How the Mute Recording button works for agents

Sometimes part of a call should not be recorded, like the moment a customer reads out a card number. The Mute Recording button gives an agent a way to pause the recording for that stretch and resume it afterward, all from the agent screen. It is a manual control, so the agent decides when to mute and when to bring the recording back.

What the button does

When the feature is enabled, a MUTE RECORDING button appears on the agent screen, sitting just below the existing recording button. The Agent clicks it to mute a live recording. While muted, the system records silence or pauses the recording, so the sensitive part of the conversation never makes it into the file. Clicking the button a second time ends the mute and recording resumes as normal. It is a toggle, not a one-way switch, which means an agent can mute and unmute several times within a single call if the conversation moves in and out of sensitive territory. Because it sits right under the main recording control, agents tend to find it without much training once they know it is there.

This is the agent-driven cousin of automated approaches. It puts the judgment call in the agent's hands, which is fine for ad hoc moments but does mean someone has to remember to click. For repeatable, hands-off masking of keypad entries, DTMF muting is the better tool, and the two do not coexist on the same campaign (more on that below).

The mute lifecycle

stateDiagram-v2
  [*] --> Recording
  Recording --> Muted: Agent clicks Mute Recording
  Muted --> Recording: Agent clicks again
  Muted --> Warning: Muted over 15 minutes
  Warning --> Recording: Agent clicks again
  Recording --> [*]: Call ends

There is one hard guideline: you should not mute a recording for more than 15 minutes at a time. Mute for the card number or the sensitive exchange, then unmute. Leaving it muted for long stretches risks losing audio you actually needed and defeats the purpose of recording at all. Train agents to treat mute as a short, targeted action rather than a way to skip recording a whole segment of the call. A good habit is to mute, take the sensitive detail, read it back if needed, and unmute right away, so the muted window stays measured in seconds rather than minutes. If you find agents leaning on mute to dodge being recorded for normal conversation, that is a coaching problem, not a settings one.

How it interacts with DTMF muting

The Mute Recording button and Recording DTMF Muting do not run together. If Recording DTMF Muting is enabled on a campaign, the Mute Recordings feature is disabled automatically. That makes sense: DTMF muting already silences the recording around keypad input on its own, so there is no need for a manual button doing the same job and possibly conflicting with it. Pick one approach per Campaign based on whether you want automatic or agent-controlled muting. For a side-by-side, see DTMF muting versus the Mute Recording button.

Either way, muting is one piece of keeping recordings clean and compliant, which sits inside the broader topic of our call recording guide. To turn the button on for your agents, follow our guide to adding the Mute Recording button.

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