Imagine this scenario: an Attorney General’s office calls and informs you that your firm has been cited in a complaint, stating that you have not complied with the regulations governing your industry. If you are found guilty, the fines start at $100,000 and increment exponentially. How quickly and easily can you defend your organization and prove that your employees followed the letter of the law?
This scenario might seem extreme, but each day it becomes more common for many organizations in heavily regulated industries. For some businesses that don’t pay enough attention to regulatory guidelines, the difficulty in proving compliance often leads to a number of nuisance lawsuits, in which consumers actually threaten to lodge complaints with the hope that a firm will “pay them off” for not reporting a regulatory transgression.
More so, regulations and risk management in today’s business environment have become increasingly complex, and penalties are growing. Managing risk must therefore include the actions of your entire organization, along with the actions of any contractor on your behalf. And that requires carefully evaluating any legislation that pertains to your operation. In other words, any number of regulations can cover how you engage with your customers and prospects, as well as how you manage your customer contact records.
Yet, ultimately, the burden of proof regarding any compliance issue rests with your business.
Beyond the personal aspects of compliance challenges, your technology platform can reduce regulations complexity, and can in fact protect you from many compliance risks. One primary example is a fully-integrated bundled communications application suite for the contact center and enterprise — including applications for things like quality monitoring and interaction recording. When working with customers and prospects, such bundled solutions typically enable consumer-driven companies to provide one platform and interface across their organization and every customer touch point.
In turn for compliance purposes, a single multi-channel platform that incorporates monitoring and recording capability permits the recording of all critical interactions, regardless of media type: phone call, fax, e-mail or Web text chat. Similarly, a single database for managing multimedia recording files can speed the retrieval of interaction data related to contact with a customer or prospect, along with the names of all employees who interacted with that customer or organization. A single database for storing recording files likewise facilitates the rapid retrieval of recorded interactions in the event of an audit or nuisance lawsuit. Most of all to help train employees and agent teams for compliance, an integrated recording/ storage framework provides a powerful interface for coaching and scoring, while an integrated platform provides real-time interaction monitoring to view performance across your contact center(s) and enterprise, often including historical reports for continuous improvement.
Consider this as well. Your technology platform can protect you by ensuring a recording’s contents, especially in litigation cases where greater scrutiny requires proof of adherence (the submission of recordings!) as court evidence to substantiate overall recording security. Systems that highlight any instances of tampering with recordings favorably lend to evidence presented in a court of law.
When it comes to compliance, heavily regulated organizations must take their performance seriously to stay in business … and to give management peace of mind. The smart ones thus invest in technology that enables them to adhere to best practices in planning their compliance program, that lets them successfully execute the program once in place, and that allows them to do so in a cost-effective manner. And for those businesses that invest wisely, they create a competitive edge over similar organizations that still conduct compliance management tasks manually, or that can’t quite get a unified view of regulated activity because they still use disparate hardware systems.