The contact center is one of the most important resources in any business environment. It’s not just where agents connect with consumers to make sales or address concerns. It’s also the center of your “customer experience” strategy. Without an effective contact center, companies can’t deliver the service, support, and guidance their consumers demand.
Unfortunately, the contact center is also home to huge volumes of sensitive data. While this data can be valuable for guiding company initiatives and strategies, it’s also subject to strict regulatory guidelines. Every contact center must ensure they’re not only collecting the right data in the contact center but storing and securing it effectively.
Unfortunately, around 96% of contact center leaders say they struggle to maintain compliance in a world where customer communications are growing more complex.
Today, we’re looking at some of the top contact center compliance challenges businesses face, and how you can overcome them.
The Top 5 Contact Center Compliance Challenges
Achieving true compliance in the contact center requires companies to understand which guidelines apply to their operations, and how they can follow them effectively. There’s more to compliance than simply implementing the right strategies for data encryption and fraud detection.
In today’s world, compliance in the contact center is becoming increasingly difficult, as communication trends change, and regulations evolve. Here are just some of the biggest challenges businesses are facing today.
1. Comprehensive Communications Capture
In the past, collecting contact center information for compliance purposes was often a straightforward process. Companies usually only had to worry about storing email information and call data. Now, in the omnichannel world, there are numerous different environments that need to be monitored.
When using comprehensive CCaaS platforms like RingCentral, organizations need to think about how they’re collecting data from not just calls, but video conferencing sessions, messaging discussions, and mobile interactions. Using different tools for archiving and collection on all channels increases a company’s chances of data silos and inaccuracies.
That’s why it’s so important for organizations to have a comprehensive solution in place, capable of capturing all call and screen recordings, chat messages, and more in one place. With an integrated solution, businesses can ensure they’re capturing contextual, rich, and accurate data, no matter which touchpoints they’re using to connect with customers.
2. Guarding Against Data Loss
Collecting data effectively is just one part of the puzzle for companies in the modern contact center landscape. Once data is captured, it needs to be carefully stored and managed, to ensure vital information isn’t lost. Many regulatory guidelines require companies to implement careful strategies for protecting customer data and mitigating potential breaches.
Unfortunately, protecting against data loss, in an environment where companies are now producing huge volumes of data every day, can be complex. Fortunately, a compliance solution integrated into your contact center platform can help.
Innovative systems, like Theta Lake’s compliance service for RingCentral, leverage AI and machine learning to analyze video and audio content against dozens of built-in policies.
It’s specifically designed to detect and redact potential data issues and make certain no valuable information goes missing. There’s even support for custom detections to help companies ensure they’re storing the right data, while keeping sensitive data protected according to privacy guidelines.
3. Compliant Archiving
To adhere to contact center compliance guidelines, companies need to ensure they’re not only collecting the right data but removing any sensitive information from their records. For instance, PCI-DSS guidelines prohibit contact centers from capturing sensitive credit card information.
Additionally, GDPR guidelines require companies to remove data from their ecosystem whenever they’re requested to do so by a customer. This means businesses need to invest in an archiving solution that makes it easy to not only secure the right information but manage it correctly.
A comprehensive archive connector for your contact center can capture all your contact center content, and seamlessly integrate with your archive or record keeping system. It allows you to develop workflows and processes to redact information when necessary.
Plus, it ensures you can search for and rapidly find information with time stamps to help you jump quickly to specific moments in a call or conversation.
4. Risk Detection and Monitoring
Even before hybrid and remote work became the new norm, many companies struggled to monitor the various conversations occurring in the contact center consistently. Now that employees are more distributed, and consumers are using a wider range of communication tools, monitoring, and detecting risk rapidly is becoming more complex.
Fortunately, advanced compliance solutions do make it easier to stay on top of potential risks. These solutions can include automated and AI-driven systems, to help you track risks and issues in real-time. With a comprehensive compliance solution, companies can automatically “score” conversations based on their risk level and send alerts to crucial team members when necessary.
Businesses can create their own compliance policies and create customizable workflows for every user activity they want to monitor. Plus, they can leverage artificial intelligence to automatically analyze content, place legal holds, and reduce the strain on their IT teams.
5. Employee Training and Management
Finally, while there are various risks companies need to overcome in the modern contact center, the threat of employee error is still one of the most significant. Agents must behave ethically when interacting with customers and must follow specific guidelines when recording conversations and discussing sensitive information.
Unfortunately, keeping track of all your employees and their adherence to compliance rules can be extremely complicated in the hybrid world of work. Compliance monitoring tools can help with this, notifying employees when team members are engaging in risky behaviors automatically so they can instantly jump in and help mitigate the problem.
Some solutions for compliance even allow supervisors and managers to deliver real-time coaching and training to employees, reducing the risk of non-compliance. What’s more, with a comprehensive compliance tool, companies can set their own access control policies to determine which team members should be permitted to access certain files and documents.
Overcoming Compliance Issues in the Contact Center
The contact center might be one of the most valuable resources businesses have, but it’s also an environment subject to a variety of compliance risks and threats. To ensure they’re adhering to the latest regulations and guidelines, business leaders need to ensure they have the right systems in place.
A comprehensive compliance platform, integrated with your contact center software, will ensure you can implement the content capture, archiving, and retention solutions you need to protect your business, customers, and your reputation.
Garth Landers, Director of Product Marketing at Theta Lake, says “According to research from firms like Metrigy, contact center as a service solution are becoming a crucial decision point for standardizing on UC platform investments.
Theta Lake takes the same approach to safeguarding CCaaS as we do for UC platforms, by ensuring that all forms of interaction can be captured seamlessly, remediating risk and providing compliant recordkeeping.”
