Customer service can be a tightrope walk for your support agents. They need to showcase your brand’s unique voice in customer interactions while maintaining contact center compliance.

Every piece of information either about your business or your customer has to be handled with due diligence and must follow the regulatory standards for data protection rigorously.

But, is contact center compliance limited to security and privacy?

Certainly not. Support teams face the added challenge of keeping your brand’s perception healthy by following the brand guidelines consistently. As much as it is a treasure trove for brands to develop lasting customer relationships, social media poses serious reputational risks if your consumers are discontent with your customer service.

If your service leaves people disappointed and they decide to vent on social media or review sites, it could put off potential customers, leads, talent, and investors. Research shows that 82% of people are less likely to use a business after reading negative online reviews.

Why is contact center compliance important?

There are two primary reasons why contact center compliance is vital to the health of a business and its customers.

Security and privacy

Modern customers prefer the online route for interacting with brands. The pandemic has further accelerated digital transactions by three times.

However, digital spaces are susceptible to data theft, privacy breaches, and other security compromises. Customer consent is another factor that weighs in a consumer’s right to privacy of their personal information, giving them the long-pending opportunity to seize control of their own information. Compliance with global data protection and security protocols will establish a culture of due diligence that takes care of sensitive information involving your company and its customers.

Quality assurance

Quality assurance is an internal measure of call center compliance that companies follow. It allows customer service managers to monitor customer interactions and evaluate them for quality, speed, responsiveness, and adherence to guidelines.

Top 4 mistakes that affect contact center compliance and quality

Quality assurance keeps your contact center vigilant about support risks that come at a great cost to the company. Here are a few support mistakes to avoid for maintaining the quality compliance of your customer service teams.

Neglecting negative feedback: ignoring negative feedback can result in poor brand perception. When a company chooses to acknowledge positive mentions and ignores valid criticism, it erodes the trust customers have in them. It also indicates the company’s lack of willingness to take feedback seriously.
Inadequate agent training and information repositories: agents are empowered to offer support to their best ability only when the company provides them with every resource needed to make their job simpler and contextual to the customers.
Lack of processes to handle reputational risks: PR risks need to be constantly monitored and prioritized as and when they occur. Every company requires a set procedure for crisis management to take control of the situation diligently without passing the buck around.
Ambiguous brand compliance policies: the lack of clear-cut business guidelines and brand compliance policies is another mistake that you need to avoid. If your support agents are unaware of compliance and regulatory policies, their adoption is stunted, which can lead to brand risks like data protection and contractual breaches.

Reduce your customer service risks with high contact center compliance standards

Meeting all regulatory compliances for contact centers is a bare-minimum exercise that companies should follow. Securing your support function with all the prescribed data protection certificates will help process your customer information in a safer and legal environment.

Contact center compliance and certification checklist

Here are some important compliance measures that contact centers need to meet to reduce customer service risks.

Your contact center compliance checklist also needs standards for network and workplace security. You can reinforce these by deploying firewalls, compliance management platforms, SSO and password maintenance systems, anti-virus software, and VPN.

8 definitive steps to monitoring agent-customer interactions for quality and compliance

The way agents interact with customers is vital to earning their trust and sense of belonging with your company. Beyond your products and services, having a “human” customer service helps create a deeper customer relationship.

1. Train agents to anticipate or face scenarios out of the normal

Equip your agents to deal with challenging situations they don’t face on a typical day. Train them to keep a contingency plan if support interactions indicate that a customer is disgruntled or near churn, instilling habits such as the following:

Onboard agents with the proper culture training that puts customer satisfaction over business outcomes.
Sensitize agents to customer problems, so they are emotionally equipped to handle them objectively while also empathizing with their pain points.
Deploy guided training that runs different support scenarios to prepare your agents for a wide range of customer issues.

2. Study your customers’ background information before interacting with them

To improve your customer support quality, agents need to be proactive and understand the context behind every customer interaction. Deploy a system that allows agents to quickly study historical interactions and make educated decisions based on customers’ explicit and implicit preferences. The system should allow agents to manage customer experience from a single, unified platform.

