Am I allowed to record my customers?

Effective 21 July 2026. We will say what changed when this is revised.

Start here: we are not your lawyer

This page explains how recording works and what LeadLatch does about it. It is not legal advice, and we have deliberately not written a state-by-state table. Those tables go stale, they disagree with each other, and if we got one wrong and you relied on it, the consequence would land on you rather than on us. That is not a risk we are willing to hand you dressed up as a helpful resource.

What follows is the shape of the problem, and the tools we give you for it. For your own situation, check with someone qualified.

The shape of the rules

Recording a phone call is governed by consent, and jurisdictions broadly fall into two camps.

• One party needs to consent. You are on the call, so you are that party. No announcement is legally required.
• Everyone on the call needs to consent. Your caller has to know it is being recorded and carry on anyway, which in practice means telling them at the start.

The complication is that the two people on a call are not always in the same place, and the stricter rule tends to be the one that matters. This is exactly why a lookup table is a trap: the answer depends on facts about a specific call.

What LeadLatch actually does

The product treats the announcement as a setting rather than something you have to remember.

• It can announce recording at the start of the call, in the agent’s own voice, as part of the greeting rather than as a robotic preamble bolted on the front.
• It can be set per shop, based on where you operate: always announce, never announce, or follow the rule for your location.
• Recording can be turned off entirely. You lose the audio, you keep the transcript, and the rest of the product works exactly the same.

The default is set when your shop is configured, from where you operate. It is not left blank and it is not assumed.

Whose obligation this is

Plainly: yours. They are your customers, it is your phone line, and you decide whether calls are recorded. LeadLatch is doing it on your instruction, the same way a receptionist you employed would be.

We think that is the honest description rather than a way of shifting blame, and it is why we build the announcement in and set a sensible default rather than leaving you to remember. But the decision is yours, and so is confirming what applies where you work.

Why you would want recording on anyway

The legal question tends to crowd out the commercial one. Recording is the feature that settles arguments.

• A customer says they were quoted a different price. You can go and listen to what was actually said.
• A job went wrong and you want to know whether the address was taken down incorrectly, or given incorrectly.
• You want to know how the receptionist is handling your callers, which is hard to judge from a summary and obvious from a recording.

Every call also produces a written transcript, whether or not audio is kept, and both sit on the job rather than in a separate system you have to go and find.

What happens to the recordings

Audio is treated as short-lived and deleted on a schedule unless you save a specific call. Transcripts are kept as the durable record. Where that data lives and who can read it is on the security page, and everyone who touches it is on the subprocessors page.