Reading the business press, it’s clear that the cost and breadth of regulatory compliance has increased dramatically in the last few years. And the costs aren’t just incurred in the implementation of new systems and processes. More and more companies are investing in compliance teams to address non-compliance; with rising costs being incurred monitoring and proving compliance and responding to information requests.
The impact on contact centres
While the growth of the dedicated compliance team is undoubtedly a necessity in any larger organisation, it’s clear that the weight of compliance is felt more strongly in some business departments than in others. Particularly those customer-facing departments, like the contact centre.
The challenge, which will come as no surprise to any contact centre professional, is in managing, monitoring and proving compliance in a dynamic environment where customer interactions are happening in real-time with multiple agents, across multiple channels and often multiple platforms.
The data challenge
At the best of times, getting meaningful data from across your disparate customer communications channels can be a challenge – it can be frustrating enough when attempting to mine that data for internal training and analysis, but in these instances, where there are no huge external pressures, companies have made do. Making do though, is no longer an option: The risk of non-compliance, in financial terms, as well as in terms of customer experience and brand damage can be huge.
The legacy issue
Perhaps the biggest headache caused by increased regulation is the requirement so much of it has on legacy data: Ensuring new customer interactions are compliant is one thing – and can usually be addressed relatively easily with changes to training, call scripts and active monitoring, but ensuring historic recordings fall into line with modern regulation is another thing: Finding that data, understanding the format it’s been recorded in, and then examining the kinds of data held all pose significant challenges and are often beyond the skill of in-house IT and contact centre ops staff.
So, what to do?
You might feel like ripping everything up and starting again! But realistically, that’s not an option on several levels: Firstly, the cost of replacing multiple systems with new, all-powerful platforms is likely to be prohibitive – not to mention the additional integration and training disruption that would incur, secondly, there is a real danger that, in integrating a yet another platform to the equation, you’d actually be adding to the challenge, with more legacy data sets created from the systems replaced.
A far more cost-effective approach, one which will mean little – if any – operational disruption, and one that will bring all your data together, irrespective of format, age, channel or vendor platform, into a single, consistent solution. Something like Liquid Voice, for example, goes far beyond reporting on disparate live communications channels (which it does very well by the way). It ingests data from any repository – Contact Centre, Unified Comms, even CCTV and CB radio, live and historic.
From that ingestion point it enables ops teams and contact centre managers to perform any number of powerful compliance checks – from real-time flagging of compliance issues on live calls, and stitching together timelines of interactions across multiple channels, to encryption and redaction of toxic legacy data.
