Handling PII Safely
Personally identifiable information arrives on calls whether you asked for it or not. Managing it is partly configuration and mostly prompt design.
What Your Agent Collects Deliberately
Names, phone numbers, service addresses, and the substance of the enquiry. This is ordinary business data, and it is collected because you instructed the agent to ask for it.
What Callers Volunteer Anyway
This is the harder category. Callers routinely offer information nobody requested:
- Health details, when explaining why they need an appointment
- Card numbers, when they assume they are paying now
- Financial circumstances, offered as context
- Details about third parties — family members, tenants, employees
All of it lands in the transcript. Some of it is sensitive under data protection law, and some of it — card data in particular — you actively do not want in your systems.
Instruct the Agent to Refuse Payment Details
This is the single most important PII instruction in your prompt. Tell the agent explicitly never to accept card numbers, and to redirect callers to a secure payment channel instead.
⚠ Note: Card data captured in a call transcript creates a PCI DSS problem you almost certainly do not want. Preventing it at the prompt level is far easier than remediating it afterwards.
Minimise What You Ask For
Every field you collect is a field you must protect, retain appropriately, and hand over on request. Review your prompt periodically and remove questions whose answers you never actually use.
💡 Tip: If you cannot name a decision that a field changes, stop collecting it. Unused personal data is pure liability.
Special Categories
Health, biometric, and similar special-category data attracts stricter requirements. Medical and dental practices in particular should assume calls will contain health information and configure retention, access, and disclosure accordingly — including confirming whether your obligations extend beyond GDPR to sector-specific rules.
Access and Audit
Access to call audio is audited, so you can establish who listened to what. Combine that with restricting dashboard access to people who genuinely need it — the most common PII exposure is not a breach, it is unnecessarily broad internal access.
Checklist
- Prompt explicitly refuses card and payment details
- Collect only fields that change a decision
- Retention windows configured per data type
- Dashboard access limited to those who need it
- Special-category data identified and handled appropriately