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Call Recording in Call centers

Many call centre firms record conversations between agents and customers. This has become a widespread practice within the call centre industry to ensure quality control. Call recording can help analyze the performance of individual agents, groups or even an entire call centre, enabling to spot trends and weaknesses and respond proactively towards them. Call centre managers often use call recording to enhance agent productivity. Focused training and development is the single most effective method to increase both call quality and productivity, and call recording and scoring is the single most effective way to deliver it. Agents are often trained by making them listen to recorded calls. Call recording is sometimes even used in case of customer disputes, to prove or disprove any communication that took place.

Recorded calls are stored in a digital format either on a standalone computer or on dedicated servers. It is not possible to record and store each and every call made in a call centre for the sheer volume of storage space it requires. For this reason call recording is done by quality assurance agents either randomly or in a fixed monthly schedule of recording calls of an agent. Call recording can either be done onsite by the call center’s quality assurance department or it could be offsite, outsourced to a third party quality control vendor.

There have been a few complaints in the past few years by customers over invasion of privacy by call recording. Recording calls involves collection of personal information and many customers are not comfortable with that. Federal laws and many state laws require that at least one person on a call gives their consent before the call can be recorded. In some states, both parties on the call must give consent before it can be legally recorded. Many call centers do their part in obtaining the caller's consent by including a prerecorded message at the start of incoming calls that states that the call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes. All call centers communicate to their agents that any of the calls could be recorded for quality assurance. Thus both the parties concerned are aware of the recording.

However, in this case, if a call centre uses the recordings for a purpose other than of quality assurance it becomes a legal issue.