Originally published January 19 2005
Customer service phone monitors not necessarily on break during hold music
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Corporate phone systems warn callers that conversations may be monitored "to assure quality service," but most callers probably don't realize the monitoring doesn't stop when the hold music starts. Professional eavesdroppers who listen to the calls have plenty of stories of overheard household spats and other candid sounds. Once a recording has started, the only way a customer can stop it is to hang up.
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It is the opening line on so many phone conversations these days: This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.
The taped message is so common that many callers might assume that no one is ever listening, let alone taking notes.
Monitoring is intended to track the performance of call center operators, but the professional snoops are inadvertently monitoring callers, too.
Most callers do not realize that they may be taped even while they are on hold.
It is at these times that monitors hear husbands arguing with their wives, mothers yelling at their children, and dog owners throwing fits at disobedient pets, all when they think no one is listening.
Over all, about 2 percent of the hundreds of millions of calls made to call centers are monitored by a company's own managers or, increasingly, by third-party monitoring companies, which have come on the scene in the last couple of years.
The business of assessing the behavior of operators has taken on a new urgency in recent years.
With so many companies selling similar products at similar prices, competent and professional customer service agents are more and more the difference between a sale and a lost opportunity, a burnished brand and a tarnished one.
That reality has turned third-party call monitoring into a fast-growing industry watching over the nation's 6 million call center operators as well as hundreds of thousands offshore.
And people like Pike, who listens to about 150 calls a week, have become the equivalent of factory foremen policing America's service economy.
Some privacy advocates worry that monitors, as well as operators, can steal customer passwords and other sensitive data.
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