We were the customer first.

I used to run a company that took five thousand calls a week. We sold by phone. A lot of those calls ended with a customer reading out a card number, digit by digit.

Zendesk Talk recorded every one of them. Thousands of card numbers were sitting in our call archive, next to the names, addresses, and expiration dates that make them usable.

I woke up at night more than once in a cold sweat about it. My worry wasn't hackers, it was simpler than that. Any rep could open a recording, listen, and write a number down. One bad choice by one person, and we're the company in the news story, with a state attorney general asking questions.

So I went shopping. Every solution I looked at was expensive, or error prone, or came with a two year contract and pricing I couldn't explain to my own team.

The standard advice was to train agents to pause the recorder before the customer reads their card. Here's the thing about that. Anything that relies on a busy person remembering will fail. In controlled studies, busy people forgot an intended action 25% of the time after just a five-second delay, and predicted they'd forget 2% of the time. Nobody feels it coming.

I wasn't going to bet the company on memory.

The wish list was short.

• Turn something on and stop worrying.
• No new steps for agents, they have enough to remember already.
• Recordings come back clean on their own, and the original with the card number in it gets deleted.
• A price that fits in one sentence, charged only for the people who take calls.
• No contract. Software should have to keep earning its spot every month.

CallTutor was the one thing that matched the list, so I became a customer. It did what it said: every recording came back clean a few minutes after hangup, and my agents never changed a thing. The worry I'd been carrying ended.

I liked it so much that I bought the company. Then I rebuilt the whole service from scratch so I could stand behind every piece of it.

Most questions people ask us have an answer that traces back to that history.

• Agents don't have to do anything different. They take the call like normal. Minutes after hangup, the redacted recording and transcript post to the ticket. Memory is not part of the plan, because memory was the problem in the first place.
• The original doesn't stick around. Redacted audio and transcript post to your ticket, the original recording is deleted from Zendesk, and transcripts are cleared from our database. A clean archive was the whole point.
• Transcripts stay useful. The redaction knows a card number from an order number. Card numbers, CVV codes, and expiration dates get bleeped. Order numbers, phone numbers, and zip codes stay readable, so transcripts still work for training and quality checks. We can redact health information too if you ask.
• $9 per Talk agent per month. No contract. A Talk agent is a person who takes phone calls in Zendesk. Five people on the phones is $45 a month, and support-only agents are free. It's the price I wished someone had offered me. Billing runs through the Zendesk Marketplace. You can restrict the app to your Talk group so Zendesk bills only those agents, and we'll walk you through that if you ask. Leaving is uninstalling a Zendesk app.
• Old calls too. Email support@calltutor.com with the ticket numbers and we'll run your back catalog. One limit comes from Zendesk, not us: once Zendesk closes a ticket it's locked, and nothing can be added to it, including a transcript.
• A person answers. Redaction is English-only, and once in a while it bleeps an extra number. If a call ever looks wrong, email support@calltutor.com and we dig into it, usually the same business day. I'd rather tell you the limits here than have you find them later.

CallTutor has processed more than 2 million calls with no reported missed card data. About 10,000 hours of audio come through every month, for around 40 companies, including Carnegie Hall, Selkirk, and Moultrie.

The cold sweats are gone. That's the product.

- Doug