Your call is being monitored. But why?
If you've ever called a bank or customer service center, chances are your call was monitored. STEPHANIE HOO gets the lowdown from a company that designed call-monitoring software.
Think about how many times you've been on the phone and heard the words, "This call may be monitored." A Nice machine was probably on the line.
Business is booming at Nice Systems, which sells call-monitoring technology to more than three-quarters of the Fortune 100 and a total of 23,000 customers worldwide.
Its devices record 50 million calls a day -- for banks, health care companies, mail order firms, whathaveyou. And while no one has time to listen to all those calls, Nice software can scan them for keywords and even detect a caller's emotional state -- joy, anger, frustration.
FedEx's Custom Critical service, for example, uses Nice software to notice when someone says "wow," explains Eyal Danon, Nice's vice president for global marketing.
"Whenever a customer says 'wow' on a call, that call immediately is being recorded and then it's being sent to hundreds and hundreds of call center agents so they can actually learn from the interaction and see what prompted the customer to say 'wow,'" he says.
Headquartered in Ra'anana, Israel, Nice has more than doubled its revenue in four years -- to $311 million in 2005 -- as recording calls has become commonplace.
asap asked Danon, who is based in New Jersey, to explain why call monitoring has surged to the point that any call to nearly any business is getting recorded.
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Beyond just financial institutions, why has there been an explosion in the different types of companies seeking to record all their calls?
Danon: I think it has a lot to do with competitive forces.
If you look at the wireless business, for example, it's an industry yardstick that a wireless provider is losing up to 30 percent of its customers every year. We're talking about major, major dollars here. So they need to invest in customer service. They need to be different.
A recent study ... said that 73 percent of American consumers experienced what this study termed as "customer rage" when talking to a call center, 50 percent said they'll never do business with that company again after a bad service experience, and 25 percent either yelled, raised their voice or used curse words on the phone.
Obviously the statistics are not that encouraging.
What industries in particular have more recently begun to monitor calls?
Danon: We see first and foremost anything that has to do with telecommunication. Then, hospitality and travel. ...
(Also), marketing departments are really starting to gain access to information. ... They spend billions of dollars on branding, on market awareness, on market education, and that entire investment can be obliterated by a call center agent that is screaming, yelling or maybe not even giving the service that the customer expects.
If everyone is recording phone calls, could we be reaching a point where there's no expectation of privacy on a phone call, similar to e-mail?
Danon: My personal opinion is that this is a good thing, and I'll tell you why. If you are actually calling into a call center ... up until now if the call is not being recorded, the call could've gone into the abyss. ...
Now, companies that use Nice Perform -- you know that all the calls are being recorded, all the calls are being analyzed; you know that your call is somewhere in the queue (and) the software actually listens to your voice, analyzes your emotional state. ...
So if you have a valid, legitimate concern, complaint, suggestion, you have a much better chance of being heard.
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Stephanie Hoo is asap's business writer.
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