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
Blackouts remove and / or block out sensitive information that may be part of a call, such as credit card numbers or other personal information. PCI-DSS, HIPAA, etc. prohibit contact centers from retaining this kind of information in their audio and screen recordings..
In the NICE Uptivity documentation, blackouts are sometimes referred to as Real-Time Blackouts to distinguish from any other previously-supported method. With Real-Time Blackouts, 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.
Associations
By default, blackouts in Uptivity are associated with the agentThe person or people taking the inbound calls.. 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.
Considerations
The following considerations apply to Real-Time 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).
A blackout can be triggered 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).
