The instructions below only apply to team members who are set to record. As long as at least one person from outside your company is invited to the meeting (determined based on their email address) , Gong will join it and record automatically. You’ll see Gong show up as “ YOUR COMPANY NAME] Notetaker” along with the other participants. It’s easy to add more recording users as necessary.

Step 1: Create a Gong meeting invite for any customer/prospect 

NOTE: Google Meet no longer populates automatically.

At Hack the Box, we use Google Meet for internal meetings, and are required to use the Gong meeting add-on for all external meetings with customers and prospects. 

Selecting Gong when at least one external user is invited to a call sets three things in motion:
 

1. It generates a link that everyone uses to join the call.

2. It lets Gong know to record the meeting.

3. It ensures that your company’s personalized consent page URL displays automatically as each participant joins the call. 

If we forget to use the Gong meeting link when there’s an external participant (say, we use Google Meet instead), we get a notification like the one below so we can adjust the meeting invite by adding the Gong meeting link. (Watch a brief video about Step 1.)

Step 2: The prospect/customer provides their consent

This is our personalized consent page URL, based on the settings applied by our Gong admin. Yours may look a little different.

Participants can click to join the recorded meeting, or opt out of the recording from here. From there, the Consent Page redirects them to the Google Meeting. If any of the participants opt out of recording, the meeting is not recorded by Gong.

Step 3: Enter the call

As soon as you’ve admitted every meeting participant (“ YOUR COMPANY NAME] Notetaker” included), go straight into your call.

You’ll know that Gong is recording if the “kYOUR COMPANY NAME] Notetaker” shows up as an extra participant, as in the picture below. (Sometimes we call it the Gong bot.)

What happens if a participant doesn’t provide their consent and joins the meeting after clicking “Join but don’t record”?

Don’t make assumptions about why they did this. We recommend that you try to win them over by subtly asking why they chose that option and reiterating the reasons why it’s beneficial for both them and you to record the call. 

You could say something like, “I see you chose not be recorded, and I will of course respect your wishes. The reason we record these conversations is so that I can focus on listening to you and your needs without being distracted by taking notes during our conversation. What do you think — would you be open to recording for that purpose?”

If they say no, proceed with the call. If they say yes, here’s how you bring Gong back into the conversation.

Step 4: What to do based on their response

When they join and see the “uYOUR COMPANY NAME] Notetaker”, a prospect or customer may ask what it means. (If they don’t say anything about this, continue straight into your call.) Here’s how you might respond:

“It’s the automatic notetaker we use so I can focus on listening to you and your needs and not be distracted by taking notes during our conversation. Hope that’s OK.”

You could also let them know that you’d be happy to share the recording after the call so they have a recording as well.

If they say “Yes, you can record”, continue with your call. If they say “No, I don’t want to be recorded”, go to the participants option and remove the notetaker from the call.

If they say “I don’t want to be recorded and I want you to delete everything that’s been recorded so far” go to the participants option and remove the notetaker from the call, then send an email to your Gong administrator and request that the call be deleted immediately.

If they ask what security looks like for Gong or how long Gong keeps recordings for, point them to the security page of Gong and also provide them with quick answers to common security-related questions. (Gong is SOC2 certified, its servers are in the US, and data is held for three years maximum but we can delete everything at any time, and we can share every recording with prospects/customers if they ask.)

If you want to learn more, you can request the SOC2 documentation for Gong from your CSM, but please DO NOT SHARE it externally.