Do Your Call and Contact Recordings Have An 'Ethical Wall'?
June 18, 2015
By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor
Many companies today record their customer calls in order to evaluate agents, avoid “he said, she said” scenarios and to train new workers. Companies that engage in call monitoring for training purposes often record only a small portion of calls. Other companies, however, are moving to a 100 percent call recording model. It allows them to protect themselves better legally, and they can also use speech recognition and analytics to spot trends that might be otherwise invisible to human call evaluators.
For other organizations, most notably those in financial services, healthcare and other regulated industries, recording calls is a matter of following the law. These organizations must record and keep their calls archived for a period of several years, and large fines can result if they fail to do so. While cloud-based solutions and off-site data storage has made the prospect easier – most organizations aren’t equipped to store what could be millions of calls on their premises – the multichannel nature of customer support today has made things more challenging. Other communications, such as emails, texts, chat and even mobile interactions must also be stored to remain in compliance.
Not any call recording solution will do: companies today must retain what’s known as “ethical wall,” according to ISI Telemanagement Inc. This mandates that companies record, save, verify, audit, control, secure, and maintain the integrity of the voice, IM and video recordings captured while doing business in a way that ensures that the recordings are intact and haven’t been tampered with, or that they are accessible only to those individuals in a company who are permitted to use them. (Think of lawyers within the same firm representing clients with conflicting interests.) Strict adherences to company policies and trade regulations are a requirement for avoiding costly penalties and fines. Solutions such as that offered by ISI (News - Alert) provide companies that need to record contacts and maintain them with “ethical wall” with a unified platform compliance solution that allows them to successfully manage these multiple modalities and mitigate risk.
Companies using solutions that record and monitor in a way that adheres to regulations also have the flexibility to avoid conflicts of interest, adhere to workplace policies and avoid damaging data leakage. Selective session blocking between users and groups can ensure that only those workers who require access to certain recorded transactions are able to reach them, and that communications with sensitive information being released to a wider audience can be redacted in part, if necessary. Companies using a solution that features Ethical Wall capabilities can, for example, separate advisory and brokering departments in a financial services firm, protect a company from insider trading liabilities and ensure that the organization remains compliant with all rules dictated by Sarbanes-Oxley.
It’s simply not enough today to capture all interactions with customers. Companies must do it in a way that prevents those interactions from being misused. As some unfortunately organizations have found out, ignorance is not a defense against legal repercussions from non-compliance.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi