How To Manage Customer Expectations While Conforming to Regulations
Steve Murray, Solutions Director, IP Integration
With the never-ending advancements in consumer tech – such as Alexa, Siri and countless mobile apps –consumers have become increasingly tech-savvy, causing customer expectations to skyrocket. For brands, this is motivation to assess and re-address the customer experience (CX) – making sure that, regardless of evolving customer expectations, a brand’s contact center is ready to play its part in making the customer journey smooth and memorable (for the right reasons).
Compliance as a Cornerstone
For many, the greatest challenge in achieving this is finding the right balance between meeting customer expectations and addressing compliance standards. The likes of Privacy Act, CCPA and CDPA have been implemented to keep both consumers and organizations safe. These compliance standards will continue to evolve to improve and meet the needs of business security standards, as well as influence other states’ discussions on data privacy, making the task of meeting them not just important, but highly sensitive too.
As customers, we have become too complacent with our personal devices and assume that our security is guaranteed through integrated biometric capabilities or pre-authorized accounts. Yet the same isn’t always possible when the technology – such as automation – is used commercially. Indeed, as customers become increasingly digital-first and accustomed to omnichannel approaches, many brands face the challenge of delivering a secure CX, across multiple platforms. So, how can contact centers, as the face (and voice) of brands, find that balance between modern-day CX and regulatory compliance? Here are some ways to do just that:
Pause & Resume Technology
Ecommerce boomed during the pandemic as consumers were forced to look beyond in-person branches to shop, a trend that has only continued. As such, brands need to ensure that customers can make their card payments securely and efficiently on their platform of choice, without being compromised by out-of-date technology.
For many, the answer lies in Pause & Resume solutions. For telephony and omnichannel contacts that require card payments. Pause & Resume – or ‘stop-start’ – recording technology aims to prevent sensitive authentication data and other confidential information from entering the call and screen recording environment, thus allowing sensitive card details to be blocked from recordings across telephony and other media types. It works by automatically stopping the recording of a call or agent screen at the very moment the customer provides their confidential card or bank details.
For our clients at IPI, best practice is adopting a solution which enables the automatic “pausing” and “resuming” of recordings. Automated solutions, like Pauseable, are triggered by events in a workflow or application and require no interaction from the agent to initiate the process. This not only reduces human error, but also allows the agent to keep their full attention on the customer and their needs – enhancing their overall customer journey. The automation ensures information such as card data is never recorded, helping to enable a wide variety of regional, national and international compliance regulations.
Yet Pauseable is just the start of how enhanced technologies can be used to improve CX and compliance. Organizations that want to elevate their Pause & Resume solutions have a range of options and countless solutions that once integrated, make the customer journey even more seamless, without increasing the burden on contact center agents.
Automated Identification & Verification (ID&V)
There is no denying that the process of manually verifying a customer’s identity when they call a contact center can be tiresome and tedious – for the customer and the agent. For the customer, trying to remember one of many passwords, recall your security question and answer, and enter the pin code you set up years ago can be frustrating. For the agent, the process can take away valuable time that you could be spending engaging with a customer and resolving their problem faster.
ID&V tools that use Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) can streamline this. Just as if you were speaking to Siri or Alexa, these solutions can identify and verify an individual just as an agent would or, taking it a stage further, through the uniqueness of their voice. Using voice biometrics, these tools use voice patterns to produce unique identification for every caller, making it easier for organizations to authenticate customers, protect against fraudsters, ensure compliance and streamline the customer journey.
DTMF Suppression
To ensure that organizations are delivering a consistent, secure and streamlined CX across all platforms and enabling customers to share sensitive information – such as card details – on the channel of their choice, omnichannel DTMF Suppression is key. Regarded as the compliance gold standard, Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) Suppression obtains PCI compliance across multiple channels, from phone to web-chat to email.
DTMF suppression works by blocking sensitive data from the customer service agents and any recording that is in place. On the phone, DTMF generates a series of audio signals to mask the input from a caller’s keypad, so customers can input sensitive data without compromising security. For payments, the details only go to the Payment Service Provider and the bank, meaning customers can shop securely on the channel of their choice. In this way DTMF suppression adds an additional layer of security and privacy for confidential information, reassuring the customer and removing another compliance headache for the contact center.
Intent Capture
HubSpot found that 90% of consumers expect an immediate response to a customer support issue, with 60% defining ‘immediate’ as under ten minutes. Yet the only thing worse than being put on hold, is to be passed onto the wrong department at the end of it. It disrupts the customer journey and negatively affects a customer’s impression of that particular brand.
Intent capture enables contact centers to find out why customers are getting in touch by utilizing the likes of AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand the reason for a customer’s call, in real time. Customers are then either routed through to the best skilled team for the query, or to an automated voice bot, or other digital channel option, where they can self-serve securely. Intent capture also provides rich insights to shape future CX. By reviewing and analyzing – through speech analytics – the data captured at the start of the customer’s journey, organizations can detect patterns in the reasons for calling, and work to resolve pain points.
Making Customer Contact Count
Today’s customer expects their favorite brands to deliver a tech-savvy and secure experience. One bad experience with a contact center can be all it takes for a customer to become a detractor and look for a new brand more capable of meeting their needs.
Yet the increase in customer expectations should not make complying to legislation and regulation feel insurmountable. In fact, with the appropriate assistance of the right technology, it is a very reasonable undertaking. For example, Pauseable effortlessly brings automated pause and resume of call and screen into the contact center, matching the needs of customers and relieving a compliance headache. Simple, secure and customer friendly – Pauseable provides contact centers with the anchor they need to begin their journey to better compliance and CX, showing the two can co-exist.