Opinion : ‘Calls may be recorded for training and quality purposes…’

No doubt everyone has made a phone call to a large company and at the start of the call heard the message ‘Calls may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes‘.

Many years ago phone recording technology was expensive but nowadays it’s cheap and even small businesses can afford the necessary equipment.

Of course recording a call can prove who said what and can be used to clarify the content of the call if a dispute arises. It also helps to deter abusive callers and if a customer does turn abusive then the necessary evidence can be provided to the authorities if prosecution is necessary.

But what happens if you, the customer, call a large company and the manager at the other end turns abusive? Well, that is exactly what happened to a friend of mine the other day.

He only called to find out how a job was progressing but sadly the representative of the company turned funny and then had the cheek to accuse my friend of being the one in the wrong after which the company’s representative pointed out to my friend that the call was being recorded as if to put a level of guilt onto him.

My friend is not so stupid though because he had installed an app (or appliance for those non-technical people like my good self) on his new-fangled smart phone which was also recording the call at his end.

Upon my friend revealing that he had also recorded the call the representative of the company immediately slammed the phone down. Naturally all that was left do was to ring the complaints department and take matters further.

It seems that thanks to advances in technology anyone can record calls simply by downloading an app from an app store.

The law in the UK seems to say (correct me if my understanding of the law is wrong) that calls can be be recorded without notification provided it’s for your own use but if there’s a possibility the contents of the call may be made available to a third party then generally it’s best to notify the person at the other end of the phone hence the little message at the start of calls to businesses saying that they may record your call.

When my friend hears the message ‘Calls may be recorded….‘ he simply says ‘and I will record it too!‘ thus putting his recording on the same status as the recording of the company he is calling.

Whatever will the advances in technology bring us next? I dread to think.

One thing is for sure, there is no longer a need to be intimidated by abusive and obnoxious customer service representatives sitting in the call centres of large companies as it’s not just them who may have a permanent record of what was said during a phone call.

What do you think?

*My blogs are published every Tuesday and Friday evening around 8.00pm here on the WycombeToday.com website.

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