How to mute credit card entry from your recordings

You can let a customer type a card number on their keypad mid-call and keep those tones out of the saved recording. The mechanism is tone-triggered muting: the system listens for keypad tones while a recording is running and blanks the audio for a set window once it hears the first one. Here is how to set it up so card entry is silent in the file every time.

Step 1: turn on detection at the system level

Nothing else works until tone detection is on platform-wide. Enable the Allow Recording DTMF Detection system setting first. This is the master switch that lets the system notice keypad tones during a recording at all. Without it, your campaign value is ignored, and the DTMF tones go straight into the file.

Step 2: set the mute window on the campaign

Open the campaign that handles your payment calls and find Recording DTMF Muting. The value is a number of seconds. Zero means off. A non-zero number is how long the recording stays muted after the first keypad tone is detected while recording is active. For card entry, give the customer enough room: the card number, the expiry, and the security code together usually fit in fifteen to twenty seconds. The timer starts at the first tone, so err on the generous side rather than cutting them off.

This is the campaign-level form of DTMF muting, and it covers calls placed from that campaign only. Be aware of one side effect: switching this on for a campaign automatically disables the agent-clicked Mute Recording button for that campaign, because the two muting models are not meant to run side by side. Plan for this so you are not chasing a button that has quietly stopped appearing on the agent screen.

Step 3: cover your inbound calls

flowchart TD
  A[Enable system DTMF detection] --> B[Set campaign mute seconds]
  B --> C{Inbound payment calls too}
  C -->|Yes| D[Enable on each In-Group]
  C -->|No| E[Campaign only is enough]
  D --> F[Card tones muted both directions]
  E --> F

The campaign value does not reach calls that arrive through an In-Group. If customers pay on inbound calls, enable the feature on each Ingroup that takes those calls as well. Miss this and your outbound recordings are clean while your inbound ones still carry the tones, which is the kind of gap an audit finds first.

Step 4: test before you trust it

Place a test call, key a fake card number during the recording, then play the file back. You should hear normal audio, a stretch of silence where the digits were entered, then audio again. If the tones are still in the file, the system detection switch is off or the campaign value is still zero. Also confirm the silence window is long enough: if it cuts back to audio while you are still typing, raise the second count. Run the test on both an outbound and an inbound call if you handle payments in both directions, since the inbound legs depend on the In-Group setting rather than the campaign. Getting this right keeps payment audio out of your stored files and out of PCI pause scope, which is exactly where you want it.

If you would rather not hand-build an agent-driven workflow at all, the Mute Recording button is the agent-driven alternative, though for cards the automatic tone-triggered route is safer. For the full recording picture, see our call recording guide, and check our pricing when you want this running without the setup work.