Automating Contact Centers To Support Regulatory Compliance Efforts
By Paul Logan, Contact Solutions
Corporate America is facing ever increasing controls over how it deals
with customers and manages business. Wide-sweeping regulations have been
passed in the last decade that affect nearly all businesses. If you are
managing an organization that provides inbound or outbound telemarketing,
you are painfully aware of the additional efforts required to ensure your
company is complying with the appropriate regulations.
Telecommunications service providers have been operating under the
watchful eye of the FCC and the anti-slamming regulations described in the
Telecommunications Act for several years. These same requirements will now
have a bigger impact on wireless providers as customers can switch
carriers more easily as a result of the Wireless Number Portability
legislation that took effect in 2003. The telecommunications marketplace,
however, is not the only one that has been affected by increased
regulatory pressures. Healthcare companies must adhere to controls laid
out in the Health Insurance Privacy Assurance Act (HIPAA). HIPAA defines
requirements for the disclosure of privacy practices for client
information as well as the methods used to market to patients. The
Graham-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB) applies similar regulations to accounting,
banking, insurance and brokerage firms.
Based on more recent legislation, compliance is no longer
industry-specific. With the passage of the Federal Trade Commission's
Telemarketing Sales Rule, telemarketing organizations in all industries must
keep a watchful eye over how and when they contact potential customers. The
focus on customer contact and information management has also been raised to
the highest level of the corporate ladder with the advent of the Patriot Act
and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Now, senior executives are focused on compliance
issues regarding security and corporate governance which require tight
management of the use and retention of personal data such as customer
records.
When considered as a whole, the dizzying array of potential compliance
pitfalls can be daunting. The impact of a mismanaged telemarketing sales
call or an improperly filed customer record can be disastrous. How can
anyone hope to comply with all the regulations when there are potentially
millions of customer interactions on a daily basis? One way to minimize the
risk is to automate as much of your customer contact and data management
activities as possible. Interactive voice recognition and speech recognition
technologies have evolved dramatically over the past few years and the
resulting advances can be used effectively to address many compliance
issues.
Third-Party Verification Is Tailor-made For Automation
Many telecommunications service providers now ensure they are complying
with anti-slamming regulation through automated means. Third-party
verification (TPV) is an ideal candidate for automation for a number of
reasons. By the very nature of the regulations, TPV mandates that a consumer
is asked a consistent set of questions to independently verify that he or
she is agreeing to change services. The customer experience with a
live-agent call center can vary substantially. However, the consumer must
know what he or she just agreed to buy. Anything less opens a window for
dispute, which can be very costly for the service provider. Automation
solves this problem with a high degree of accuracy by posing these sometimes
very specific and sometimes complex legal questions in a consistent fashion.
Automated TPV not only meets the letter of the law but it benefits the
service provider as well. When proper attention is paid to the exact manner
in which the questions are asked (i.e., phrasing, tone of voice and
intonation), the carrier is likely to solicit a positive response from the
consumer while meeting the FCC mandates. When combined with speech
technology, these scripts can allow for a safe, friendly verification
process that meets all the requirements and leaves the consumer with a clear
understanding of the choices he or she made and when the changes will take
effect.
Recording both sides of an IVR call is also a key component of the FCC's
TPV legislation. Integration between the IVR and the call recording
equipment provides the carrier with the peace of mind that any 'slamming'
complaint can be easily defended using the consumer's actual recorded voice.
Beyond the benefits of third-party verification and the resulting
auditable record of the transaction, the service provider also reaps rewards
by automating the order process. Once the TPV system has validated the
customers' acceptance of the changes to their service, their records can be
automatically created or updated in the order processing system. Thus, human
error in the service provisioning process is minimized and the costs
associated with creating the customer record are reduced.
Rely On Systems To Ensure You 'Do Not Call'
The FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) governing outbound telemarketing
activities has created a unique opportunity to leverage automation. The TSR
defines consumer rights to include permissible call times and caller I.D.
requirements and, most notably, specifies the creation of a national
do-not-call registry that allows consumers the power to stop unwanted calls.
One specific aspect of the regulation dictates that any telemarketing agency
that contacts a consumer must identify the reason for their call. Often,
outbound telemarketing centers use predictive dialers to place the initial
call to a consumer from a pre-defined list which has been verified against
the do-not-call list. These systems determine the most likely time that a
live agent will be available to talk to the consumer and place the call with
the expectation that an agent will be free when the consumer answers. On
occasion, when the consumer answers the call, there is not a sales agent
available. In this case, the regulations state that the telemarketer must
identify the reason for the call with a recorded message within a specified
timeframe. They must also provide consumers with a toll-free number that can
be called for further information about why they were contacted.
