Part of my job is to monitor phone calls in an inbound call centre. All I’m looking for when I listen in on a call is how well the agent is doing – are the questions being answered correctly, is the agent being polite, that kind of thing.
If a client says at any time during the phone call that they do not want the call to be monitored, of course I stop listening immediately. It happens a couple of times a day, and I don’t really get it.
Why wouldn’t someone want their call monitored? Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable knowing that if you are told the wrong thing, there’s a chance someone who knows more will correct it? That if an agent is rude to you, that there’s someone who caught them?
Some people don’t really trust the companies that they have to deal with. Does your company have any problems continuing the call if the customer insists on recording the call?
However innocent and upright your intentions and actions, it’s still to some degree an invasion of privacy. Whether while chatting with a friend in store, or while doing business with a company represenative, knowing that a third party who is not normally part of the conversation is listening intently can be unnerving. Some people are more sensitive to this than others. They aren’t thinking about your job, they’re thinking about their perception of being overheard.
If you’re embarrassed or feel dumb about the problem you’re calling for help with, you may not want someone else listening to you pour out whatever silly thing you did. You may even feel that what you did is so silly that the employee helping you can’t help but laugh, and you don’t want them to be penalized for laughing at your problem. (This is especially true if, like a lot of call monitoring, the person listening is likely to pick up in the middle of the call.)
I think people have an odd expectation of privacy on the phone, even when they’re talking to someone they know is one of hundreds of reps in a call center. My previous job did have the “your call may be monitored for training purposes” disclaimer in the initial recorded greeting, but I still got some rather strange reactions from callers if I mentioned I had a trainee sitting next to me.
What seemed to unnerve them was just the idea that someone was sitting next to me listening to our conversation-- that we weren’t really as “alone on the phone” as it seemed. It didn’t matter that the person was listening in order to learn to do the job, or that if they called next week they might even talk to that trainee themselves. Just that it was someone they weren’t able to hear the voice of, or even know the name of, seemed to make them feel funny.
Some people also think of monitering as always including recording and some people really don’t want a recording of themselves, I’m not sure why. Back in my younger days I was working on the phones and a woman got rather irate with me and started demanding that we erase our recording of her. Nothing I said would convince her that her call was not tape recorded, although I did advise her that a supervisor may be listening to the call although not recording it.
Having an extra person overhearing you is just creepy.
I always demand they don’t do that.
It’s so intrusive. What if you were just at some other place like a dry cleaner’s counter, talking to a clerk, and someone was behind her with a clibpard and tape recorder. You’d resent it!
Really? If I’m at the dry cleaners, talking to a clerk, and their manager is there watching to ensure I am treated properly and that my clothing is taken care of correctly, I’d appreciate it, actually.
Honestly, I don’t find anything creepy about it at all.
Hasn’t everyone had at least once where you had such-an-such a conversation, and the person was undoubtedly rude, then claimed they never said such a thing?
When someone is monitoring…if it’s a company I trust already, I feel they are there for me.
But sometimes, if I don’t trust the company and am merely going through them because I have to (Niagara Mohawk, anyone?) then I feel they are only there to cover my ass and don’t really care much about me.
I strongly object to the practice of monitoring/recording phone calls. Well, from the viewpoint of an employee that works at a company whose calls are monitored and recorded, anyway. Whatever happened to treating employees as trusted professionals? I think that my company enabled call monitoring to give supervisors something to do with their free time.
At my company we don’t even talk to customers at all on the phone-just other employees and calls are still recorded and evaluated. 6 calls are evaluated each month and they affect our annual performance review.
From a customer’s viewpoint, if there were on option on the automated menu to disable the call monitoring, I guess I would disable it. I don’t really like the idea that someone else may be listening in. I don’t like security cameras either.
Every employee needs to have their performance reviewed, right? Companies have many ways of doing so, and call monitoring is an easy way to get an objective look at typical behavior. How do you know that Agent John is doing an outstanding job, while his neighbor Agent Andy is treating customers with disrespect? It’s very easy, as a manager, to have a skewed view and treat certain random occasions you happened to see as important, when they may have not been typical behavior. If you monitor random calls regularly, it’s fair to everybody as long as the standards are both well-known and fairly applied.
Also, this gives the company (or a client that’s purchasing call center services) control on what was said and how things were done. I’ve listened to thousands of calls and some people will say totally off the cuff and inappropriate things, and honestly don’t mean to do anything wrong (in some cases). Heck, I hear at least a call or two each week that makes me wince. A lot of call center agents aren’t very experienced at phone etiquette and don’t have a good knowledge of business professionalism yet as it’s typically someplace you work at the start of your career.
Many front-line customer interactions are evaluated in some way. Retail stores have mystery shopping, for example.
I can pretty well say that I doubt extremely this was the case.
As a call centre employee, I hate having my calls recorded and I breathe a sigh of relief when my 5 calls for the month are over. But I can see the necessity of it, because there’s a whole bunch of my cow-orkers who are complete and utter snapperheads- who only got the job by being able to spin a massive line of bullshit, not by having any actual technical skill- and the monitoring means there’s more chance they’ll get caught out for being completely useless and removed from the phones.
But when I have to call into a call centre for whatever reason (and I try to avoid that as much as possible) I’ll tell them I don’t want my call monitored. Not because I don’t want to have someone listening to me, or because I’m paranoid, but because I know what it’s like to have the fear of someone listening over my shoulder for me to slip up, and I like giving the minions a break, if only for a two minute call.
The problem isn’t the monitoring as much as it is the stupid monitoring forms most companies use for call center reps.
A rep will lose points for not using the customer’s name in the call. The rep doesn’t have the option to use their best judgement that this customer is one who is a bit distant and isn’t likely to want a stranger calling them by their first name.
The rep may be REQUIRED to upsell on every call. Again, this would apply even if the customer is rushed and calling from a cell phone which is breaking up.
The rep may be required tor repeat every bit of information including…“Last name SMITH that is S M I T H…” Again, this is annoying.
About 3 insurance plans ago, the prescription drug provider for my employer was not doing a great job of customer service. The solution to that was to have supervisors from the drug provider AND from my employer occasionally monitor calls. Since I worked in HR (although outside the benefits area, but people move around a lot) the representatives who monitored those calls were essentially my coworkers. I would always ask to disable monitoring on those calls. In part, this was because my coworkers had no need to know about my prescriptions. Also, the prescription reps were so bad that it was occasionally necessary to rip them a new one, and I didn’t want to do that in front of a coworker, either.