Privacy Policy

Zappledesk provides an AI receptionist that answers the phone for businesses — dental practices, clinics, salons, takeaways. This policy covers zappsdesk.com and the service behind it.

If you are a caller, the business you rang is the data controller for what you said to us. We are their processor: we handle your details on their instructions and for no purpose of our own. To see, correct or delete what is held about you, contact that business — they can do all three from their own screen. If you contact us instead, we will pass it on.

If you are a business using Zappledesk, we are the controller for your account: the name, email and password of whoever signs in, your billing details, and the configuration you enter.

• The number you called from — so a returning caller can be recognised, and so the business can ring you back.
• What you said — a transcript of the conversation, kept so the business can check what was agreed.
• Your name — asked for on a booking or an order, because a business cannot greet or ring somebody with no name on file.
• Surname and date of birth — only where the business has turned these on. Most have not. Practices that share a phone line between family members use them to tell two patients apart, which is exactly the mistake this prevents.
• Appointment and order details — what you booked or ordered, and when.
• A delivery address — for order-taking businesses only, and only for a delivery.

Calls are not recorded unless the business turns recording on. It is off by default, because recording carries consent obligations that belong to the business, not to us. A transcript is not a recording: it is text, and it is what the service needs to work.

We do not ask for card numbers, bank details or medical information on a call, and the receptionist is not built to take them.

A business can connect a Google or Microsoft calendar so the receptionist does not book somebody into a slot they are already busy in. This is optional, and nothing here happens unless a business connects one.

When a Google Calendar is connected we use it in exactly two ways.

• We read when you are busy — and only that — We ask Google's free/busy endpoint, which answers with start and end times and nothing else. We do not receive, request, store or display the title, description, location, attendees or contents of any event. We learn that somebody is occupied between two o'clock and three; we do not learn what they are doing.
• We write the appointments we take — When the receptionist books somebody in, that booking is added to the connected calendar so staff see it where they already work. We create and update our own events. We do not read, modify or delete events we did not create.

We ask for the narrowest scopes that allow this — calendar.events and calendar.readonly — and deliberately not full calendar access, which would also permit deleting the calendar itself. No receptionist needs that and we do not ask for it.

Access tokens are encrypted at rest. A business can disconnect a calendar at any time from the Calendars screen, which deletes our tokens and the cached busy times. You can also revoke our access directly at myaccount.google.com/permissions.

We do not use Google Calendar data to train, retrain or improve any machine-learning or AI model, generalised or otherwise.

Answering a phone call in real time takes several specialist services. Each receives only what it needs to do its part, and each is bound by a contract to process it on our instructions and nobody else’s.

• A telephony provider — carries the phone call and any text messages.
• A speech recognition provider — turns what the caller says into text.
• A language model provider — works out what the receptionist should say next.
• A speech synthesis provider — turns that reply back into a voice.
• Google or Microsoft — only where a business has connected a calendar, and only as described above.
• A payment provider — handles subscription billing. Card details go to them directly and never reach our servers.
• A cloud hosting provider — runs the service and the database, in the United Kingdom.
• An address lookup service — checks whether a delivery postcode is inside a shop's delivery area. Order-taking businesses only, and it receives a postcode and nothing else.

We have named the job each one does rather than the company, because which supplier we use for a given piece changes as the technology does. The current list, by name, is available to any business using Zappledesk on request — write to us and we will send it.

We do not sell personal data, and we never have. We do not use call content or calendar data to train AI models, and every provider above is contracted not to train on it either.

Calendar data is the narrowest case of all: it goes to no one. It is read from Google or Microsoft, used to decide which appointment times are free, and stored on our own systems. It is never sent to any of the other providers above.

Data is stored in the United Kingdom. Some of the processors above operate outside the UK; where they do, transfers are covered by the safeguards those contracts require.

We keep call transcripts and contact records for as long as the business using Zappledesk has an account with us, and delete them when that account closes. A business can delete an individual contact or booking at any time, and doing so removes it from our records.

We are working towards a fixed retention period after which transcripts are deleted automatically, and will say what it is here once it is in place.

• Traffic is encrypted in transit — every connection to the service uses TLS.
• Stored credentials are encrypted at rest — including calendar tokens and mail passwords.
• One business cannot see another's data — every query is scoped to a single business, enforced in the data layer rather than left to each screen to remember.
• Phone webhooks are signature-checked — so a request that only claims to have come from our telephony provider is refused.

Under UK GDPR you may ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct or delete it, object to how it is used, or complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

If you are a caller, the business you rang holds your details and can action all of this directly. If you are not sure who that is, write to us and we will find out.

If we change this policy in a way that affects what we do with your data, we will update the date at the top and tell account holders before it takes effect.

Questions, requests or complaints: info@zappsdesk.com.