Keeping your customers' data safe when you use AI, and what to ask any vendor

When a person answers your phone, the customer's information stays in one head and maybe one notebook. When software answers, that information is written down, stored somewhere, and handled by companies you have never met. That is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to ask questions before you sign, and to expect straight answers.

Here are the questions we think matter, in the order a careful owner would ask them. Under each one is our own answer, taken from our published security overview and privacy policy, so you can hold us to it and compare anyone else against it.

1. What do you store about my callers?

Ask for a list, not a reassurance. The list should include what is kept from a call, how long, and where.

Vestibo: text transcripts of conversations are stored, along with the details a caller gives to book or to be called back. Full audio of live calls is not recorded by default. Where a caller leaves a message on the voicemail path, that recording is held by our telephony provider, encrypted, and deleted after ninety days.

2. Is the data encrypted, and where are the keys?

"Encrypted" on its own means little. Ask two follow-ups: in transit and at rest, and who holds the keys.

Vestibo: every connection uses TLS 1.2 or newer. The database and its backups are encrypted at rest at the storage layer, with keys managed in the cloud provider's key management service. Any account credentials you connect, such as a calendar login, are additionally encrypted at the application layer before they are saved, so a copy of the database alone does not yield usable secrets.

3. Is my data used to train anything?

This is the question owners most often forget, and the one whose answer is most often buried. Ask it plainly: will my customers' conversations be used to train your models, or anyone else's?

Vestibo: no. We do not use customer data, conversation transcripts or voice recordings to train any third-party foundation model, and we do not sell personal information. That is a commitment in our privacy policy, not a setting.

4. Who else touches it?

Any software company uses other companies: hosting, telephony, the AI itself. You are entitled to know who. Ask for the list and ask how you will hear about changes.

Vestibo: the current list is published at /legal/subprocessors. We give thirty days' notice before adding one. If you want to follow changes, email privacy@vestibo.com and we will tell you when the list moves.

5. Can I see everything it has said on my behalf?

A receptionist you cannot audit is a liability. You should be able to read every conversation after the fact.

Vestibo: every conversation is in your inbox with a transcript. Owners and admins also have a read-only activity log in Settings showing what changed in the account and who changed it.

6. Can I get my data out, and can I have it deleted?

Both, not one or the other. Ask how, and ask what survives deletion.

Vestibo: you can request a self-service export of your account's data. You can also ask us to erase it. We hold one exception, and we would rather name it than have you discover it: the tamper-evident security log, which records who did what in the account and which we cannot edit, is kept for a fixed retention period. Everything else is erased.

7. Are you certified for my industry?

If you run a medical, dental or legal practice, this is the first question, and it is the one where vendors are most tempted to blur the answer. Insist on a plain yes or no, in writing.

Vestibo: the self-serve product is not offered as a HIPAA service and we do not claim compliance for it. Regulated practices are a conversation with us about a separate tier, not something you can sign up for online. If a vendor tells you they are "HIPAA ready" or "HIPAA friendly", ask what document backs that phrase, because usually there is no such document.

8. What can the software be talked into?

Callers will try things: asking for another customer's appointment, asking the desk to read back a phone number, asking it to change a booking that is not theirs. Ask the vendor how the receptionist behaves under that kind of pressure.

Vestibo: the desk works from your business's information only. It does not take card numbers over the phone, it declines legal and medical questions, and it hands off to a person when a request falls outside its brief. Rehearse these scenarios yourself before going live; the rehearsal step exists for this.

9. What happens when something goes wrong?

Every company will have a bad day. Ask how they find out, how you find out, and whether outside researchers have a way to report a problem.

Vestibo: we publish a vulnerability disclosure policy at /legal/vulnerability-disclosure so security researchers can report issues to us directly. Our security overview at /legal/security has a section on incident response; read it before you sign, and ask any other vendor for theirs.

Things you can do on your side

The vendor is half of it. A few habits cost nothing:

• Give the desk only what it needs. It needs your hours, services and policies. It does not need your customer list to answer the phone.
• Review what it learned. If you pointed it at your website, read what it took from there. Remove anything a caller has no business hearing.
• Keep the handoff phone current. A caller who needs a person and reaches a disconnected number has a worse experience than one who reached voicemail.
• Use the export. Take a copy of your data once in a while. It is yours.
• Read the transcripts in the first weeks. Not only to check accuracy. To check that nothing is being said that you would not say yourself.

The honest summary

No vendor, including us, can promise that nothing will ever go wrong. What a good vendor can do is tell you exactly what is stored, who touches it, what it will never be used for, and how to get it back or get rid of it. If you cannot get those answers in writing, the answer is no.

Our published versions are at /legal/security and /legal/privacy. If anything in them is unclear, email privacy@vestibo.com and a person will answer.