What Routing Initiated Recording does and when to enable it

Recording usually kicks off from the agent screen the moment a call lands there. Routing Initiated Recording moves that trigger earlier in the chain. When it is enabled, the call routing script for outbound auto-dial calls starts the agent recording instead of waiting for the agent screen to do it. The default is N for disabled, so this is something you turn on deliberately.

What it actually changes

On a normal outbound auto-dial call, the customer is answered, the call is routed to an Agent, and the agent screen begins recording. With Routing Initiated Recording on, the routing script itself triggers the recording during that routing step, slightly ahead of the agent screen. The practical effect is that recording starts a touch earlier in the call path, which can matter when you want to capture the very front of the conversation as the call connects. It is a small shift in where the recording trigger lives, but on a busy floor that consistency adds up across thousands of calls.

The requirements

flowchart TD
  A[Outbound auto dial call answered] --> B{Recording mode}
  B -->|ONDEMAND or NEVER| C[Routing Initiated does nothing]
  B -->|ALLCALLS or ALLFORCE| D{Call type}
  D -->|Auto dial| E[Routing script starts recording]
  D -->|Manual dial| F{Recording delay}
  F -->|0| E
  F -->|Above 0| G[Will not trigger]

This option only works if recording is set to ALLCALLS or ALLFORCE. It does nothing under ONDEMAND, where the agent decides per call, because there is no blanket rule for the routing script to act on. So before you enable it, confirm the Campaign is in one of those two recording modes. If you are not sure which mode you want, our writeup on campaign recording modes walks through the differences.

There is a second condition for manual dialed calls. Routing Initiated Recording will only work on agent manual dialed calls if the recording delay is also set to 0. Any delay above zero and the routing trigger will not fire for those manual calls. If you rely on a recording delay to skip very short calls, you are trading that behavior away for manual dials when you enable this. Decide which you care about more, because you cannot have both a non-zero recording delay and routing-initiated recording working together on manual dials. Auto-dial calls are not affected by that delay condition, so a mixed campaign that does both will behave differently depending on how each call was placed, which is worth flagging to your supervisors before you flip the switch.

When to turn it on

Enable it when you are running ALLCALLS or ALLFORCE and you want recording driven from the routing layer rather than the agent screen, for instance when your routing uses a custom path and you want the recording to follow it consistently. If you run Predictive dialing at scale, having the routing script own the recording trigger keeps behavior uniform across every connected call. Leave it off if you are on ONDEMAND or if your manual-dial recording delay is doing important work for you.

It pairs naturally with forced recording. If you have already committed to capturing every call, see how ALLFORCE recording works, and the full setup is laid out in our call recording guide.

Getting these interlocking settings right is fiddly on a box you manage yourself. If you would rather have recording behave predictably from day one, check our pricing and we will configure it with you.