Email UsCan You Afford To Leave Compliance To Chance?
Bernie Kane, QA Consultant.
So far this year the FSA alone has issued fines totalling over ?20 million. A significant proportion of this has been related to failure to comply within telephone and internet sales. If you add this to similar levels of fines issued by OFWAT, OFGEM and OFCOM, to list just a few of the regulators, the contact centre market is paying a heavy premium to sell regulated products.
So why after over two decades of telephone-based selling are we still failing to meet the demands of the regulators? Although it can be argued that the regulators are getting tougher and rules tighter, this is no excuse for some basic errors by many organisations.
In our opinion, the answer lies in two key areas. First is to make better use of technology to reduce the cost and burden of compliance. And second, to ensure your processes focus on proactively correcting the root cause on non-compliance rather than simply addressing the symptoms.
Leveraging Technology To Find The Interactions That Matter
With thousands of calls, it is very difficult to cost effectively, manually identify every issue that occurs. Many contact centres rely on supervisors to monitor quality, however when these people are busy, they do not have the time to coach agents and identify every problematic interaction. Organisations have a wealth of information about the interactions they have with their customers, for example, call duration, number of transfers, result codes, etc. It is not difficult for organisations to utilise this information to identify which interactions have potential issues or which interactions need to be reviewed for compliance.
By simply having a QA system that selects interactions for review based on the information held in various systems about this interaction you are able to focus your people in the areas that matter rather than waste time reviewing random samples of calls. This not only reduces your costs of compliance, but also dramatically improves the effectiveness of your compliance monitoring.
Addressing The Underlying Compliance Issues
Unfortunately, overzealous agents, poor agent knowledge or ineffective processes are issues that affect your ongoing business and are not isolated to one particular transaction.
Most quality processes focus on individual interactions (whether these be as a result of a complaint, or random sampling) and in essence addresses the symptom of the issue rather than the root cause. Worse, still, many organisations are still relying on simply recording calls and saving these recordings as being the tick in the compliance box. This fails to cover non-voice transactions and also relies on customer complaints to identify issues.
We feel that by being proactive, organisations can more effectively manage compliance and reduce the associated costs of non-compliance. This is achieved by analysing non-compliant interactions and instigating corrective action against the root cause as well as that particular instance. For example, if the non-compliance is a symptom of poor product knowledge, this can be addressed by additional training, if it is a process that is disjointed, then the process can be closely integrated and simplified, or an overzealous agent can be coached on sales skills.
Again technology can help, specialist QA and Compliance software can assign and track corrective action. This allows you to address issues, take the right steps for your business and then audit the steps that have created the desired results.
A Small Cost To Pay
With so much technology available to help contact centres, it is hard to believe that the industry is still having such trouble in effectively managing compliance. Are we accepting the regulators fines as just a cost of doing business or are we ready to look at new ways of reducing compliance costs while improving the quality and avoiding the unwelcomed attention of the regulators?
Technology solutions that assist you in the area of QA are not expensive and immediately provide a return on investment in terms of reducing your administrative expense of compliance and making the whole process more effective.
If you want to find out more about our views and experience on how contact centres can meet the compliance challenge visit www.infinityccs.com or contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it