Call Accounting Featured Article

Compliance, Privacy, and Data Collection, Search & Storage

  By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC

We live in a day and age in which people are becoming more acutely aware of the need to protect their data. Interestingly, some of the regulations established to address such concerns are actually prompting businesses to invest in solutions that allow for more data collection and information search capabilities, and sometimes even require individuals to cede their personal information. And in some cases organizations can employ those solutions both to meet compliance requirements and to advance their other business efforts.

The well-known Do Not Call Registry in the U.S. calls for people to visit a web portal to enter their phone numbers. The idea is that organizations that call those numbers with consumers’ express permission will be out of compliance and could face fines. As we are all aware by now, the Do Not Call effort has had less than stellar results.

Laws and regulations like the Dodd-Frank Act, HIPPA, PCI (News - Alert)-DSS, and Sarbanes-Oxley – all of which have contact center components – also aim to protect privacy.

More recently the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation. GDPR calls for any business that touches the personal data of EU residents to deliver or delete that data if a customer puts in a request of that nature. Something called MiFID II also recently went into effect in the EU. MiFID II, which next month marks its one-year anniversary, requires EU financial services organizations to record all conversations related to financial transactions. This applies to both personal- and company-owned mobile devices. And it requires those affected to hold on to those records for five years.

Such rules and regulations have led business operations like contact centers to erect processes and implement systems to track and record their interactions with customers. And speech analytics can be part of those efforts. Speech analytics can allow organizations to automatically transcribe and score calls to make them more searchable and valuable.

“The most common use cases for transcribing calls or wanting to accurately transcribe calls are for staff training improvements, customer service improvements and compliance, and the top three AI use cases seen to be enhanced by voice data are cited as customer experiences such as sentiment analysis, security and fraud protection, and predictive analytics to influence strategy, reduce OpEx and increase efficiency,” says Red Box (News - Alert). “This shows the clear need for holistic and accurately transcribed data sets and for high-quality audio capture in the creation of ‘AI Ready’ data sets.”

Analyst Jon Arnold (News - Alert), who will be moderating The Future of Work Expo next month in Fort Lauderdale, added: “Voice data is currently locked in a complex mix of cloud and on-premise telecom systems and disconnected from the services which can maximize its value. Insight lives across an organization and high quality and complete structured and unstructured voice data sets are crucial to enabling businesses to benefit from technological advances, such as Artificial Intelligence and sentiment analysis. These are the true value-add for today's enterprise.”