In my new job, I have to make a lot of phone calls to insurance companies. Nearly all of them have the disclaimer “Your call may be recorded for training or quality purposes” or some such phrasing.
Has anyone worked at a business that actually records phone calls for these reasons?
I worked in a phone room taking reservations for moving trucks, all in-bound calls. Yup, they did record some calls. See, we had a sort of script to follow. There were some things we had to say and some things we couldn’t say. They recorded several of my phone calls every paycheck. If I didn’t pass their guidelines for those calls, I wouldn’t get my bonus. (Note: The bonus was most of the paycheck. Also note: I always received the bonus.) Once I even got one of the manager people call me pretending to be a customer, so she could check up on me.
So yes, they sometimes do record your call. But it’s not for you personally. It is so they can make sure that all their employees are following their guidelines. The “quality purpose”.
Of course, maybe they are recording your call for nefarious reasons. What would I know?
Well, as long as they tell you first it shouldn’t really matter on your end.
I’ve worked five different phone jobs which all have that disclaimer (although in my case it’s been “recorded or monitored”). In only one of those jobs was every call actually recorded. In the other four they were monitored by one or more training or supervising people. In one job I was one of the people who did the monitoring. Calls are monitored for quality control and training purposes just like the recording says, although the company for which I now work (local phone company) records all sales calls. The reason for the announcement is that many states require disclosure by the monitoring/recording party.
Yep, the company I work for records all calls. Saved my butt too. I got in a lenghty “discusion” with someone over a technical problem. I think that was the longest, undeserved ass chewing I have ever taken. He basically ranted and raved at me and another tech for 45 minutes. My managment pulled the recording and reviewed the whole mess. I was praised for staying cool. I’m assuming that the other guys managmet had some explaining to do.
The whole mess is somewhat of a legend at work now. I think they still have the .wav file enshrined somewhere.
I briefly worked at a call centre doing technical support and we were told that calls would randomly be recorded so that they could evaluate our work.
Every month or so, they would hand out a report on how well you did or didn’t do. So I would assume that message isn’t a lie.
I worked as a tele-relay operator. That’s the person who relays a conversation between a hearing and deaf person by typing your speech and reading the TTY. A call placed through a state relay will not contain the “may be monitored” announcement but it can be monitored. A small percentage (don’t know what it is) of calls are monitored and evaluated to keep track of the operators’ abilities. I’m not sure about peterw but our group supervisor would discuss it immediately as well as discuss our monthly average.
it does help make customers less likely to be abusive of the employee taking the call, and that is a blessing.
I’ve worked in call center operations and reporting for, um, more years than I’d like to think about right now … Most call centers record at least some calls for quality monitoring. This is for several reasons:
To back up reports of the quality monitors. Employees sometimes appeal poor reviews, and it’s useful in those cases to have a recording available.
To more efficiently staff the quality department. In a 24/7 call center, you can significantly reduce expenses for the quality department by having a computer randomly recording calls all day and all night, while the quality department staff reviews and grades the calls during business hours Monday through Friday.
To monitor the quality monitoring staff. (Yes, most call centers do this!) If quality monitoring is to be fair, it shouldn’t matter which of the quality department personnel rates the call. A random sample of the random samples can be used to verify that the monitors are being done by a consistent standard.
Very few centers will record every call. Storage space for these audio files can add up surprisingly quickly-if they do save every call, they’d need to rotate them out quite quickly or pay a lot for the extra terabytes of space they’d use. The center I currently work for records (automatically) about twenty calls per month for each person taking calls, out of the six to eight hundred they’re likely to answer/make.
Because of this, there’s rarely a concern for verifying the facts on a customer complaing-the odds are slim that the particular call was recorded. But they do check, of course …
Some industries do record all calls. Back office staff supporting dealers at merchant banks, for example, where much of the transaction is confirmed over the telephone.
I’ve worked for various companies who do record their incoming calls. This helps them monitor the customer service advisor’s call handling skills, and may be used for training purposes later. In fact, these calls are often used to train new employees and get them used to using headphones and typing/talking at the same time.
Many people think it’s a joke, their call being recorded, so continue being jerks. When a supervisor calls them back and deals with the abusive situation, they have proof. These calls also act to reduce the number of rude callers, knowing that they may be recorded calms their jets a bit.
Yep. I worked in QA at an inbound telemarketing company. We indeed recorded some calls for evaluation purposes. We in QA offered tips for handling calls more efficiently, etc., We also graded their tone, their responsiveness, and their product knowledge. And on occasion, like the time one girl hung up on ever call she got, we used the tape to fire them.
I worked in tech support for a large computer manufacturer a couple years back. After some time taking calls, I was promoted to a QA position where my job was… to listen to the recorded calls and evaluate the technician’s performance.
Not every call was recorded. There were far too many calls to do that. While I was there the recordings were never used for anything other than to evaluate the technicians. And my amusement.
Senior techs and managers had the capability to monitor calls live, something I also did as a mentor. Usually the mentor is sitting right next to the trainee with a muted headset. Sometimes the trainee listens in on the mentor for a day or two.
It didn’t happen much, but sometimes the trainee would crash and burn so badly on a real call that the mentor would drop onto the line and get the customer fixed up.
-fh
I have worked on the phones at 2 different companies, and been a supervisor at one of them as well. I can honestly say that recording calls has saved my ass in several situations when I was a supervisor. We had a problem with several reps hanging up on customers to improve their call time, so we finally just popped in tapes to record their entire day. They were fired, and tried then to sue the company for wrongful termination (or some such bull like that.) The tapes proved our case.
As a side note, many of the phone systems now have a user ability to record the call. Very useful for situations where a customer is getting irate, and we have even had bomb threats recorded.
Well, if you need yet more testimony, I worked at two different phone centers. One used randomly recorded calls to evaluate the phone staff, and the other had people monitoring live calls. So yes to both recorded and monitored.
It’s big business (selling call monitoring systems).
The systems are bundled as part of overall quality control systems, popular in call centers. You can record agents AND records thier PC steps, then review it later, just as if you were looking over the shoulder of the agent. You can build scorecards in the system and keep it all automated.