3 Must-Have Tools for Meeting GDPR and PCI DSS Compliance Requirements | Eleveo

Contact centers place extraordinary trust in their Workforce Optimization solution to protect against legal and financial risk.

If your business interacts directly with consumers and your contact center collects customers’ sensitive financial or payment information, you're required to navigate an alphabet soup of consumer protection regulations. That’s no great revelation, nor is it a surprise to you that maintaining compliance isn’t easy.

Organizations operating in the European Union must adhere to hundreds of pages of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance requirements that prevent unauthorized access and use of personal information. PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliance requirements apply to credit card transactions worldwide. They are no less arduous when it comes to limiting and monitoring access to cardholder data.

Additionally, there’s HIPAA for healthcare organizations, FCA-CDC (Financial Conduct Authority) - a new set of consumer privacy and protection regulations covering the UK’s financial services industry set to kick off in June 2023 - CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), MiFID II and more.

All of these regulatory compliance frameworks reach across organizations, touching departments from IT and Operations to Marketing and Sales. The contact center lies at the epicenter of an organization’s efforts to comply with these regulations and – equally important – any efforts to prove the organization’s compliance to auditors and regulators on an ongoing basis.

For their part, contact center agents are front-and-center with consumers during every interaction involving protected information. They should certainly be trained on the rules surrounding that information, and it’s important that contact center leadership monitor their awareness of regulatory requirements and their diligence in conforming to them.

That said, no contact center’s compliance program should rely on an agent’s conscientiousness; human error is inevitable, leading to compliance gaps that expose your organization to significant legal and financial risk. Instead, your compliance program needs to be built on a technology framework – compliance-specific tools integrated into your WFO software.

What are the stakes?

The stakes are high. The cost of not complying with GDPR, for example, can reach up to 20 Million Euros or 4% of annual global revenues, whichever is greater. In the case of PCI DSS non-compliance, payment processors may fine organizations anywhere from $5,000-$100,000 per month, depending on factors such as the organization's size and the seriousness of the security breach.

It can be a daunting challenge for organizations to keep pace with all of their compliance responsibilities, and it's not going to get any easier. The regulatory environment, in general, and in each industry, moves in one direction – always toward more regulation. The demand on resources – both financial and human - associated with staying compliant can overwhelm contact centers, particularly smaller ones, unless their call center technology can automate many of those tasks. Thankfully, the right workforce optimization solution will do just that.

3 Tools for Automating Compliance Tasks

• Automated Omni-Channel Recording collects, stores, and facilitates searches of support, sales and back-office transaction, providing a single repository for accessing all customer interactions and transactions, whether those take place on the phone, in chats, or emails. To ease searchability, the tool should also automatically categorize those interactions by type, source and customer.
  
  The tool should include an intuitive web-based interface, advanced record organization, storage and archiving, sophisticated access control and record manipulation, comprehensive recording, and on-demand access to all recordings. Call tagging capabilities, and a tight integration with your contact center telephony platform will also enable you to correlate each case number and call to a particular agent and a specific day and time, making it easy to find and review any call – a must-have for audit protection.
  
  By recording 100 percent of all calls and screens and delivering sophisticated call data-search capabilities, your WFO solution will streamline and strengthen your contact center’s compliance efforts. It’s also important to ensure agents adhere to scripts and use required phrases/not prohibited phrases during their interactions. Moreover, you can utilize recordings for agent evaluation and training to improve your customer satisfaction scores.
  
  Without these capabilities, if an organization’s legal or billing department needs to review a particular recording, its contact center team would need to undertake a comprehensive investigation to identify the agent and timeframe involved in a ‘problem’ call. They’d likely need to review hours of calls before finding the right one. Your WFO solution's omnichannel recording tool should allow you to retrieve the call virtually immediately.
  
  
  
• Auto Pause and Resume (APR) removes the human element and the possibility of human error from critical compliance-related activities during agents’ interactions with customers. Every day, contact center agents at their workstations process customer payments over the phone, collecting sensitive financial or credit card data. The same regulations that effectively require that all customer interactions be recorded and archived for compliance reasons pointedly exclude the recording and archiving of audio or computer screens containing personal financial information.
  
  APR automatically pauses and resumes call and screen recordings at the customer/agent interaction point where the customer is providing information protected under GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA and other regulatory frameworks. Without a tool automating the pausing and resumption of the recordings, your compliance regime depends on each call center agent remembering to manually pause every recording just before taking the customer’s financial information and resume it immediately after. Every call. Every day. One agent forgetting to pause the recording means you’ve captured protected customer information, and you're out of compliance. One agent failing to resume the recording after collecting the information means you’ve lost the rest of the call.
  
  Put simply; APR works this way. The tool’s browser-based URL and application detection technology automatically pauses audio and screen recording when your agents interact with a URL or application they are required to access while exchanging confidential financial data. It then automatically resumes recording after that activity has ended.
  
  
  

• Data Management tools, like Media Lifecycle Management, Encryption, and User Management, are critical to ensuring recordings and data files are accessible when they’re needed (by the people authorized to access it) and to anonymizing, extracting and deleting personally identifiable information. They also provide complete audit protection by assuring that no calls will be lost and that those calls and data will be accessible, remaining so regardless of how long those data and records must be retained. This media lifecycle management capability is critically important to healthcare organizations, which are required to retain and protect recordings for up to seven years. Any gap in call records puts these organizations in major legal jeopardy.
  
  A robust call tagging feature will allow organizations to fine-tune their ability to filter every call by agent, day, and time and quickly find and review any call. Call tagging, and other elements of a data management infrastructure can help your organization keep pace with the relentless growth in the amount of data you’re required to collect and protect. Effectively managed, these data asset pools will be safely stored and archived for easy retrieval in the event of an audit to verify GDPR or PCI DSS compliance and compliance with the range of regulations covering virtually every industry.
  
  

Compliance is one of those necessary evils for contact centers. Given the stakes, it has to be a top priority for your organization and your WFO provider. Though protecting your organization from the legal and financial risks of running afoul of regulations can seem overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be – not if you’re leveraging the right technology and automating your compliance efforts.

There's no viable alternative to a robust, automated system for tracking, recording, and assuring compliance; it’s a must-have for today’s contact centers in this highly regulated environment. Without adequate tools, your people and your operation will simply be overwhelmed, and even your best efforts will leave gaps, opening your organization to unacceptable risk.