Everything You Needed to Know About Call Center Compliance

Customer interactions are highly regulated, and compliance has become one of the top priorities of call centers.

It doesn’t matter if you are operating a BPO, customer support center, financial services call center or collections; you have to adhere to industry standards and regulations. This would help you build trust with your customers and protect your business from legal risks.

Non-compliance can have severe consequences, ranging from hefty fines to reputational damage. For instance, in 2022, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) imposed penalties on multiple companies for violating unsolicited commercial communication (UCC) regulations.

How about non-compliance to the Do Not Disturb (DND) registry?

This can lead to severe financial repercussions for call centers.

In this article, we will explore the best practices for call center compliance, the challenges businesses face, and how compliance can be a strategic advantage.

Even before we get into the intricacies of call center compliance, let us define what it is.

What Is Call Center Compliance?

Call center compliance is all about adhering to legal, regulatory, and industry standards that govern customer interactions, data security, and communication practices. It can vary across industries and regions.

Some of the key regulations are:

1. TRAI Regulations: Governs telecom services, including marketing and automated calls.
2. RBI Guidelines: Regulates financial service interactions and customer grievance redressal.
3. SEBI Regulations: Ensures transparency in financial advisory services
4. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): Governs the handling of EU customer data, impacting Indian call centers serving European clients.
5. DPDP Act (Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023): Regulates data privacy and protection in India.
6. CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act): Protects California residents’ data, which is relevant for call centers dealing with U.S. customers.
7. TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act): Regulates telemarketing calls in the U.S., requiring explicit customer consent.
8. PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry – Data Security Standards): Any business that stores payment information will have to be compliant with PCI-DSS standards. With PCI-DSS, you have to mask and redact customer-sensitive details like credit card numbers and personal identification details. Other information that comes under the purview of PCI-DSS includes physical and digital access to cardholder data, agent tracking, and encryption of data transfers.
9. HIPAA (Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) Compliance: It addresses the privacy and security of patient information like social security numbers, IP addresses, full-face or comparable photographic images, geographical identifiers, and account numbers.
10. SOC Compliance: SOC 2 is an auditing procedure that ensures your call center is securely managing your data to protect the interests of your organization and the privacy of your clients.
11. FDCPA (Fair Debt Collection Practices Act) Regulations: This covers when you can call your customers, how many times you can call them, the language to be used, the channel in which you can contact them, and DRA (Debt Regulation Act) certification of field agents.

What Are the Best Practices to Be Followed for Call Center Compliance?

There are multiple practices that you as a business should follow to ensure compliance and adherence to standards and regulations.

Here are a few common things that you should consider to ensure compliance:

Obtain Customer Consent Before Calls and Recordings

• Most countries need prior consent before recording calls. Customers must be explicitly informed that a call is being recorded under the DPDP Act. That’s why you always hear that your calls may be recorded for quality and training purposes.
• Under TCPA, U.S. customers must explicitly opt-in to receive marketing calls, impacting Indian BPOs serving American clients.

Maintain and Update Do Not Disturb (DND) Lists

• TRAI mandates that telemarketers scrub their call lists against the National Customer Preference Register (NCPR).
• Non-compliance with DND rules can lead to penalties of up to INR 10 lakh for repeated or serious offenses, with fines ranging from Rs. 2 lakh to 10 lakh, depending on the severity of the violation.
• Similarly, violating TCPA can result in fines of up to $1500 per call for non-consensual automated marketing calls to U.S. numbers.

Secure Customer Data

• Encrypt sensitive customer information and adopt role-based access controls. Follow RBI-mandated IT security guidelines when handling banking transactions.
• GDPR and CCPA require businesses to offer customers control over their personal data, including access and deletion requests.

Implement Real-Time Compliance Monitoring

• AI-powered tools can detect compliance violations and flag them in real time.
• Speech analytics software helps ensure agents follow required disclosure statements. It can figure out all compliance issues by flagging using keywords and phrases.

Train Agents on Compliance Requirements

• Continuous training ensures agents are well-versed in evolving regulations. Role-playing exercises and regular audits help maintain compliance.
• Indian call centers that invest in compliance training see 25% fewer violations compared to those that don’t.

