Your remarks about the NICE Perform tool caught my attention, along with your concerns about privacy. My consulting work with collaborative lawyers and mediators is about emotional intelligence; not the Daniel Goleman popular press version, but the original theory of EI as an ABILITY. Some of us are born with low, some with average, and some with high levels of the ability to recognized emotions in self and others. Mayer, Salovey and Caruso developed the original tool to assess EI, the MSCEIT (Mayer Salovey Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, published by MHS in Canada, http://www.mhs.com/), which gives an objective measure of strengths and areas of potential development.

My work has shown that some professionals who think they are very effective at recognizing emotions or dissatisfaction in their customers, peers, and staff, are in fact very wrong. Lawyers and mediators, by virtue of their self-selection into these fields, often feel that they must be above average at recognizing emotions, but that is simply not the case.

Although I have no experience with the NICE Perform tool, I think that I do understand the need it addresses. For those organizations that need to improve training and development of staff, as well as to gauge customer satisfaction and improve customer care, the idea of this tool makes sense. I think training and development always makes sense. The reality is that many people do NOT do well with recognizing emotional content easily, and the technology intervention for training and development makes sense for some organizations.
For individual EI development, the MSCEIT has set the standard for many years. Perhaps the NICE Perform tool is the way to bring this level of staff development to call canters where turnover is high and customer service needs to remain a priority.

You ask two very good questions: What information, if any, will callers be given about the uses to which these recordings may be put, and what ethical obligations do organizations have to customers with respect to the uses of systems like this?

Perhaps the paranoia is misplaced here. If the NICE Perform tool is simply a technological version of a person with high EI, then the fact that these organizations are recording and storing phone interactions as a matter of course becomes moot. Emotional content is specific to a given situation, and the individual’s emotional data may disappear in the aggregation of call center data.

I encourage emotional learning, and I optimistically look forward to opportunities for individuals to develop their own EI. I hope this tool supports that aim, but I also applaud your questioning of the tools implementation.

Greg Thompson
1-888-296-6459