Risk Management and Compliance with Speech Analytics

In today’s contact center, risk management and compliance are not just best practices. Certain laws and governing bodies regulate how call centers handle sensitive data. Because non-compliant agents are a costly risk, both through unsatisfied customers and monetary penalties, monitoring calls is a necessity in the modern contact center.

But for contact centers that see a high volume of calls, manually reviewing calls is an impractical and imperfect way to monitor compliance. Yet failing to do so can have serious consequences. Fortunately, speech analytics technology automates call quality monitoring so that managers can monitor every call and significantly reduce risk.

Here are three ways speech analytics technology improves risk management and ensures compliance.

Contact centers must follow a strict set of compliance laws designed to protect consumers. For instance, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) protects customer credit card info when given to agents over the phone. PCI standards have specific guidelines for recorded calls. Therefore, compliance tracking is a key part of ensuring PCI-compliance for any contact center or business regularly recording phone calls.

Specific industries also have their own regulations, such as HIPAA compliance in the healthcare industry. Debt collection agencies are regulated by laws that prevent harassment. And failure to adhere to these laws can result in steep fines and/or legal action.

That’s why most contact centers require that their agents follow a specific script. This is also known as script compliance. CallFinder’s speech analytics solution offers several ways to ensure script compliance. First, automated call scoring monitors agents on whether or not they use specific phrases related to compliance. Plus, our Insights dashboard with sentiment analysis provides a visual overview of how agents are handling calls.

Regularly monitoring agent performance and script compliance with speech analytics mitigates risk by providing managers an opportunity to step in before problems turn into lawsuits. Scorecards are also useful agent training tools because they provide insights on why agents fail to follow scripts. More importantly, it eliminates manual call monitoring with automated tools and reports.

If a contact center faces legal consequences for alleged compliance failure, speech analytics can help with dispute resolution. Rather than searching through hours of recorded phone calls, managers can use speech analytics to quickly scan all contested conversations. They can then easily extract the part of the conversation in question to resolve or settle a dispute. And with searchable call transcriptions, managers can quickly locate keywords and phrases from conversations within a certain date range. Speech analytics offers so many ways to efficiently resolve issues and mitigate risk while improving the customer experience.

With contact center agents on the front lines of customer interactions, ensuring they are fully compliant is imperative. Some businesses recommend annual compliance training for agents to keep them informed. However, waiting a whole year may not be the best option if one agent’s mistake is detrimental to the company in the interim. Speech analytics shows managers right away which agents need extra compliance training and guidance, putting agents back on track before they go too far off the rails. Not only will this help agents develop stronger skills and reduce compliance risk, but it will also help contact centers avoid agent churn and the costs that go with it.

Risk management can be overwhelming, especially with such a large number of agents working from home due to COVID. CallFinder’s speech analytics solution with automated features, such as call transcripts, sentiment analysis, and agent scorecards, provides everything your contact center needs to understand what’s happening on 100% of recorded calls. Plus, our usage-based pricing and SaaS offerings make CallFinder an affordable way to manage both risk and compliance, no matter where your agents are located.

Let us show you how easy it is to manage risk with our AI-fueled speech analytics solution for SMBs and contact centers. Schedule a custom demo with a speech analytics expert today!