Financial & Insurance Call Center Compliance | Eleveo

Compliance and performance in financial & insurance call centers

Organizations operating in these two highly regulated industries, with employees engaging directly with customers via formal contact centers or otherwise, must also meet operational performance expectations. Is your call-recording/WFO solution up to the challenge?

What are the main issues in financial and insurance call centers?

Keeping pace with mounting regulations

Insurance and finance are two of the economy’s most regulated sectors — for good reason. Call centers in both industries engage customers in highly sensitive transactions, and those customers entrust them with their financial and credit card information. For customers’ and business’ protection, regulators require insurance and finance call centers to capture a record of each phone, email, chat and mobile interaction with customers and retain those records, typically for years. Additional regulations compel businesses to actively avoid recording their customers’ most personal information.

None of this comes as a surprise to call center managers, compliance managers or officers responsible for IT, security and legal; they and the organization’s customer-facing employees work in this demanding environment every day. They understand the penalties businesses face for non-compliance and the central role a call-recording system plays in protecting against legal exposure. GDPR, as you know, gives individuals the right to see their data, determine how it can be used and require that it be deleted. The penalties for violating these rules are considerable, in some cases, enough to erase an organization’s annual profits.

Any call-recording system lacking a robust compliance system capable of automatically backing-up and archiving each interaction throughout its lifecycle leaves a gap in that protection. It exposes insurance and financial companies and their call centers to profound legal and financial risk.

MiFID II financial regulations, for instance, obligate banks to capture a broad set of investment conversations. All calls between sales representatives and potential clients must be recorded, even if they did not complete the transaction.

A growing body of regulation is being built around protecting ‘vulnerable customers’ — people to whom insurance companies cannot sell policies or financial institutions make loans.

What are the criteria of good call center software for the financial & insurance markets?

Is your call-recording solution equipped with advanced speech analytics to help you identify those keywords, phrases or behaviors that likely indicate a vulnerable customer, so your agents can end the call? That capability is key to keeping you in compliance and decreasing the likelihood of selling or loaning to someone who cannot pay.

Equally important is functionality that automatically pauses and resumes call recordings to prevent the capture of protected personal information.

• Is your organization’s compliance program built on the notion that each agent will remember to manually pause the recording just before taking the customer’s financial information and resume it immediately after? On every call? Every day? If so, one mistake by one agent means you’ve captured protected customer information or lost the rest of the call. Your company is out of compliance.

Ensuring performance

Customers expect their data to be protected and they expect efficiency and effectiveness. Agent empathy is increasingly important, as well. Their level of satisfaction and, to a great extent, your brand’s reputation are products of a quality management (QM) program — a qualitative and quantitative approach to evaluating agent and process performance.

QM is driven by metrics, analysis and control over thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of inbound or outgoing interactions. The ability of quality managers or call center managers to accurately forecast and schedule, along with their ability to review agent/customer interactions, are some of the most critical keys to meeting service-level objectives and KPIs.

Your call-recording solution provides the framework for building those capabilities.

Automation is the key. By being able to quickly retrieve, review and analyze a large number of interactions — not only audio, but screens and chats as well — contact center and quality managers can identify root- cause issues related to critical KPIs, such as Average Handling Time (AHT), First Call Resolution, Net Promoter Score, and Customer Satisfaction. Managers can use their analyses as a basis for training agents and improving scripts and processes, all to maximize critical KPIs.

• Does your WFO solution help you ensure your agents provide the quality of service you and your customers demand?

Without an automated call-recording solution, you’re likely focused more on policing a small sample of agent/customer interactions than solving problems. With features like automated speech analytics, you can collect and analyze a large number of interactions, giving you a data-driven, systematic way of addressing issues. Again, you can identify the root cause of a longer-than-acceptable AHT. Does the agent lack the product knowledge to answer a question quickly? Are they spending too much time in the knowledge base? Are they losing control of the conversation?

You’re probably already discovering that the analysis of unstructured data is increasingly connected to your contact center’s ability to maximize its KPIs. You need to be able to rely on your call recording solution to automate and streamline that process.

Compliance and performance; both are business-critical matters for conventional contact centers and for any customer-facing employees. With the right tools there’s no reason to compromise on either.