How Do Cloud Contact Centers Help Banks With Their Regulatory Compliance Needs?

A few years ago, organizations were skeptical about having their contact centers on the cloud, especially in regulated industries like banking and telecom.

Over time, after the onset of the pandemic, organizations realized the power of the cloud. They also learned that most privacy and security concerns they had earlier were unfounded, and the cloud, in fact, offered a much better scope for security.

Most contact centers have moved to the cloud or are in the process of moving their operations to the cloud. This is evident from the fact that almost all platform providers are now actively pushing their cloud offerings and phasing out their on-premise offerings.

The most critical aspect of a contact center infrastructure involves compliance with regulatory requirements.

Let us look at the cloud contact features that help comply with various regulations.

• Data Encryption – cloud contact centers offer end-to-end encryption to protect data during transmission and storage.
• Call recording and storage – records every customer conversation and is easily searchable at all times.
• Compliance monitoring – analytics help flag misselling, non-compliance, unauthorized actions, non-compliance to disclosures, and improper language usage in real-time.
• Role-based access control provides only the necessary access to the respective individuals based on their roles.
• Data redaction and masking – automatically mask or redact data such as credit card numbers and personal identification information.
• Multi-channel security – secure communication across multiple channels that include voice, email, chat, social, mobile, and web.
• Data localization – configurable options for customers to choose where their data should reside and how they should manage redundancy.
• Consent management – maintain data on all forms of consent that you have obtained from customers and other stakeholders.
• Business continuity planning – the inherent nature of the cloud is to offer failover routes and redundancy, ensuring disaster recovery and business continuity.
• 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 Do Cloud Contact Centers Help Regulatory Compliance in Banking?

Now, let us specifically look at how cloud cloud contact centers help in regulatory compliance for the banking industry.

GDPR and PCI-DSS Compliance

Cloud centers offer robust security protocols, including end-to-end encryption of calls, chat logs, and customer data.

This helps banks comply with regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), ensuring the protection of customer data.

Call and Screen Recording With Analytics – Compliance

Cloud help you record and store calls as well as agent screens, which can be easily retrieved for audit and compliance needs.

What happens to the recorded call recordings?

Managers and supervisors of a contact center listen to only 2% of the recorded calls unless something unfavorable happens or an audit is carried out.

What happens to the remaining 98% of the recordings?

They just sit on the storage servers and get listened to only when there are complaints or audits.

Assuming that you have a voice analytics solution, the scenario is entirely different.

You can rapidly analyze call recordings to identify compliance issues, misselling, and privacy issues – either warn the agent or escalate to a manager to take corrective action.

This would ensure that your banking call center complies with regulatory compliances and helps you understand grey areas to improve your call center function’s overall productivity and happiness.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

Compliance Issues

Insurance selling is regulated, and you must ensure that the customer understands all the required disclosures during the sale. Besides, you can’t incentivize a customer during the insurance purchase.

One of the insurance firms reached out to many prospects, but the sale closures turned invalid. When the voice analytics platform assessed the recordings, it glaringly revealed that the sales reps were not reading the required disclosures during the sale. This is a red flag process, and the sale loop wasn’t closed.

It also allowed the insurance firm to figure out the specific reps who weren’t doing this and helped create a training plan for those agents.

Identifying Self-Service Options

When the pandemic struck, the call volumes at a bank’s call center went up drastically. They were moving their agents to work from home, and the call volumes were increasing. So, the time they took to resolve customer queries went up, which made their customers unhappy.

They decided to automate their processes to handle their customer queries better. There wasn’t any consensus on what could be automated. Voice analytics of their calls revealed the commonly asked straightforward transactional queries, and they took those up for their first level of implementation.

This helped the bank set up self-service tools on their digital platforms. It brought down the number of calls the call center was receiving and helped address their customer queries faster and better.

Only the complex queries went to the agents, as the automated self-service options handled the rest.

What About Screen Recording?

Let us look at how screen recording helps with compliance and auditing.

An old-age customer who is not digitally savvy clicks on a link sent by your organization and unknowingly subscribes to an annual service. It gets added to his subsequent months’ bill. When he receives the bill, he understands that something is amiss. He calls up your call center.

One of your agents picks up the call and flatly refuses to entertain his request for reversal of the subscription fee to a service that he isn’t using. The screen recording shows the information that the agent accessed before responding to the customer.

It shows that he didn’t spend time checking the customer’s usage of the subscribed service from the date it was subscribed.

Screen recordings help you assess the quality of your operations apart from providing inputs on what information needs to be accessed. This can come up in your audit, helping with your training and delivery of customer service.

Data Localization

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.

Cloud centers help you with storing data in local cloud servers.

Business Continuity

How do you manage your traditional contact center platforms?

They are far too dependent on IT to set up, maintain, and operate the contact center. There are too many variables associated with internal IT – capabilities, infrastructure availability, and reliability.

Imagine if your server goes down. How do you ensure business continuity?

You need to have a redundant backup server with seamless failover when the primary server goes down. The primary and redundant servers shouldn’t be at the same location – you have to take into consideration the connectivity.

With cloud, disaster recovery and business continuity are factored as a part of the infrastructure. They can ensure 99.99% availability of your platform at all times. 

Seamless Authentication

What if you want to provide two-factor authentication?

How about including biometrics and voice recognition as a part of the authentication process?

All of these means additional technology implementation and infrastructure in a traditional contact center.

With the cloud, most of these authentication methods are easily configurable as a part of your offerings.

This helps in compliance and fraud prevention initiatives.

Adherence to Debt Collection Guidelines

As a debt collection organization in India , you have to be compliant with Reg-F and Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) regulations.

It includes some of the following guidelines:

• You cannot call someone before 8 am or after 7 pm. You get an 11-hour window to contact your customers who have missed a payment.
• You can call someone only so many times, beyond which it will be considered harassment.
• The language that you use has to be polite and neutral and should not be threatening.
• The customer has the choice to choose the channel through which they can be contacted.
• The collection executives you send to the customer’s premises must be DRA-certified.

Cloud allows you to configure all of these in no time and ensure that your contact center is compliant with the regulations.

Automated Reporting

With the cloud, you can easily create any form of report by slicing and dicing the data.

It can generate comprehensive reports on agent performance, call logs, and data access – simplifying the audit process and ensuring compliance.

Data Masking, Consent Management, and Redaction

With PCI-DSS, you have to mask and redact customer-sensitive details like credit card numbers and personal identification information.

Cloud contact centers help you do these with ease.

With contact centers, you can pull out all consent data about customers agreeing to use their personal data easily.

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

Besides, no on-premise solutions can have the level of security and data protection that cloud providers offer.

Every cloud service provider handles hundreds and thousands of customers and has dedicated teams to ensure security and compliance needs.

Cloud contact centers offer a combination of security, flexibility, and automation that helps banks meet regulatory compliance.

If you are looking at compliance, as a bank, you have to look at cloud contact center platform providers.