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This Call May Be Monitored ...
Iphtashu Fitz writes "We've all heard it. The recorded message when you call technical support or your bank or credit card company: 'This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.' But has it ever occurred to you that people actually DO listen in? Approximately 2 percent of these calls are listened to either live or after the fact, and it may come as a surprise that Big Brother even listens to what you may say while you are on hold. The people who monitor these calls routinely hear arguments between spouses or parents and children, people yelling at pets, and all sorts of other domestic disputes."
Just pretend talking to your friend while on hold, discussing the option to switch to another competitor "if this call doesn't solve my problems", that might get you something.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
What part of "This call may be monitored" did you not understand?
You'd think that if 2% of the calls are monitored for quality control purposes... then QC would actually improve in the long run. In my experience, phone support/service is generally about the same (or less) quality as it was many years ago.
I always loved telling people they were on hold and listening to them for a while... People seem to lose all sense of reality when you tell them they are on hold.. Some of the names you get called are quite.... entertaining.
"Carpe Noctem"
This call may be monitored or recorded? Ok thanks, I'll just hit record now then.. thank you for your permission.
No todo lo que es oro brilla
I assume if I tell their on-hold-music-machine "I'm recording your call too" that would be OK.
I don't get it.
My rights: I'm told that the call may be monitored. I can hang up if I object. No 'rights' are being violated.
Online: You mean "on the phone", right?
Seriously, where's the BIG BROTHER story here? Slow news day?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
And yeah, they can hear you on hold, so do be careful.
Dammit... that was my first date this millenium, too. No wonder she told me off when I called!
I kept a young, hopeful MCI rep tied up for forty five minutes during a routine "would you like to try our internet service" call. Playing the role of a slightly mentally retarded teenager, I actually had the guy explaining to me that I could check my email when the computer wasn't connected, and that their install CD would work in my blueberry IMAC even though there were four other discs jammed in it already. The person monitoring the call broke in and asked the young man to "please terminate the call." He called me back when he realized what was going on and gave me a royal cussing, also informing me that he'd switched my long distance service to MCI's most expensive plan. I stayed in character the whole time, actually putting the phone down to go take a leak and returning to his angry yammering. When I returned, I explained to him (in my best "retard voice") that I'd set a pick lock on the line and he was full of crap. I got a call back the next day from the manager (who had broken into the previous call) and he explained that the kid had been disciplined. Whatever that meant. He probably got a few paid vacation days and an MCI tote bag.
I hope someone was listening the time I administered the Turing test to a female synthetic-voice / voice-recognition self-help system, in the form of an attempt to solicit phone sex... (Telus customer assistance robot: 1-800-400-2598)
As a former phone customer service person, and phone tech support person, Id like to let everyone know to STFU when you are placed on hold. If you don't hear hold music, (and sometimes even if you do) the phone tech has put you on mute while while he/she curses the series of life events that led him/her to have to *try* to help you (and/or just researches the issue). The phone tech can hear what you are saying, and one thing we are not fond of is people talking thrash about the tech support. This may lead to you not being helped out.
A general rule of thumb is that the nicer and more reasonable you are on the phone, the better the quality of support you will receive, and the faster you will be off the phone with your problem solved. Its fucked, but thats reality. Also, most call logging systems have a section for "Technician comments", which can be anything from "customer follows directions well" to "customer is an asshole". This can influence greatly the way you are treated by future technicians. Sometimes I've escalated calls for a callback (in 1-2 days for one company I worked at) just because I won't deal with a rude fuck. At one company, this was unoffical policy.
And, as always, my question is this: how is it that this is related to my rights online when I call up a remote location, with no idea what's on the other end, and my call is recorded when I speak INTO THE PHONE *after* I'm told it might be recorded?
Perhaps if you RTFA you'll see that the issues are more complex than this. For me, two parts of the article that disturbed me are
1) That the monitoring itself even captures what you say while on hold. Despite the 'please hold' and you listen to music, they are recording what you say. That was a reminder for me. I kinda thought the monitoring would be done while you were communicating with someone, not while listening to muzak. I wonder how many times they have heard me say 'If you are so concerned about your customer, don't make me wait on hold' or perhaps 'Thanks for my patience? Do I have a f'in choice?'
2) The monitoring itself is being outsource. Third parties, sometimes in other countries, are listening in when the rep asks you for you account number, mothers maiden name, etc. Thats a privacy issue about how my data is protected/not protected.
I think you are focusing on the wrong parts of the article.
As far as how does this relate to online? Hmm, its a stretch, more about affects of technology. TFA does mention VOIP.
Actually you don't have to, at least not in Pennsylvania. If both parties know the call may be recorded it's perfectly legal to record it. Of course they never expect *you* to record the call.
I bought a handy device to do just that, and it's already paid for itself: I foolishly signed up with what turned out to be a fly-by-night phone company. Our phone lines would cut out every morning for between 5 and 20 minutes - no outgoing calls, and incoming calls would receive a message saying "could not be completed as dialed."
I reported the problem to them many times, and they could never fix it, so I tried to cancel the service. They refused, claiming the contract hadn't been fulfilled. So I switched to the old phone company and all was fine with the service.
A couple months later I get a letter from a lawyer demanding $1200 for the cancelled contract. I played the totally legal recordings (after all, they said "this call may be monitored or recorded") back of me reporting the shitty service to their techs, and voila, the lawyer went away!
This obviously puts the company in a sticky situation since they're most likely NOT in the business of being a match-making service, and this kind of behavior is almost certainly NOT allowed on "company time."
So is it wrong for a waitress to spend a little time flirting with a customer? Or agreeing to go out on a date with him?
Or worse: how many times they caught you humming along to the muzak. Next time they'll sick the RIAA onto you for this illegal public performance of copyrighted work!
If I hadn't already posted I would have modded up that up because it's absolutley correct.
I have worked in various kinds of tech support for 6 years and it's just simple human nature; if people are nice to you - polite and helpful you are much more likely to be the same with them.
Whenever anyone in the office got a call from a particulary abusive, annoying or arrogant customer they would make sure everyone got the name so regular callers did get very definite widespread reputations.
People who were constantly annoying got a pretty awful service from us since no one saw any reason to help those people whilst people who were polite and helpful would have everyone going out of their way to be helpful to them - they could even have the odd tantrum but we'd understand because usually they would apologise afterwards - unlike the assholes.
Just remember it costs you nothing to be polite to people and you will always be able to find out a lot more about what is happening with your query if you are polite than if you spend your time cursing the person you are talking to, their company and life in general.
About five years ago when I got my Dell laptop, I noticed that if I blew in to the phone it seemed that my hold time was greatly shortened. Blowing in the phone seemed to overdrive the audio into anoying distortion. I came to the conclusion that either a) someone is hearing this, or b) they have some sort of system that tries to gage how upset a person is by autio levels on hold (possibly more complex even, as I tried cursing at teh hold music several times with mixed results). :-)
This wasn't a once or twice thing, I probably called tech support 100 times while my laptop was under warranty for 4 years. I was very rough on it and finagled a warranty repair for everything I did to it. I ended up with almost 10K in repairs on a $3500 laptop, and at one point got a whole new laptop for a fried mobo with cracked plastic
All these techniques stopped working when dell switched to Indian support near the end of my warranty. Last thing I called in for was more cracked plastic... the nice, yet clueless Indian man suggested I check my hard drive for errors and possibly have it replaced... That said, no more Dells for me!
"It seems that when people become desperate they consult the gods, and when the gods become desperate they tell lies." -
I tried, but my number is always busy.
paintball