For many years, compliance and customer experience have felt like two business objectives that are completely at odds.
Customers have continued to demand experiences that are smooth, seamless and convenient – fast and frictionless across all devices and channels.
With these expectations in mind, the steps required by contact centres to operate to the highest standard of compliance can feel like bumps in the road of the customer journey.
But recent advances in contact centre software and customer experience technology have the power to end this long-lasting conflict.
Armed with the right tools, businesses looking to enhance their level of customer experience provision can do so while also minimising the scope of noncompliance, as well as mitigating other areas of business risk.
Read on to find out more about how contact centre software is changing, and how you can leverage its capabilities to bulletproof your compliance, without any trade-off in your customer experience.
One of the main advantages of leading customer experience technologies is that they are designed to help contact centres and other organisations achieve a ‘single customer view’.
In short, they are able to capture all of a customer’s data generated through their historic interactions with your business – across all channels and devices, whether online or offline – and display them all in one place.
Having this information centralised and stored in a uniform format, rather than spread across a disparate web of systems, mediums, and formats, significantly helps in supporting more compliant data handling practices.
Similarly, leading contact centre technologies are also built to unlock operational visibility – giving managers and team leaders a single, at-a-glance view of all agent activity across the organisation as it unfolds.
This level of operational transparency helps reinforce organisational compliance.
While older contact centre technologies could offer things such as call recording and monitoring, activities like this would usually have to be handled manually. Usually operated by the very agents handling customer enquiries.
This placed undue pressure on contact centre staff, resulting in their attention being split between delivering a top-flight customer experience, while ensuring their every action remained airtight from a compliance perspective.
And when an employee’s focus is torn between customer experience and compliance, it limits their ability to complete either to the best of their ability.
Thankfully, advanced contact centre technologies now exist, with automation capabilities that can monitor, analyse and score every interaction, with no extra effort or resource required - helping to dramatically streamline Quality Assurance processes.
It also gives contact centres a wealth of data to hand if needed to demonstrate compliance to industry regulators, and a similarly comprehensive bank of information on how their agents are performing.
Contact centre owners can then use this information to identify and address any training needs or areas of risk which may be jeopardising their standards of compliance.
The regulatory landscape faced by outbound contact centre teams seemingly gets tougher to navigate with each passing year.
The primary litmus test that outbound campaigns have to pass is that they must avoid being excessively persistent, a nuisance, or some other cause of anxiety or disruption.
Today, regulatory bodies and authorities measure this not just by reports from the public, but also by closely examining metrics such as abandonment rates and the number of ‘silent calls’.
In this regard, the choice of contact centre software you use to drive your outbound campaigns can make an enormous difference to the compliance of said campaigns.
And that’s a difference that can equal thousands of pounds in fines.
Advanced contact software technologies work to conduct more successful outbound campaigns, using intelligent algorithms.
As well as matching the number of outbound calls to a team’s capacity to handle them, automated diallers can also slow down outbound activity in line with customer responses.
If abandonment rates start to climb, the software can scale things back and try at a more suitable hour, helping to keep engagement on target .
Compliance capabilities aren’t always the main sell of leading edge contact centre solution.
But the truth is that remaining compliant - and mitigating other aspects of business risk - can add just as much value as the other revenue streams offered by high-calibre customer experiences.
Plus, in the age where customers are more aware of their rights and vulnerabilities than ever, a devotion to compliance is a worthy value for your brand to have.
Businesses that wish to raise their compliance standards can do so by investing in the right contact centre software can help businesses to raise their compliance standards, by: