop at the vendor. You are the seller on whose behalf the calls are made. Before authorizing any outbound work, get in writing who maintains the do-not-call suppression list, how quickly a request to stop calling is honoured, what records are kept and for how long, and what happens if a complaint arrives.