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. NICE Uptivity provides the means to comply with these regulations in the form of blackouts.
NICE Uptivity supports two types of blackouts:
- Real-time blackouts — In this method, recording of audio and video stops when a blackout start event is received and resumes when a blackout stop event is received. Sensitive information is never recorded. Not all recording integrations support real-time blackouts; ask your Uptivity representative for more information.
- Standard blackouts — In this method, audio and video is suppressed at the time of recording and reviewers cannot see or hear the information. When the recording is processed by the Transcoder, the blacked-out content is deleted and replaced with blank audio and video. Thus, sensitive information is present in the recording for a limited period of time. This method is not recommended when PCI compliance is a concern.
You can decide whether to use real-time blackouts or standard blackouts based on the needs of the organization.
By default, blackouts in Uptivity are associated with the agent. 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.
When a blackout is associated with the call instead of the agent, the blackout ends when the call ends. This can create a security issue if the agent still has sensitive information on their screen as they begin taking a new call.
For most organizations, agent-associated blackouts are the best solution. However, can be configured to use call-associated blackouts.
Both call-associated and agent-associated blackouts can be implemented as standard or as real-time.
The following considerations apply to both real-time and standard 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. For more information on configuring this timeout, contact Uptivity Support.
- 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, Uptivity cannot associate blackout events. However, if timed and non-timed events happen concurrently, blackouts can still be applied to the non-timed events.
Once the type of blackout is configured, a blackout can be triggered:
- Manually using the Start Blackout and Stop Blackout options from the NICE Uptivity On-Demand client menu. This allows an agent to apply blackouts during a call. This functionality is permission-controlled.
- Automatically using NICE Uptivity Desktop Analytics or a similar third-party application or custom API integration. In this scenario, a scripted call is sent based on your desired trigger event(s).
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. The HTML5 Interaction Player does not support manual blackouts.