How to Improve Your Call Center Compliance

Failing to meet regulatory requirements, industry standards, or internal processes can lead to poor customer experience (CX), negative brand perception, or even worse, severe fines, and other penalties.

No company can afford to pay that big of a price for not complying with regulations. That’s why mitigating the risk of non-compliance must be a top priority for call centers today.

But how can you keep your contact center ahead of compliance challenges? Read on to find out!

What Is Call Center Compliance?

Call center compliance means adhering to laws and regulations around the operations of a contact center, including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), data privacy laws, such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), or any industry-specific regulations.

Set by local, federal, and global regulatory bodies, call center regulations may differ from country to country, which means contact centers operating across borders must be aware of and operate in line with all of them to avoid penalties and reputational damage, as well as earn and maintain customer trust.

However, it’s not just external regulations call centers need to comply with. Each organization has its own internal policies with a set of processes and behavioral directives the company expects their employees to follow.

An effective contact center compliance program can identify gaps in both external and internal requirements and put things in motion toward taking preventive and corrective actions.

Why Is Call Center Compliance Important?

Call center regulations and guidelines change in line with the expansion of interaction channels and customer demands—such as protection of personal data, transparent data management, providing disclosures, and non-discriminatory practices.

Brands must always be on the lookout for better services across digital channels in a growing number of interactions—all that, while keeping their operational costs low. That’s why contact center compliance programs and employee training are key in navigating safely across the ever-changing compliance landscape.

Failing to meet your compliance requirements means your business may endure hefty fines or other penalties. But the damage won’t stop on the financial side.

For example, failing to protect your customer’s sensitive information (such as Personal Identifiable Information (PII)) and do right by them (such as providing disclosures and making sure they are treated equitably) puts your reputation at risk.

When trust is broken, your unhappy customers will likely leave your brand, which can quickly show up in your revenue figures.

If it’s bad enough, your unhappy customers will create a social post that will go viral, causing you potentially irreparable reputational damage. Not to mention that non-compliance can also turn your employees away from your business: no one wants to risk their own career for compliance breaches.

Long story short, it’s a dangerous downward spiral that doesn’t have an easy way out. The best way to avoid stepping on this path is prevention. With an adept compliance program in place, you can:

• Promote regulatory compliance.
• Improve CX.
• Drive customer loyalty.

How Can You Improve Call Center Compliance?

The top three ingredients to keeping your contact center ahead of regulatory challenges are

• A comprehensive compliance program.
• Continuous agent training and coaching.
• A smart monitoring solution.

But how can you implement all this without breaking the bank?

Many contact centers are only able to evaluate a small portion of their interactions due to the limitations of their manual call center monitoring processes.

Think of supervisors and quality teams spending hours after hours listening to calls and manually grading them against the scoring criteria. It’s a tedious, time-consuming and expensive task for employees, which takes their time away from more value-added work, such as agent coaching.

Plus, this partial sampling approach causes blind spots in your compliance processes. If such cases of non-compliance don’t get caught, your brand is likely to be exposed to compliance risks and penalties.

What if there was a simpler and cost-effective way of adhering to call center regulations? Below we’ve listed three key steps to improving your contact center’s compliance, while helping to minimize operational costs.

1. Build a Strong Compliance Program

Your journey toward improving call center compliance must start with putting a strong compliance program in place. A contact center compliance program is made up of your own internal processes and policies designed to improve your company’s adherence to regulations.

In other words, it’s a practical guidebook that helps you uphold your business’ good standards for lawful and ethical behavior. A well-defined compliance program can also help you maintain your brand reputation among your customers, partners and employees.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to building a compliance program, but you’ll want to consider the following details:

• Carry out an audit to assess your business’ specific risks.
• Tailor your standards based on the risks you’ve identified.
• Outline guidelines and policies and communicate them consistently across your organization.
• Set up a team for monitoring and enforcing your policies.
• Educate your employees via recurring compliance training.
• When encountering a compliance risk, take appropriate action in line with your compliance program.
• Regularly update and refine your compliance program in accordance with regulatory changes.

2. Train Your Agents Efficiently

Even the best compliance program is useless without effective accompanying training that helps your employees understand the nuts and bolts of its practical use. Your training program should set clear expectations and requirements in how agents can comply with policies and convey your company’s take on what to do if potential risks are detected.

There are various training methods to choose from, including live call training, classroom training, one-on-one sessions, e-learning, and more. You can even leverage artificial intelligence (AI) enabled coaching solutions, such as Verint Coaching Bot, which can give your agents real-time, non-disruptive assistance when they need it.

No matter which method you choose, keep in mind: the call center compliance training shouldn’t be a one-off part of your agent onboarding process. Instead, you’ll want to have recurring coaching sessions with regular refresher courses and updates, as well as timely mentoring in case risks are encountered.

As part of your call center compliance training program, you can also introduce pre-written call center scripts to help your agents compliantly navigate across customer interactions.

Today, when customers are more impatient than ever and call center agents are having a hard time gathering the right response quickly, scripts can hugely impact both the agent and the customer experience.

To learn more about call center training, read our guide here.

3. Use AI for Call Center Monitoring

Using AI technology is an effective and cost-effective alternative that can help you gain visibility into performance issues and identify compliance gaps. These smart solutions can also create real-time alerts and suggest the appropriate tools when corrective actions are needed.

For example, Verint Quality Bot‘s compliance scoring capability can evaluate up to 100% of interactions to identify compliance risks. It automatically monitors all your voice and text-based interactions and sends notifications when a potential case of non-compliance is detected.

By deploying this bot, you can significantly improve your employees’ adherence to internal workflows as well as to external regulations, such as PCI-DSS, data privacy laws, or any industry-specific regulations.

Automate Your Call Center Compliance Program with Verint Automated Quality Management Solutions

Verint Quality Bot was designed to mitigate the risk of non-compliance and automate your call center compliance program to deliver business outcomes quickly with AI-powered automation.

• Learn more about Automated Quality Management with Verint Quality Bot that can help improve call center quality here.
• If you’re interested in our full selection of Verint Specialized Bots, get to know them here.
• And if you’d like to learn more about how to improve your call center quality, read the first of our call center blog series here.