Interaction Analytics supports compliance in your contact centers

Every contact center needs to track its compliance with laws and regulations, yet so many make it tougher on themselves to do so. Reviewers screen call after call, checking off compliance steps and ensuring agents meet expectations. But with potentially millions of calls to screen, manual compliance tracking becomes an impossible task -- and workaround solutions can leave centers open to damaging compliance failures, potentially costing companies millions of dollars in fines.

The cost of human error is too high, but manual processes are too overwhelming, time-consuming and expensive. Automating compliance monitoring can remove much of the burden from compliance managers and officers and decrease their chances of human error. Technology like Interaction Analytics helps reduce the traditional pain-points and limitations in reviewing contact center compliance while also unlocking insights on larger trends and ways to improve contact center operations.

Compliance monitored on every call

When centers are processing potentially millions of calls, reviewers can’t listen to every single one. Typically, they review a small sample of calls and extrapolate compliance from them. While this strategy keeps reviewers from getting bogged down in compliance management, it leaves open gaps where costly compliance failures could slip through.

With Interaction Analytics, AI sits in on calls instead of humans. The system can monitor calls for compliance adherence at scale. It eliminates the need for sampling, instead catching issues that might arise in every call -- patching a spot of vulnerability for contact centers.

These systems can also deploy analyses on NLP-derived capabilities such as customer intent, silence, empathy and sentiment within each call. Not only will managers have accurate data on compliance, but they’ll also know more about the customer’s emotional state and the quality of their interaction. This lends insights on how to tweak an agent’s approach beyond compliance.

Faster compliance reviews

Reviewers screen calls while looking for "compliance statements," the key phrases agents must use to meet compliance standards. For example: according to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991, an agent must give their name and the company’s name when they start a call. On their own, reviewers must listen to calls in their entirety to capture when agents said those statements. The longer each call is, the more time and money the review process consumes -- and the greater the chance for committing an error.

Using AI, Interaction Analytics parses calls and tags where those specific compliance statements were uttered. A reviewer can then navigate directly to the location and verify the statement. The system can even produce a dashboard view, compiling all the identified statements onto one screen, massively reducing the time reviewers spend on each call. More importantly, the system also alerts when agents fail to say certain compliance statements, pinpointing where more training is necessary.

Trends from aggregated compliance data

With a manual process, reviewers have been limited to covering 2-5 calls per agent per month, assessing agents on an individual basis. This has helped score agent performance in the past, identifying their strengths and areas of improvement, but it has also siloed data and prevented managers from seeing emergent compliance trends.

With Interaction Analytics, managers can aggregate agent-level performance data to unearth hidden insights. For example, centers can categorize data by supervisor, location, vendor or agent tenure and determine if there’s a pattern to compliance lapses. That helps managers build better agent training programs, identify which vendors aren’t following regulations, and what compliance statements pose the most challenges among agents.

That level of data and analysis enables contact center managers to make scoring agents a more insightful experience. Interaction Analytics can automatically evaluate and score every conversation between agents and customers -- phone call, email, live chat, even social channels. The system then uses natural language understanding (NLU) to analyze the actual voice of the customer and their words to produce a single agent score. Managers can aggregate these scores and identify trends or track top-scoring interactions in real-time.

Managers can also use their intelligent scoring solution to set and monitor their own criteria beyond compliance alone. For example, a center struggling to improve quality of service can automatically score agents not only on compliance statements but also on soft skills, product knowledge and issue resolution. This lets quality management teams better prioritize resources to improve quality of service -- when managers know what kind of coaching would best help their agents, they can resolve issues faster and more effectively.

Not using technology like Interaction Analytics to track compliance can be a costly decision. Beyond complying with regulations, however, technology can help managers find pain points they would’ve otherwise missed. Training opportunities and emergent trends lie within compliance data; use Interaction Analytics to extract it and create key insights to improve contact center operations.

Image Credit: HABRDA / Shutterstock

Fabrice Martin, CPO, Clarabridge is responsible for the vision, roadmap and go-to-market strategy for the Clarabridge CX Suite of products. He brings more than two decades of experience launching new products and business applications focused on solving large, complex analytical problems and delivering valuable insights.