A substantial proportion of businesses record calls to their operation “… for quality and training purposes.”

But what does this mean?

In most cases “quality” usually means checking that the organisation’s call-takers are saying and doing the things that they should or must—in the way they should or must do them—to comply with internal policies and procedures and any applicable external regulations. Any non-compliant interactions identified by the checks can also be re-worked to correct the situation.

On the other side of the coin, “training” means that when the quality checks reveal that employees are not following those mandated scripts and procedures, this can be identified—and then training and coaching offered to course-correct their future behaviours.

A further output may be that the quality checks reveal weak spots in established processes, or the tools used to administer them, that are regularly causing missteps that in turn result in non-compliant transactions. In such cases, the quality checks can be used to inform consideration of how to re-profile procedures or system configurations, to eliminate the potential for mistakes and the need for consequent re-work.

WHY are we worried about these issues in the first place?

To misquote W. Edwards Deming, "variability is the enemy of compliance.” It is fairly self-evident that any business that places a premium on its reputation with its customers will want to be seen as treating them fairly and in accordance with its own quality and customer service standards. Not doing what you promise, or in the way you promise to do it, can be a short route to poor feedback scores and a rapidly declining reputation.

But beyond this, many businesses (most, even) need to comply with one or more external regulations that govern the way they conduct certain aspects of their business. Think data privacy (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA), or financial and contractual integrity (PCI-DSS, TSR, Dodd-Frank and MiFID II), to name but a few.

And any well-run business will also have designed its processes, not only to deliver against customer and regulatory expectations, but also to ensure efficient and effective operations.

“If you think compliance is expensive, try non-compliance.”

So said former U.S. Deputy Attorney General, Paul McNulty, and his insight is worth taking to heart. In the absence of quality checks—and associated corrective actions—diverging from carefully configured compliance standards and processes can:

• Be harmful to the smooth running of your business.
• Result in customers receiving unsatisfactory service, putting at risk their future business and loyalty, as well as the organisation’s reputation.
• Run the risk of breaching regulatory standards that can be punished with heavy fines and other sanctions, which sometimes include imprisonment. Not to mention the ever-present threat to the organisation’s reputation and future business prospects.

And so we’re back to where we started—to counter these threats we record calls and review them to assess whether processes are adhered to, identify where those standards are missed, which employees need further coaching, and, on occasion, the procedural waypoints that most often cause issues.

Then we take action—to correct non-compliant work, coach and train employees to prevent reoccurrence, or redesign procedures to avoid the potential for future issues.

But here’s the rub…

… reviewing 100% of calls is, for most businesses, simply not a realistic prospect. Even the best resourced organisations do not normally have either the time, or the resources, to achieve this.

So, most businesses screen random samples of interaction recordings and, typically, this amounts to no more than around 3% of all calls. The hope, because there can be no guarantee, is that these samples will happen to include enough examples of non-compliant interactions to provide useful intelligence about the staff to target with future training, or the procedures that need attention.

Here’s the science bit.

Consider this …

… if your business takes, say, 1,000 calls a day, 5 days a week—you will be processing 5,000 calls a week, around 260,000 calls a year.

And let’s assume that only 1% of those 5,000 calls do not meet the required regulatory or procedural requirements (for whatever reason) ...

… meaning that, on average, there are 50 non-compliant calls a week—just over 2,500 calls a year.

Now, if you screen 3% of those 5,000 calls for quality, you will be reviewing 150 calls a week, or a little under 8,000 calls a year.

But you can only reasonably expect those samples to reveal 3% of those 1% of calls that are non-compliant …

…which is between 1 and 2 calls a week, or just under 80 a year.

But it’s what is NOT included in those numbers that is really important, because that leaves 48 or so non-compliant calls a week. Calls that you have not identified or done anything to make right.

That’s over 2,500 calls a year that you don’t even know about.

Any or all of which could lead to fines, sanctions and other consequences, before you’ve had a chance to do anything about them.

And here’s the really sobering bit.

To throw those numbers into even sharper relief, if the problem revealed in those 2,500 unidentified, non-compliant interactions resulted in a fine of $2,500 for each case, that would leave you with $6.25 million of potential fines, lurking undetected in your unreviewed call recordings.

With your teams now working from new locations, in distraction-filled environments, the risk to compliance has become even greater.

To avoid compliance failures, and their negative impact on your business, you really can’t afford to review anything less than 100% of calls.

Now imagine an alternative reality.

One in which 100% screening and scoring of recorded calls IS possible.

Automatically.

Without the need for an army of compliance officers.

Allowing your existing staff to focus on the most important compliance challenges; to dedicate their time to delivering the most effective staff training or designing bullet-proof procedures to prevent problem transactions in the future.

Sound good?

It’s what Verint can deliver with Automated Quality Management.

As an existing or potential user of Verint’s Quality Management solution, you can now also take advantage of an innovative, rapid deployment of powerful Automated Quality Management capabilities, empowering your organization to automatically monitor and analyse 100% of recorded voice and text-based interactions to assure compliance.

With Verint Automated Quality Management, you’ll be better able to avoid fines and penalties, and gain much greater insight than you’d receive from small call samples. And your quality team will be able to focus on other activities that add greater value to your business, such as analysing interactions, evaluating compliance, and providing targeted coaching.

Easy, Rapid Deployment

Verint Automated Quality Management can automate your entire contact centre quality process, from scoring evaluations through assigning coaching.

Entirely cloud-based for ease of maintenance, support and updates, deployment takes a matter of weeks. You’ll get three automated quality management rules out-of-the-box, addressing three of the most commonly encountered contact centre compliance issues:

• Informing customers that their call will be recorded
• Following the correct identity authentication procedures
• Ensuring that the CVV number is not recorded when taking credit card payments.

All of these rules provide automated alerts that highlight when compliance KPIs fall below acceptable thresholds.

Also included are services for configuration and testing, and Gold or Silver managed services, which provide assistance with configuring additional rules, access to Verint experts for help and advice, and innovative optimization tools to help keep KPIs accurate and relevant. To this, the Gold service adds two consultative progress assessment and guidance sessions, to help keep KPIs up-to-date and provide guidance on future automation.

Automated Quality Management is designed to help you reduce compliance issues, elevate customer experience and reduce operational costs, while achieving both a quick return-on-investment and maximum long-term results. And once up and running, you can continue your digital transformation at your own pace by expanding the scope of your automated quality monitoring with more automatic scoring rules – such as for soft skills, compliance, script adherence, and more – in the contact centre and beyond.

Compliance with regulations is seldom optional, and the consequences of non-compliance are almost always painful. Automated Quality Management provides a practical and effective way to avoid that pain, delivered quickly and economically for rapid return on investment.

To find out more, visit the Verint website.