How many calls do you wager go in and out of your call center every day? As an enterprise organization, hopefully your answer to that question is less of a guess and more of an exact science. No matter your specific vertical, maintaining an intimate understanding of every voice interaction between customers and agents is integral for call centers to maximize revenue, retention rates, and customer security.
A call center today measures success in its ability to provide an exceptional customer experience, or CX, to its customers. And with the amount of information received, transmitted, and stored in call center databases, they are quickly becoming aware of the possibility of data breaches. Historically, security of customer information wasn’t typically seen as a source of revenue for companies—it was primarily just an operational necessity. However, with the advent of CX as a business priority, enterprise-level organizations are starting to see data security as a way to improve brand reputation and trust, resulting in more lifetime value from customers.
Take this example: across multiple companies’ in 2018 alone, there were over two billion people affected by a barrage of security breaches which failed to protect consumer data. Data compromised included personal info, physical addresses, and even credit card information. These compromises came through multiple sources such as websites and in-store transactions, but call centers certainly topped the list of highly-susceptible targets. As a result, call centers are stuck in a cycle to continuously ensure that they are staying up to speed on the necessary policies, procedures, and checklists that they need in order to ensure they meet compliance regulations.
Businesses today walk a fine line with their call center operations. They want to be able to optimize staff productivity, but there is always the looming task of ensuring compliance and sales standards are met, all while providing an exceptional customer experience. Analyzing these calls can help you find the right balance between customer experience and operational efficiency. A commonly-used solution for call center compliance is speech analytics.
Speech analytics improves compliance by automatically monitoring every call, transcribing it into searchable data, and automatically scoring calls. Let’s explore some of the ways that a speech analytics API like VoiceBase can help manage ever-changing compliance standards while also amplifying your ability to provide exceptional customer experience to your callers.
What is Compliance Monitoring?
In response to the potential of hackers stealing consumer data out of call centers, several organizations including the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau laid out a set of standards designed to defend consumer data that goes in and out of call centers. Meeting the requirements around call authentication and protecting sensitive customer information is paramount to mitigating risks that can result in costly security breaches or compromised data.
Compliance monitoring is the process of adhering to these regulations through the use of a series of data checkpoints. These regulations not only protect your customers and business from fraud scams, but it keeps you up to speed on policies and procedures that support your operational and business initiatives. It’s not a sexy topic, but it is a set of standards that both safeguards the business and its consumers from looming data breaches.
Any business operating a call center should already be acutely aware of their duty of compliance monitoring, but there’s just one problem: it requires an inordinate amount of time and money to do. That’s why more and more companies are turning to speech analytics vendors to help automate this important yet burdensome task.
Eliminate Risk and Increase Productivity Through Automation of Agent QM and Call Scoring
With a speech-to-text solution like VoiceBase, gone are the days of manually sorting through hundreds of thousands of calls to identify sensitive information. Now with speech analytics and speech-to-text capabilities, you are able to automatically score and analyze 100% of calls for any compliance violations without lifting a finger.
Agent Quality Monitoring
As much time and effort you put into training your call center agents, they are still humans, and humans are inherently error-prone. This means that with every call an agent takes, there is a notable level of risk for him or her to say the wrong thing or to unknowingly collect unnecessary or sensitive information.
With near real-time call analytics from VoiceBase, you can tag violations within recordings and transcripts, which in turn allows managers to immediately navigate to the occurrence of the violation. You can then use these insights to easily and quickly refine agent scripts to better adhere to compliance policies.
In short, VoiceBase allows you to focus on your agents, not wasting your valuable time listening to and scoring calls manually.
Call Scoring
VoiceBase enables you to score every single call that comes into call center with ease. By using custom vocabulary, call categorization, and custom predictive models, VoiceBase can automate your call classification efforts for easy analysis. Without automated scoring, call centers are not only increasing chances of letting sensitive information fall through the cracks, they are also missing key insights that lend to the opportunity to up-sell or pre-churn signs that would allow them to prevent account cancellations.
So what can you detect with auto call scoring?
- Agent script adherence helps ensure that your agents are not deviating from pre-determined, compliance-ready verbiage.
- Keyword searching allows you to seek out certain words or phrases such profanity, competitor mentions, and overall positive or negative topics.
- Redaction of sensitive information is perhaps one of the most pivotal tools in the VoiceBase API arsenal. VoiceBase is PCI DSS Level 1 certified—we are compliant with the standards set forth to guarantee all sensitive information is redacted. That means that through the use of the VoiceBase API, you can automatically redact personal information such as social security and credit card numbers without ever having to worry.
Detecting this information within calls provides management with a full understanding of both the agents and the callers’ behavior. All of this without having to manually listen to each call a manager can easily detect common trends and KPIs.
What Does All This Mean For CX?
Customer experience is defined as the full encapsulation of a person’s interaction with a brand from awareness to the sales process to the actual sale and beyond. Now more than ever, companies are identifying the need to provide an experience and not just a product for their customers. In fact, EConsultancy’s Digital Marketing Trends found that companies identified CX as the most exciting service to provide to customers in 2019. When a customer does business with you, they want the entire experience to be edifying, seamless, and supportive for the entire lifetime of interaction with your brand.
So, how on earth does maintaining an efficient, foolproof compliance monitoring system play into your ability to provide amazing CX to your customers?
There are multiple components that come into play when concocting the perfect CX. However, one of the most important aspects to building that end-to-end experience is developing a trustworthy name for your company. If a person is able to put their faith in your ability to protect their sensitive information, chances are they are more likely to keep doing business with you as well as refer you to family, friends, and colleagues.
Speech analytics products like VoiceBase creates that bridge of trust between you and your customer. By mining calls for keywords, phrases and objection handling; managers are equipped to define actionable patterns and best practices of their top reps. This aids in agent conditioning and replication of behavior training across the entire call center, creating an overall better customer experience for your customers.
Since there are so many rules and regulations for call centers to abide by, it is crucial that they have established a system to track, record, and assure compliance all the time with every call.
With speech analytics solutions call centers can assure that their agents are adhering to best practices and monitor agent behavior on calls. It is crucial to make sure your enterprise contact center is compliant and up to date with regulations and security, if not only for data safety but to fortify that trust and ease-of-mind that CX methodologies have come to define.
