As if running a contact center was complex enough, many (if not most) contact centers are struggling with external and internal directives to ensure compliance with any regulations that may affect their operations. Since we live in an e-commerce world today, most call centers handle some sort of sensitive information: customer financial data, for example, or social security numbers and account information.
There are a variety of rules that govern call centers from a security perspective. There is compliance with financial regulations, privacy matters and the necessity of keeping healthcare-related information secret. Many organizations record calls, and therefore must keep those recordings, which often contain confidential information, carefully secured.
Attaining a truly secure contact center environment is challenging, particularly today, when many organizations use a cloud-based contact center solution that is networked across multiple locations, which opens up the information they guard to added risk. While they must secure this information, they are also under a mandate to supply the best possible customer support.
UK-based unified communications and contact center services company Sabio recently conducted a series of interviews with senior information security and risk management officers to determine the impact that compliance is having on the customer experience provided by call center organizations.
According to Sabio, the interviews identified a clear split between those seeing compliance as a policing role, and others who felt that it could offer a more supportive role – helping organizations to achieve their business goals while still addressing compliance requirements.
For the latter type of organization, an effective security policy is an edge in the marketplace: a way to differentiate itself from the competition. Cloud contact center solutions provider VoltDelta (News - Alert) provides a robust and secure solution with its VoltDelta Secure product. A credentialed VoltDelta security, risk and compliance (SRC) team ensures that all customer care elements are protected and available while maintaining confidentiality. Security features of the product include a "layers of defense" foundation for people, process and technology, which works to minimize risk and ensure confidentiality, data integrity and availability of systems within a VoltDelta PCI (News - Alert) compliant infrastructure for all voice and data assets.
While the cloud contact center solutions marketplace continues to grow, particularly among small to medium-sized companies, persistent fears about security weaknesses compared to premises-based products are holding the market back, particularly on an enterprise level. Sabio’s Peter Galloway, head of the company’s voice self-service practice, says for cloud-based solutions providers to succeed here, it needs to be about striking the right balance between compliance and ensuring quality customer support.
"If we're to ensure that compliance activities don't actively harm the customer experience, organizations need to shift their security focus from a 'just say no' attitude that looks to eradicate all business risk, to a more intelligent approach where security and risk Managers are working together to help the customer-focused side of the business succeed without falling foul of compliance,” said Galloway.
More successful companies in the cloud-based contact center space will find that technologies that ensure compliance aren’t a “necessary evil” and shouldn’t be considered such; they should more correctly be looked at as an opportunity to set their product apart from those of their competitors.
Edited by Blaise McNamee