3. Audit your agent’s responses for quality and compliance

Perform timely and continual audits of your agent interactions to make sure they’re adhering to the brand voice and also suggesting the best courses of action to the customer. Help them introspect and fine-tune their approach to get better at handling customers progressively.

Approval workflows: Create workflows to ensure brand-approved messages for special cases and loop the rejected messages back to the agent for ongoing performance improvements.
CSAT and NPS scores: Record customers’ feedback through post-resolution surveys and online reviews to calculate NPS scores and CSAT ratings. Review your product offerings and your approach to customer support after identifying the roadblocks that customers face.
Customer journey: Audit every agent action throughout a customer journey and customize training programs based on their limitations.

4. Proactively engage on issues around downtimes and security

Earn your customers’ trust by being forthcoming about potential issues on your company’s end. Trigger proactive messages when there are downtimes and signs of security issues, rather than trying to ride out the storm.

Cut through the noise by configuring alerts for:

5. Handle crisis communication with a sense of urgency

Prioritize high-risk interactions that require assurances and speedy resolutions. Follow a well-planned escalation workflow when such instances occur. Set up a crisis communication panel to ensure there are no PR problems.

Another way to do it is by deploying an FAQ bot to answer sensitive and crisis-related questions from customers right away. You can also manage escalations and complaints by building intuitive workflows in a complaint management engine as shown below:

6. Add intelligence and credibility to your voice support strategy

With digital transformation, asynchronous customer care has taken the spotlight away from traditional support channels. But it takes a call or any form of voice interaction to resolve specific customer issues, which involves technicalities and prolonged agent guidance. The best way to implement a smart call center strategy is to bolster voice as a support channel with modern insights and tracking mechanisms.

Requirements of a modern call center compliance framework

Deploy a VoIP system for better scalability and flexibility
VoIP (voice over internet protocol) systems are a considerable step up from conventional telephone networks as the customer data doesn’t reside in an analog silo. VoIP offers more call routing mechanisms for agent productivity and gives immense visibility into your call center performance. VoIP systems also let you scale your support or make operational changes without going against the run of play.
Leverage integrated cloud telephony for a unified experience
Integrate your cloud telephony system with an omnichannel customer experience tool so that context doesn’t slip through the cracks. With this, your agents can understand customer intent and preferences through their interactions on other channels and provide a coherent, unified customer experience.
Reduce call volume and wait times with IVR
Set up automated self-serve paths through IVR (interactive voice response) telephony to enable customers to record their grievances for a call-back instead of waiting in long queues. IVR can also collect information about the customer issue with automated prompts, and gracefully route the call to the right human agent.

7. Leverage AI and automation to avoid brand risks

AI and automation are known to improve agent productivity by taking up recurring processes and easing the workload. But they’re also vital in securing your business from customer service risks.

Deploy troubleshooting prompts to reduce human error – Help your agents address customer queries through step-by-step prompts by configuring guided workflows.
Use AI-generated prompts while communicating brand messages – Make sure your agents use brand-appropriate verbiage while responding to risk-related queries.
Set up FAQ bots that ring in 24/7 support – Leverage FAQ bots to deliver accurate information and answers from your knowledge base to customers, even without the need for a live agent.
Configure rules to detect customer intent – Prioritize social media posts and other customer interactions with your brand that need urgent attention by setting up rules to detect intent.

8. Track brand mentions with social listening

Mitigate future risks by monitoring the perception of your brand on social media. Social listening helps you pay special attention to posts that might need your intervention to avoid bad PR. You can either manually scour through social media channels or aggregate data from multiple support channels through an omnichannel customer care console.

Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management platform integrates social listening, customer care, workforce management, and other customer-facing functions of a business to deliver delight through every stage of a customer life cycle.

Proven ways to derive enterprise-grade insights from social listening:

Get invaluable brand insights from channels beyond support, such as customer reviews on Yelp and Trustpilot.
Prioritize social media posts that might affect brand health by assessing customer sentiment through AI.
Consolidate customer messages and public posts by augmenting your social listening strategy with high-impact keywords.

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