Blackouts Overview

Many regulations affecting contact centers, including PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and so forth, prohibit sensitive information from being retained as part of audio and screen recordings. inContact WFO provides the means to comply with these regulations in the form of blackouts.

inContact WFO uses real-time blackouts. Audio and video recording stops when a blackout start event is received and resumes when a blackout stop event is received. Sensitive information is never recorded.

Blackouts in inContact WFO are associated with the agent, not the call. For example, say that an agent answers a call, puts the call on hold, calls a supervisor, ends the supervisor call, and returns to the original call. If a blackout starts in the initial call segment and a stop event is not received until after the agent returns to the original caller, the conversation with the supervisor will be blacked out. However, if the supervisor is also recorded, that interaction will not be blacked out, even if it contains sensitive information.

Blackouts can be triggered:

  • Automatically using inContact Desktop Analytics, a chargeable feature that is required to support this functionality
  • Automatically by creating a custom integration to the Recording API
  • Manually by using the Mask feature in one of the inContact Agent applications

You can also apply blackouts using the Web Player when a previously-recorded interaction is found to contain sensitive data that was inadvertently recorded. This functionality is permission-controlled. Manual blackouts are not supported in the HTML5 Interaction Player.

The following considerations apply to blackouts:

  • Blackouts appear as silence in audio recordings, and as a black screen in screen recordings. The audio and video blackouts are synchronized.
  • Once triggered, a blackout continues until a blackout stop event is received. As a safeguard against missed stop events, a timeout can be configured to set a maximum blackout length. The default for this setting is 10 minutes.
  • Blackouts can be started or stopped during screen capture wrap time associated with a call. For more information on wrap time, see Screen capture wrap length (sec).
  • Blackout periods can be seen in the waveform display of the Web Player. There may be a very slight (less than one second) difference between the start/stop points in the display and the actual start/stop of the blackout in the recording. For more information on information available in the waveform display, see Waveform Display.
  • Screen-only recording based on timed schedules rather than call events cannot apply blackouts. Without call start/stop events from the device, inContact WFO cannot associate blackout events. However, if timed and non-timed events happen concurrently, blackouts can still be applied to the non-timed events.

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