Using the Touch On-Demand MS Teams client to ensure tamper-proof call recording compliance

Touch Call Recording Service integrates seamlessly with MS Teams to ensure in-app easy-to-use, granular, flexible, secure functionality to meet all your compliance obligations.

Microsoft (MS) Teams has become one of the most popular collaboration platforms for businesses today. It’s ease of use, broad range of features (such as instant messaging, file sharing, and video conferencing), ubiquity, and its ability to seamlessly integrate with Microsoft 365 (which means that users could spend the entire day in the Microsoft app without having to access any other) have meant that the number of daily active users has grown from around 270 million in 2022 to 320 million by the end of 2023^[1]. Its popularity continues to grow.

The collaboration tool is becoming near ubiquitous, and is available on the desktop, smartphones, laptops, and tablets (for both Android and iOS devices). In the third quarter of 2024 alone, there were 10 million downloads of the mobile MS Teams app in North and Latin America, and 8.6 million in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (the latter representing an increase of 750% since 2020)^[2].

MS Teams offers multiple collaboration benefits

It offers multiple beneficial business features, including group chat, real-time collaboration, instant messaging/chat, intelligent capture (for text) and content cameras, whiteboarding, audio and video conferencing, multimedia file sharing, mobility, security, seamless integration with Office 365, and much more, hence its popularity – it provides almost all collaboration features that most employees would require on a daily basis, particularly given its tight integration with Office 365.

Of course, this also means that there are stringent requirements for call and conversation recording for compliance, auditing, and training purposes. MS Teams conversations (voice or data), which may be local or remote, are likely to contain personal data, which means that regardless of the content (audio and video calls, shared files, chats, and so on) they must meet compliance obligations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Where financial services organisations are using MS Teams, they are likely to be bound by regulations such as MiFID II and Dodd-Frank.

It means that MS Teams must be fully absorbed into the organisational compliance programme and policies, and cover local and remote devices. While MS Teams does have some basic call recording features, it does not offer tamper-proof, privileged access functionality that can only be set by authorised administrators (and so can be prone to human error whereby a user is not aware of the need to record a call).

Touch Call Recording Service offers significant compliance benefits over MS Teams alone

Nor does it offer secure, geo-redundant storage, set retention and deletion times (for example, MiFID II requires that conversations leading to a financial transaction are stored for five years, while GDPR requires files to be deleted when no longer useful, such as at the end of a contract), or advanced search and retrieval capabilities.

Touch Call Recording Service offers all these capabilities, as well as notification to all participants that a call is being recorded, automatic tamper-proof recording and storage, and the flexibility to change recording policies for individuals, roles, and departments.

MS Teams does offer the ability for users to start recording conversations at the start of, or during, an interaction. However, this does not necessarily lead to compliance, as it can be prone to human error or misuse – for example, individuals may simply not be aware that a call needs to be recorded. In many cases, depending on the user’s role, voice call and digital conversations need to be automatically recorded.

Touch Call Recording Service can be seamlessly integrated with MS Teams, while allowing administrators to set tamper-proof automatic recording at a granular level. Touch’s policy-based compliance call recording capabilities mean that organisations can meet their obligations with MS Teams, locally and remotely.

For example, administrators can set policies to exclude all internal conversations, while ensuring that all customer-facing interactions are recorded and securely stored in the Touch Storage facility. It also enables whitelisting, whereby specific numbers (perhaps personal) might be excluded from recordings.

It offers multiple call recording options – which can be set only by authorised personnel – such as Always-On, On-Demand Keep (a user might realise halfway through a conversation that it needs to be recorded), or On-Demand Delete (which would be used to stop a recording part way through the call as there is no compliance requirement due to the nature of the conversation).

Touch Call Recording offers seamless MS Teams integration

Touch offers this level of seamless integration with MS Teams. For example, a recording can be initiated (or ended) using the Touch On-Demand client, which is available to authorised users from the App directory in the MS Teams client.

It means that users, or only authorised administrators, can start or stop a recording midway through a conversation, depending on whether they consider the need to record an interaction (or not). These options are embedded within the MS Teams app providing a fully integrated, and consistent experience for users, alongside all the enhanced functionality and benefits that Touch Call Recording Service brings. This includes secure storage, flexibility, tamper-proof operation, encrypted recorded files that contain metadata, advanced search and retrieval capabilities that record when, who, and what was searched, as well as policy-based compliance call recording.

It means that calls can be automatically recorded, started midway through a conversation, or ended if there is no compliance requirement. Due to Touch’s seamless integration with MS Teams, all of this can be performed from within the app, making it easy and simple to ensure compliance.

Touch also notifies all callers when a conversation is being recorded and enables on-boarding of users at a granular level, for example according to role or level of seniority. You may know that recording notifications are provided by default with MS Teams. Touch adds flexibility to these notifications, with options to customise the message displayed, or even to turn the notification off completely (some companies choose this option, because the recording of all conversations is clearly stated in their customer agreements).

The Touch MS Teams call recording service ensures compliance with the following regulations, and others:

• MiFID II (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive 2014/65/EU)
• Dodd-Frank Act
• The Personal Data Protection Act (Singapore)
• GDPR (The General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679)
• DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act)
• NIS2 Directive
• ISO 27001: Information Security Management

It provides completely transparent, easy-to-use, tamper-proof call recording from within the MS Teams app, ensuring compliance adherence.

Furthermore, it can integrate with 60 other channels, including mobile and fixed calls, chat, enterprise apps, PBX installations (on-premise and in the cloud), and vertical applications such as Bloomberg, LSEG Messenger, ICE and more to meet all your requirements. Why not discover how Touch supports the full lifecycle of multi-channel communications?

To find out more, contact us today.

^[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033742/worldwide-microsoft-teams-daily-and-monthly-users/

^[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1240026/microsoft-teams-global-downloads-app-by-region/