What effect does legislation, such as do not call and data protection have on the contact center industry?
Contact centers across a variety of industries are obligated to deploy policy management solutions to comply with legislation such as the Federal Trade Commission's "Do Not Call" law, Sarbanes Oxley, and HIPAA for the healthcare industry. Non-compliance can lead to heavy fines, costly legal action and significant depreciation of the company's brand value. Consequently, contact centers are under pressure to ensure that the organization is complying with regulations, that they are protecting the customer's privacy and not making false or misleading statements.
These regulations cause contact centers to re-examine their policies and procedures as well as agent training and measurement. They are also examining where and how technology can help them deal with this challenge.
What other rules have you seen in other countries and how does this differ from say the US?
In the European Union, for example, the corollary to the Do Not Call List is the Data Protection Directive, which obligates direct marketers to inform consumers that their data may be collected and used for direct marketing, and to give them the right to object to this. Some Member States have even adopted provisions which go beyond the requirements of the directive. In Italy, for example, it is forbidden to send direct mail to a consumer without their permission.
Specifically in the financial services industry, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), an independent non-governmental body and the single regulator for financial services in the UK publishes a handbook of rules and guidance. We have customers who have achieved FSA accreditation and for whom having proven compliance is a key to winning business and ensuring confidence.
When comparing with the US, we find our customers place the same significance and invest equally in extracting insight from interactions to ensure compliance, not only to avoid risk, as the severity of penalties do vary from country to country, but to offer the best possible service and protect the interests of their customers.
Do you feel the penalties for noncompliance are an effective deterrent?
While most contact centers are extremely conscientious and self-regulate quite successfully, a number of big companies such as AT&T and MCI have been fined for violating the Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law or the Telemarketer Registration Act. This has prompted other companies to re-evaluate and re-calibrate their compliance programs.
Currently, the U.S. federal fine is approximately $11,000 per violation. At the state level, the fines can be twice as much. . Organizations are realizing that not only is there a financial or legal risk at hand, yhey are realizing that compliance is tantamount to protecting brand equity as well.
Regarding existing contact center technology, how adequate do you feel this is at dealing with these legislative provisions from a compliance standpoint?
Contact center managers have realized that they need to go beyond previous-generation Quality Monitoring programs, which capture only a small number of random calls. In order to truly reduce risk and ensure compliance, forward-thinking contact centers are deploying 100% recording solutions. Recent innovations are making these solutions simpler and more economical to deploy. In addition, today's full suites of multi-dimensional speech analytic tools, such as word spotting, emotion detection and call flow analysis are helping these centers extract insight from their customer interactions. They are using this insight not only to assist with compliance but to perform precision monitoring, through which the contact center can more quickly identify the calls that require immediate action, resulting in more efficient damage control.
An end-to-end solution that performs quality monitoring and analytics on 100% of the customer interactions that come into the contact center helps managers ensure that agents are following the scripts required by law, and helps them identify coaching needs to deliver personalized, timely feedback to their agents – for performance improvement where needed.
Outsourcers are also particularly affected by legislation compliance requirements. Sometimes they have more stringent quality assurance requirements to ensure control over compliance processes and winning a client's confidence. This has become one of the key issues for winning business and maintaining clients.
By analyzing all customer interactions for any combination of words or phrases such as: "do not call" or "this is the 3rd time I asked to remove," managers can provide immediate feedback to agents on how to improve upon their interactions with customers. The risk is further decreased with the capability of alerting a supervisor to such occurrence before the issue becomes a legal action.
Without performing 100% quality monitoring along with analytics, a QA supervisor must monitor a call before it can be determined whether a violation occurred. And since QA supervisors generally monitor no more than 20% of the calls, an immediate alert to violations is critical to mitigating risk.
A customer has implemented 100% quality monitoring along with advanced speech analytics technology to track any call where a customer says: Take me off your list, do not call, stop calling, remove me from your list, Federal list, etc. This customer was alerted to an agent who made multiple attempts with customers who registered on the Do Not Call list. With the penalty at $11,000 for each call, this customer saved tens of thousands of dollar on just one agent, by pre-empting further violations.
There is another aspect to the benefits of having an end-to-end solution with the full suite of multi-dimensional analytics, namely – integrated agent coaching. Greater compliance occurs when agents are empowered with the skills and know-how to do so and are provided with the requisite knowledge in a timely and personalized fashion.
A contact center will invest several weeks of training in an agent as they join the team, on various topics – including compliance with legislation. But this training does not necessarily follow through on an ongoing basis. To make sure that agents are saying – or not saying what they are required by law, random sampling will not get the job done. On going feedback and tailoring such information to the specific performance of an individual agent is critical.
With an integrated coaching solution supervisors receive alerts on their agents' compliance with regulations and can extract insight from those interactions with customers. They then can create personalized coaching packages that provide agents with feedback and tips on their performance while the information is still relevant. This makes coaching much more effective, and better ensures that guidelines and regulations are followed, mitigating the risk of legal action.
What sort of feedback have your customers given you about this legislation?
Our customers view compliance requirements as an opportunity to differentiate themselves with better service and quality assurance. And they are using a mechanism to extract insight from interactions, anticipate potential risk and promote customer-centric initiatives. By integrating advanced speech analytics along with 100% capture and monitoring and combining that with personalized and immediate agent coaching contact centers are best positioned to mitigate risk and ensure best practices.
Over the next 5 to 10 years, where is the law headed? Do you see other major changes from a regulatory or even an enforcement standpoint and, if so, what do you predict?
Over the next 5 to 10 years the law will follow the behavior of organizations. And I certainly hope that the events like those we saw in recent years with certain companies will not occur again, and will not compel legislators to enact new regulations. I do believe that the recent events have brought many organizations to rethink and recalibrate corporate governance. And with the technology discussed today they are also better positioned to extract insight from interactions, prevent violations from occurring in the first place and promote best practices for the sake of compliance, for the sake of their customers, and for the sake of their business.
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