Your call may be recorded for quality and training purposes

I’ll bet you can’t count the times you’ve heard, “Your call may be recorded for quality and training purposes.” Why would any company lead a call with this statement? Leading with this statement is like ensuring dissatisfaction or abruptly hanging up when people do not provide expected responses. It’s leading with a disclaimer that tells the customer they may be talking to a person in training. Which means they’re probably not prepared to satisfy.

Customer service is there to satisfy, calm, or fix. Their sole purpose is to keep customers and manifest happiness.

‘Your call may be recorded for quality and training purposes’ tells people that their privacy may be compromised, the person they are about to talk with may not be providing the best quality, and they may be ill-equipped to make you happy.

Perhaps the most interesting part of call recording is that it imposes a double-standard on the customers. While the company retains the recordings to hold customers accountable, those recordings are not available to customers to hold the company accountable. How does this satisfy?

Call recording also tells me that a company is cheap and doesn’t understand people. Rather than hire someone to teach them about human nature or really study it themselves, they are using customers. Like we’re all in a big happy test tube.

How about a different lead-in? Such as: ‘Please press 1 if it is okay for us to record your call. Please press 2 if you would prefer to not have your call recorded.’ Or better yet, ‘We record calls because we are cheap, lazy, and not accountable. If you would like to be respected, please call one of our competitors.’ That would be more honest.

Kelly Hobkirk - teaching marketers how to harness strategy, goals, reality, and purpose to connect and do better work.

 

Kelly Hobkirk has been helping companies succeed in creative ways for nearly 25 years. His work has been featured in Time Magazine, and books by Rockport and Rotovision. Get exclusive articles when you sign up for his monthly newsletter.

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