Interaction Recording Retention Policies Best Practices

When setting up Quality policies that impact recorded interactions retention in Genesys Cloud, it is important to follow best practices to ensure compliance with regulations, maintain customer trust, and meet business needs. 

This article provides best practices for establishing interaction recording retention policies in Genesys Cloud. The key recommendations include:

  1. Define interaction retention needs.
  2. Set retention periods.
  3. Set up quality policies.
  4. Create evaluation and survey policies.
  5. Set up the maximum data retention period.

By following these best practices, organizations can ensure compliance with regulations, maintain customer trust, and meet business needs when implementing interaction recording retention policies in Genesys Cloud.

 

Define your interaction retention needs

Understanding the business, legal or compliance needs behind your interaction retention policies are key. Make sure that you have a clearly defined set of business use cases in writing before you start creating quality retention policies in Genesys Cloud. When drafting your use cases, consider the following recommendations: 

  • Define purpose and scope.
    • Clearly define the purpose of interaction recording and the scope of interactions to be recorded, such as quality assurance, training, dispute resolution, or regulatory compliance. 
    • Specify whether all interactions or only specific types of interactions must be recorded.
  • Understand legal and regulatory requirements.
    • Research and understand the legal and regulatory requirements related to interaction recording and retention in your industry, country, or region.
    • Be aware of data protection laws, such as GDPR, HIPAA, or other relevant regulations.
    • Understand which countries (for a global company), subsidiaries, and lines of business are impacted by regulatory requirements that need specific interaction retention policies.  
  • Define retention periods.
    • Establish clear retention periods for distinct types of interactions based on regulatory requirements and business needs.
    • Consider factors such as the nature of the interaction, industry standards, and any potential legal requirements.
    • Consider keeping the interaction recordings only as long as required by either a business need or regulatory requirement. Keeping interaction recordings longer than necessary can lead to disk space overflow charges and in some countries, it is against regulatory guidelines.  
  • Review and update retention policies regularly.
    • Review and update your interaction retention policies regularly to adapt to changes in regulations or business requirements. 

Set up quality policies

Once you have defined business use cases that describe your interaction retention needs, you must translate them into working quality policies in Genesys Cloud. 

 Quality policies enable you to create rules to trigger interaction recordings retention, screen recording, quality management evaluations, and web surveys. For more information about how quality policies work, see Quality policies overview.  

When creating recording retention quality policies, consider the following best practices: 

To retain specific conversation types for longer periods, use the best matching criteria options like Specific users, Specific queues, or Specific work teams in your retention policy.
For groups of agents within a single queue, select the queue in your storage policy instead of individual agents.
For extensive retention needs across many queues, consider creating multiple policies. Divide your queues into smaller groups (for example, 100 queues per policy) for efficient matching and easier management of policies.
For specific use cases, limit your policy selections within the Recordings section. If you have multiple requirements, such as recordings and quality evaluations, create separate policies for each. This ensures that each policy remains focused and easy to manage.
The ideal scenario would be for interactions to match a single retention quality policy, but matching policies with different retention periods can happen. 
  • Consider the following case: A user named Sam belongs to Queue A and another user Frank belongs to Queue B.
  • Policy 1 targets calls and you select Sam and Frank under Specific users in the matching criteria section and set a Delete recordings after value of 365 days.
  • Policy 2 targets calls and you select Queue A under Specific queues in the matching criteria section and set a Delete recordings after value of 730 days.
    In this scenario, both policies match Sam’s interactions. Genesys Cloud applies the longer retention period (730 days) from Policy 2.

Regularly review your policies to ensure they align with your current business cases and keep policy overlap to a minimum. 

 In scenarios where an interaction matches both with a policy that retains the recording and one where the Do not save recordings option is set, Genesys Cloud will prioritize the policy with a set recording retention and will keep the recording in storage for the number of days set in that policy. If this behavior does not suit your organization, you can use Delete even if another policy retains option that appears when you select Do not save recordings. This will override the default behavior and deletes recordings that match that policy, even if there is an overlap with another policy. 
If you want to have a policy that retains recordings for a considerably long time to take precedence over policies that have a shorter retention setting, enable the Delete Recordings After setting and set the number of days to delete to a high number (for example, 10,000 days). 
 If you want to retain all or a subset of your interactions indefinitely, you can do this by selecting the Retain recordings option under Actions to Perform, and not setting a retention setting by NOT selecting the Delete recordings after checkbox. Ensure that there is no overlap with other interaction retention policies where the Delete recordings after option is checked, and a value is set, as this other policy will take precedence and will define the purge date for the interaction.
 If you want to create recurring evaluations or generate surveys, then create separate and specific policies for these use cases. Remember you must set the Retain recordings option so you can view the Evaluations and Surveys selection options. If recordings are already targeted by another retention policy, DO NOT select the Delete recordings after option in your new evaluation/survey policy. This prevents policy retention overlap. 

You can set a maximum data retention time for your entire organization. This applies to all interaction data regardless of recording retention settings set in your quality policies. If the QM policy’s retention period exceeds your maximum data retention time, you receive a conflict notification, and you cannot set the longer period. This safeguard prevents accidental to ensure consistency between your data retention rules. For more information, see set the maximum interaction data retention time. 

     Interaction retention policy scenarios 

    Some examples that demonstrate the concepts of interaction recording quality policies and how to best translate specific business use cases to successful policies in Genesys Cloud are listed. 