What Are the Biggest Compliance Challenges That Indian Call Centers Face?

Indian call centers not only handle customers in India but also provide services to customers from across the world.

This means they will have to comply with standards and regulations pertaining to the region from where their customers come from.

Some of the common challenges they face include:

• TRAI, DPDP Act, and RBI regulations change often, and call centers will have to comply with these frequent regulatory updates.
• Indian call centers serving global clients must comply with GDPR, TCPA, CCPA, and HIPAA requirements.
• Ensuring every agent follows compliance protocols can be challenging, given the fact that call centers have huge employee turnover.
• Legacy systems may lack real-time compliance monitoring features.

How Does ClearTouch Help in Making Your Business Stay Compliant with Standards?

Let us look at how ClearTouch Operator helps you comply with various regulations.

1. Data Encryption – Offers end-to-end encryption to protect data during transmission and storage. This helps you comply with regulations like GDPR and PCI-DSS, ensuring the protection of customer data.
2. Call Recording and Storage – Records every customer conversation (Call & Screen Recording) and is easily searchable at all times. This would ensure that your call center complies with regulations and helps you understand grey areas to improve your call center function’s overall productivity and happiness.
3. Compliance Monitoring – Analytics help flag misselling, non-compliance, unauthorized actions, non-compliance to disclosures, and improper language usage in real time.
4. Role-Based Access Control – Provides only the necessary access to the respective individuals based on their roles.
5. Data Redaction and Masking – Automatically mask or redact data such as credit card numbers and personal identification information.
6. Multi-Channel Security – Secure communication across multiple channels that include voice, email, chat, social, mobile, and web.
7. Data Localization – Configurable options for customers to choose where their data should reside and how they should manage redundancy. Across nations, it is mandated that banks host their customer data in data centers within the country. For instance, according to India’s Personal Data Protection Bill, no customer data can reside in servers outside of India.
8. Consent Management – Maintain data on all forms of consent that you have obtained from customers and other stakeholders.
9. Business Continuity Planning – The inherent nature of our platform is to offer failover routes and redundancy, ensuring disaster recovery and business continuity.
10. Two-Factor Authentication – Enhanced authentication features like two-factor authentication (2FA) are available by default. This is a precursor to going entirely passwordless.

All of these features are configurable and customizable, making it an invaluable ally for every organization in ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

How Does a Platform That Complies with Industry Standards and Regulations Help a Call Center?

Outsourced call centers and BPOs must differentiate themselves by offering compliant, secure, and efficient services.

By investing in a compliance-first platform like ClearTouch, you:

• Avoid costly fines and lawsuits
• Win more enterprise clients who require strict compliance
• Improve customer trust and satisfaction
• Automate compliance monitoring to enhance efficiency
• Scale globally with multi-country compliance support

A Case in Point

One of the leading banks in India operationalized our platform for all their outbound and inbound needs. During the engagement, one of their customers raised a dispute, claiming that a personal loan had been promised but not processed as expected.

When the concern was escalated to the bank’s outbound sales head, they promptly accessed the relevant call recording. A thorough review of the conversation provided clarity on the fact that there was no mention of the loan approval as claimed.

This evidence helped the bank address the situation effectively, demonstrating its commitment to transparency and ensuring that all interactions were accurately documented.

We provide recordings of all their interactions, and we offer them a storage of recordings for ten years. This allowed the bank to uphold its credibility, reinforce trust with stakeholders, and safeguard its agents against potential misrepresentation.

This gave them the confidence to use our platform for all their collection needs as well. They use multiple third-party collection agencies to handle their collections, and they rolled out our platform to all its partners.

The bank populated the data for all its third-party vendors while ensuring compliance from their side. This allowed them to have control and visibility over the collections operations.

With ClearTouch, it becomes easy to ensure compliance as our cloud infrastructure is compliant with most industry standards and regulations.

We handle more than 1500 customers worldwide and help them with their compliance needs. Our cloud service providers have dedicated teams to ensure security and compliance needs.

Our platform offers a combination of security, flexibility, and automation that helps you meet regulatory compliance easily.

If you are looking at compliance, you don’t have to look beyond our cloud contact center platform.