One-party consent

One-party consent is a call recording standard under which a call may be recorded as long as one person on the call agrees to it, and the person doing the recording counts as that one. Under this standard a business can record its own customer calls without asking the caller. Federal law and most US states follow it, but the state lists change, and the rule that applies can depend on where the caller is, not only where your shop is.

Why it matters for a service company

You record calls for the same reason you write up a work order: so nobody argues later about what was said. The homeowner who insists they were told Tuesday morning, the tenant who says they never mentioned the second bathroom, the caller who claims a price was quoted. A recording settles it in thirty seconds.

The trap is geography. Your shop sits in a state with a one-party standard, so you assume you are fine. Then a caller phones from across the state line, or from a cell number with an area code that says nothing about where they are, and their state requires every participant to agree. Which law governs a call that crosses a border is not always settled, and a shop working near a state line meets this every week. The safe practice is the one that satisfies the stricter standard everywhere: say at the start of the call that it may be recorded, and let the caller decide whether to stay on. Under a one-party standard the law generally does not require that announcement, which is why many businesses skip it and why the ones near a border should not.

This is a general description, not legal advice. The lists move, exceptions exist, and you should confirm your own situation with counsel.

How DispatchLine handles it

• Whenever recording is on, the agent announces at the start of every call that it may be recorded. It does this in every state, so you are not relying on which standard applies to a given caller.
• That announcement cannot be switched off on its own. If you do not want the disclosure, you turn recording off entirely in the portal, and then no call is recorded.
• With recording on, the recording, transcript and a two-line summary land in the portal within about a minute of the call ending, beside the call’s outcome.

Our call recording notice describes what the announcement says. For the rule in every state and the District of Columbia, with the statute behind each, see call recording laws by state. For one state worked through in full, see is Texas a one-party consent state.

Related terms

• All-party consent, the stricter standard.
• TCPA, the federal rule on automated calls and texts, a separate question from recording.
• Call recordings, what the portal keeps for each call.