    Goal Catch all inbound voice interactions policy to retain for potential quality, coaching, or legal review.
    Impacted Lines of Business All
    Media Type Calls
    Retention Period 1 year 

    In this use case, the scope of the policy is broad as it covers all recorded interactions, regardless of the line of business. It is a best practice to provide the policy with a self-explanatory name where all QM administrators will understand its purpose after reading it. It is also key to only make the matching criteria selections needed to support your specific business use case. 

    The sample policy selections can be:

    Policy Name Calls – Record all interactions and retain for 1 year
    Description Catch all inbound voice interactions policy to retain for potential quality, coaching, or legal review
    Media Type Call
    Matching Criteria selections

    Conversation directions > Inbound
    Actions to Perform selections

    Recordings > Retain recordings > Delete recordings after: 365 Days

    Goal Regulatory mandated retention of interactions where a service cancellation was requested by the customer. 
    Impacted Lines of Business Customer Experience, Customer Retention, Cancellation departments.
    Media Type All 
    Retention Period 3 years 
    Screen Recording Retention 1 year 

    The scope of this use case targets a subset of the agent population. Policies should have a manageable number of matching criteria selections. Identify which matching criteria field can be leveraged to identify the agent subset and/or the targeted interaction type. In this case, there are a few options you can use.  

    • Specific users: If the agents that handle these types of interactions are a manageable number, you can select the individual agents by name.
    • Specific work teams: You can use this option if you are set up in a way that only specific work teams defined in Genesys Cloud take this type of interaction.
    • Specific queues: It can be used if only a specific set of queues handles this type of interaction.
    • Specific wrap-up codes: If agents are trained to select a specific disposition code(s) when a cancellation is discussed by a customer, this option can be used as well. 

    The best approach is to go with the option that gives you the most accurate matching of the interactions you are targeting with the least number of criteria selections. In this case, you can opt for a combination of specifying queues and wrap-up codes.

    The sample policy selections can be:

    Policy Name All media types – Record interactions where a service cancellation was discussed and retain for 3 years and 1 year screen recording
    Description Regulatory mandated retention of interactions where a service cancellation was requested by the customer
    Media Type Call, Chat, Email, Message

    Matching Criteria selections

    Specific queues: Cancellation_Voice, Cancellation_Chat, Cancellation_Email, Cancellation_Message

    Specific wrap-up codes: Cancellation Request, Cancellation Actioned, Cancellation Avoided
    Actions to Perform selections

    Recordings > Retain recordings > Delete recordings after: 1095 Days

    Recordings > Initiate screen recording > Delete screen recording after: 365 Days

      Goal Create recurring evaluations and assign them to QA evaluators for agents that are part of BH_99_Chat, BH_99_Voice, and BH_99_Email queues.
      Impacted Lines of Business BH_99_Chat, BH_99_Voice, and BH_99_Email queues 
      Media Type Voice, Chat, Email
      Retention Period N/A 
      Screen Recording Retention N/A

      This use case’s scope is to create quality management evaluations in an automated and recurring manner.  This policy should not impact interaction retention; it should NOT have the Delete recordings after option selected. Identify which matching criteria field can be leveraged to identify the agent subset and/or the targeted interaction type.

      The sample policy selections can be:

      Policy Name QA Evaluations – BH_99 queues
      Description Create automated web surveys for customers that interacted with agents that are part of the BH_99_Chat, BH_99_Voice and BH_99_Email queues
      Media Type Call, Chat, Email
      Matching Criteria selections

      Specific queues: BH_99_Chat, BH_99_Voice, BH_99_Email
      Actions to Perform selections

      Recordings > Retain recordings

      Evaluations> Create evaluations by agents

      Goal Create a Quality policy that will automatically email web surveys to customers that were serviced by BH_99_Chat, BH_99_Voice and BH_99_Email queues.
      Impacted Lines of Business BH_99_Chat, BH_99_Voice, and BH_99_Email queues
      Media Type Voice, Chat, Email
      Retention Period N/A
      Screen Recording Retention N/A

      This use case’s scope is to generate and email web surveys in an automated manner.  This policy should not impact interaction retention; it should NOT have the Delete recordings after option selected. Identify which matching criteria field can be leveraged to identify the agent subset and/or the targeted interaction type.

      The sample policy selections can be:

      Policy Name Web Surveys – BH_99 queues 
      Description Create recurring evaluations and assign them to QA evaluators for agents that are part of the BH_99_Chat, BH_99_Voice and BH_99_Email queues
      Media Type Call, Chat, Email
      Matching Criteria selections

      Specific queues > BH_99_Chat, BH_99_Voice, BH_99_Email
      Actions to Perform selections

      Recordings > Retain recordings

      Surveys > Send web surveys

      Goal Retain voice interactions for 100 years as outlined by legal mandate. 
      Impacted Lines of Business Financial advisory department 
      Media Type Calls
      Retention Period 100 years 

      Only the financial advisory department voice interactions are impacted by this use case, but the number of queues it will target is high (1,000 queues). Since policies should have a manageable number of matching criteria selections, we will fulfill this business use case by creating multiple policies.  Each policy will have its own selection of 100 queues for the financial advisory department, for 10 interaction retention quality policies. The sample policy selections can be: 

      Policy Name Perpetual Retention Legal Department Policy 1
      Description Perpetually retain voice recordings for legal counseling department, policy 1 of 10
      Media Type Call
      Matching Criteria selections

      Specific queues> Legal_team_1, Legal_team_2, … Legal_team_400
      Actions to Perform selections

      Recordings > Retain recordings > Delete recordings after 36,500 Days