Two-party consent

Two-party consent is a recording rule. It means every person on the call has to agree before you may record it, not just the side pressing record. Some places only need one-party consent, where one participant's agreement is enough, and since your own agent counts as that party, you can record freely there. A handful of US states and many countries instead require all parties to consent, which is the stricter and riskier standard to plan around.

For a call center this is straightforward to handle but easy to forget. The usual fix is a short notice at the very start of the call, often a recorded line that says "this call may be recorded for quality and training." In VICIdial you can play that as a Welcome message before the agent connects, which both informs the caller and gives you a consistent, automatic record that the notice was actually given on every call rather than relying on an agent to remember to say it.

Because your agents may dial people in many states from a single campaign, and you often will not know the caller's exact location, the safe habit is to treat every call as if two-party consent applies. That keeps you compliant in the strictest state without having to branch your script by location, which would be fragile anyway. The same logic covers Call recording in general, and it pairs naturally with sensible Recording retention so you are not holding recordings far longer than you actually need them.

If you record card numbers during a call, also use a PCI pause so the sensitive portion is never captured in the file at all. Outside the US, recording often falls under privacy laws like GDPR rather than wiretap-style rules, with its own notice and storage duties. This is a practical summary, not legal advice. Keep in mind that two-party consent is only about recording, while the TCPA governs whether you may legally make the call in the first place.