Call centres
Recording is easy. Consent is the part that has statutes attached.
Whether a call may be recorded, and who must be told, depends on where each party is. Getting it wrong is not a compliance finding. For a practical comparison point, see Monitask's workforce analytics software.
Who has to consentThe first question
Jurisdictions differ. Some require only one party to the call to know it is being recorded, which in practice means you. Others require all parties, which means the customer must be told and must agree. In the United States this varies by state, and the state that matters is generally where the other party is rather than where you are.
Several jurisdictions attach a private right of action to a breach, which means the exposure is not a regulator but the person on the other end of the call. A useful outside reference is OSHA.
This is a question for counsel covering the places your customers are. Nothing on this page is legal advice and the position changes.
What that means operationally
- An announcement configured per jurisdiction rather than globally.
- A record of which announcement played on which call.
- A route for a caller who declines, which has to exist and be usable.
- Retention limits, because a recording kept indefinitely is a growing obligation.
Agents see which of their calls were recorded and which were reviewed.
Callers hear the announcement configured for their jurisdiction, and which announcement played is recorded against the call.
Quality scoring, done in a way that survives
Scoring works when the rubric is published, the sample is known, the agent sees the score with its reasoning, and there is a route to disagree.
It fails when it is used to rank people. A scored sample becomes a target, coaching stops being coaching, and the scores improve while the calls do not.
What we will not do
Record without an announcement. Score without showing the agent. Or collect anything from an agent's machine beyond the call and its metadata.
Silent recording, hidden monitoring of an agent's screen, and any collection an agent has not been told about are not offered and will not be built.
Not advice
This page describes the shape of a legal question and states no rule. Whether a particular arrangement is lawful depends on where each party is, and the answer differs between countries and between states. Take advice for the places you operate in.
What an announcement should actually say
That the call may be recorded, why, and by whom. Short, at the start, and audible.
What it should not do is bury the statement in a menu tree, which is common and which weakens the position it was meant to establish.
Screen recording of agents
Some centres record the agent's screen alongside the call. It is sold as quality assurance and it is a substantially more intrusive arrangement, because a screen carries a great deal that the call does not.
Screen recording is not offered here. The quality purposes it is sold for are met by the call, its metadata and a published rubric, and the additional collection is not proportionate to the difference.
Adherence, and where it turns into something else
Measuring whether staffing matched forecast is workforce management and it is ordinary. Measuring an individual's minutes away from a desk, published against colleagues, is a different thing with a different effect.
The first belongs to a scheduler. The second is the practice that has produced most of the reporting about this industry, and it is worth deciding which one you are buying.