Automation can play a useful role in managing this complex chain of
events. In some cases, the consumer will call the toll-free number and, upon
hearing that he or she was contacted for telemarketing reasons, will
disconnect the call. However, it is often the case that the prospective
customer is interested in further information about the offer. In such
cases, the consumer can automatically be connected to a live agent, thus
continuing the sales opportunity; one that has a higher likelihood of
success. The balance between keeping the uninterested parties out of
expensive sales centers and quickly capturing those who might buy from a
sales representative is critical. A carefully designed script and tight call
center integration can achieve this delicate balance.
Secure, Auditable Records Are Critical
The Patriot Act and Sarbanes-Oxley Act have added a new dimension to the
importance of maintaining precise, secure and auditable records of customer
interaction. The Patriot Act has implications for the use and sharing of
private data with government agencies including telemarketing logs.
Additionally, the Crimes Against Charitable Americans (CACA) section of the
Patriot Act regulates telemarketing for non-profit organizations. The
Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), passed by Congress in 2002, is focused on
corporations' internal controls. Essentially, SOX requires corporate
executives to certify that their business practices have been tightly
controlled and monitored to ensure their financial reports are accurate.
These regulations raise the stakes for corporations to ensure that they
are acting responsibly and ethically. Automated contact systems can provide
an added dimension of control to the customer engagement process and the
subsequent processing of customer data. The scripted nature of the customer
interaction through an IVR system and limited human interaction with the
consumer reduces the opportunity for malfeasance and improper disclosure of
confidential information. Moreover, the resulting stored call flow provides
a built-in audit trail that can be used by the proper authorities if
required.
Effective Automation Requires Careful Planning And A Knowledgeable Staff
Customer contact automation may be the answer to many compliance
concerns, but careful planning is required. Those implementing automated
systems need to understand the associated regulatory requirements as well as
the interplay of the network, the systems and the databases associated with
the solution. Following are a few things to consider when implementing an
internal or outsourced contact automation solution.
Define success. What is the desired completion rate within the automation
application? Finding the right balance between self-service and ultimate
completion of the call with the assistance of the live channel is critical.
The application must be designed to handle as much of the customer
interaction as possible but transfer the call to a live agent before the
consumer is likely to give up.
Frequently monitor and tune the application. Careful consideration must
be given to consistency between the manner in which the live channel obtains
compliance and the flow of the automation application. It is important to
ensure the quality and accuracy of the communication. As an added benefit,
the automation of a compliance process will often identify small loopholes
and inconsistencies in the live channel method that can be rectified to
improve compliance or client uptake.
Ensure that corporate business systems are made available for ease of
data interchange. Integration of the automation application and the live
agent is key. The ability to pass whatever information was gathered by the
automation application to the live channel to enable the call to continue
seamlessly must be given serious consideration.
Train the call center staff to use the automated system appropriately. A
perfectly designed automation application in the hands of an untrained sales
agent is of little value. In the example of third-party verification,
ensuring the sales agent and the IVR consistently coach the customer to
listen to the questions and answer clearly is important. The consequences of
not doing this must be made clear to the consumer. Nobody wants to repeat
the process of buying telecommunications services, so telling the consumer
that his or her order will not be processed unless the compliance process is
completed successfully is important. Clarity is the joint responsibility of
both the sales agent and the IVR system.
Striking the right balance between legal, friendly and concise
communication is at a premium in a compliance application. Compliance
legislation is written by lawyers to be read by lawyers. Turning the
resulting regulations into something to which a consumer will pay attention
and respond in the affirmative is hard, but vital. An IVR can help this
process but it requires subtle phrasing and intonation to ensure the
consumer remains focused and alert regarding when to respond to the
question.
Automated contact center solutions are a practical and viable means of
navigating the increasingly complex regulatory landscape. Weigh the
advantages of outsourcing contact automation against the total cost of the
project to include network fees, equipment costs, staff expenses,
application development and overall system maintenance. Whether you decide
to implement the system with internal resources or hire experts to do it for
you, do your homework. While automation may provide an answer, the
responsibility for compliance still rests with the enterprise.
Paul Logan is president and CEO of Contact Solutions (www.contactsolutions.com),
a provider of outsourced hosting of automated customer service solutions.
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