Easing employee fears about call recording and monitoring:

The other day we went to interview the call center manager for a major metropolitan newspaper. She turned out to be a champion for her vendor, Coordinated Systems, Inc., of East Hartford, CT, whose product, Virtual Observer 3.0, was used in their 50 person call center.

She raved about the ease of implementation of the call center recording solution, lack of technical support issues, and professionalism throughout the organization from initial sales inquiry to proposal to installation and several upgrades.

The thing that struck me the most was the internal campaign she put together to ease employees' fears about being monitored, the whole "big brother" paranoia. She threw a party that introduced Virtual Observer and demonstrated how it was going to help her team achieve world class call center status. It was a rousing success, and statistics have demonstrated great improvement.

During the event, she showed the employees that they weren't installing the agent monitoring software to catch them "playing solitaire", but instead to identify performance issues they might not even know they had.