TMCnews Featured Article

Employers who hire people to work at call centers who use predictive dialers on a daily basis, want to be sure that their employees are doing an effective job. It is crucial to the call center industry to have the correct tools to properly train your staff, ensuring that customer service stays at the highest level possible.

New technologies are introduced everyday making it easier for employers to fully evaluate how their employees are performing on telephones, computer terminals, through electronic means and voice mail, and when employees are using the Internet.

This type of monitoring is for the most part not regulated by law. Hence, unless there is a company policy in place that lets employees know exactly what type of information their employers have access to, an employer or call center manager has the ability and right to listen, watch and read any type of communication that take place in the workplace.

According to recent surveys, many employers closely monitor their employee’s activities. A new study shown on SpitFire’s Call Monitoring Page states, "New regulations governing the storage and management of electronic data that might be needed in federal court actions have an increasing number of organizations turning to outside counsel for help.”

Issues that include discovering, producing and admitting "electronically stored information" including (ESI (News - Alert) Electronic Share Information) includes email, instant messaging chats, Microsoft Office files, accounting databases, CAD/CAM files, websites, and any other electronically stored information like sound files collected during a predictive dialer conversation.

Eighty percent of employers let employees know beforehand that they will be monitoring their practices. In fact, a majority of call centers give you the tag (News - Alert) line of “This call maybe monitored for quality assurance” on most inbound calls right away. This prerecorded message has become so common, in many cases callers think that no one is ever listening. However, this is not always the case as sometimes companies take notes from random calls, in order to increase the level of customer satisfaction.

 Any business or call center can utilize the function of call monitoring, but all Federal and State laws should be diligently analyzed in order to prevent future litigation.