Rebecca Herold, a consultant on security and privacy, cautions that the very trait that characterizes call center agents who are effective communicators is, at the same time, a potential invitation to a security breach.

What is this trait? "They're trying so hard to make the caller happy," says Herold.

Maintaining a secure call center entails restrictions. Call centers that pay attention to security don't only maintain checkpoints to require customers to identify themselves; they also limit what call center agents can bring to the workplace.

Joel Bartow, director of fraud prevention with the Nashville-based outsourcer ClientLogic, points out that items that facilitate communication among consumers, like wireless phones equipped with cameras, are precisely the types of devices that, in a corporate setting, can make a company's customers more vulnerable to identity theft.

That's one reason Bartow recommends that call centers have lockers in which call center agents store their personal belongings.

But there's another side to security. As states such as California require companies to disclose security breaches, call centers take on greater responsibility for establishing control over how the companies they represent gather information from customers and what they do with this information. Call centers also play a larger role in implementing privacy and security policies that convey to customers how call centers use information they collect and to what extent customers can control who outside the call center gains access to this information.

As Mark Albrecht, a consumer privacy manager with HP, puts it, "The key points are notice and choice."

It is better that call centers, rather than law enforcement agencies, explain to customers why companies need the information they ask for. The best way to handle a security breach is not to have one. In the words of Amit Shankardass, ClientLogic's senior vice president of solution planning, "Prevention is better than cure."

This notion extends beyond security. Call centers are areas of vulnerability and lost opportunities as long as companies underestimate how powerful they are. The reverse is true as well.

That's why, for instance, The New York Times reported on September 28 that Dell's introduction of high-end laptops includes high-end service. Yet what differentiates the service, according to the Times, is a wait time that's around half the duration that consumers with lower-end PCs would have to spend on hold. So even in defining what high-end service is, at least in the Times' article, we're implicitly equating speed with quality.

Too often, call centers make decisions about what constitutes a reasonable hold time or speed of answer without considering the impact on customers. But, as with security and privacy, call monitoring and even routing run better when customers participate in the process. It's easy to say to a caller who is on hold that the company values his or her business; it's harder to prove it.

That's why it's important, and not only for the sake of legal compliance, to give customers a part to play in directing where their information goes and how call centers evaluate agents. By empowering customers, call centers enable their companies to take control of their own destinies, too.