Today’s contact center not only has to strive to provide its clients superior service and a satisfying experience, it must do so in an environment that is becoming increasingly subject to external oversight and regulations. Many businesses, particularly those in the financial and insurance industries, have been dealing with regulatory issues for several years, but as the number and scope of regulations increase they affect a broader range of industry types.
Given the increasing complexity and extent of regulations it comes as no surprise that the many organizations are putting a higher focus on ensuring compliance and reducing potential liability. Along with this increased focus come additional costs to the organization. However, the risks associated with non-compliance can result in even more substantial costs to the business.
Costs of non-compliance can occur as direct monetary ones such as fines and settlements or indirectly through damage to a business’ public image and reputation resulting in lost revenue. Consumer surveys reveal that many people lose respect and/or trust for businesses after a security breach.
The message is clear. Businesses must proactively reduce the potential for violations and misconduct, especially those that are systemic in nature.
The contact center has been involved in compliance management for some time by monitoring agent performance and recording conversations with customers. The primary focus of these efforts have been twofold; ensuring that agents are following defined procedures and providing proof that can be used to avoid potential liabilities.
The role of the contact center in compliance management is likely to increase in significance as compliance initiatives become a higher priority across all industries. Leading contact centers will use these compliance mandates as an opportunity to identify and transform business areas that need improvement. Rather than identifying areas in need of quick fixes, they will focus on streamlining business processes, making them more effective, reducing exposure and decreasing overall expense.
Emerging trends driven by compliance management initiatives that affect recording and quality management activities in the contact center include:
• Moving from partial recording for quality management purposes to 100% recording for compliance management, especially in industries outside the financial and investment markets as they become more mindful of compliance regulations and requirements.
• Increasing the retention time periods for captured interactions beyond minimum requirements, in some cases retaining recordings forever in anticipation of possible future regulatory changes.
• Focusing on performance management as a formal methodology to ensure that root causes of problems are identified, addressed and corrected, instead of occurring over and over.
• Insisting on more thorough documentation and reporting on compliance efforts in order to show that non-complying performance is not systematic within the business, but rather a result of isolated individual failures.
• Capturing the full scope of interactions with voice and screen recording to ensure information provided to the customer is accurate and what the agent enters into the system is correct.
Organizations are looking for ways to help offset the increases in compliance-related costs. One promising means involves the use of interaction analytics solutions to mine valuable business information from the captured recordings. Interaction analytics combines multiple technologies for speech recognition, transcription and statistical processing into a powerful, easy to use solution that offers significant operational benefits to the enterprise.
Using this solution businesses are able to uncover answers to operational questions that have been very hard to obtain in the past. Information contained in recorded interactions is unstructured in nature making it difficult for traditional transaction-based analytics solutions to process. Applying interaction analytics to this unstructured information business gain key insights into customer behavior and loyalty, competitive activities, marketing effectiveness and other important factors.
These insights and understandings are then put to use in making better decisions and implementing more effective business processes. The resulting operational savings and performance improvements can significantly offset additional compliance-related investments.