5 compliance features your contact center software should have

There are a lot of factors to consider when selecting a contact center solution, and compliance is no doubt one of the most important ones.

A mainstay of contact center software is the ability to record calls—and with call recording comes the need for you to consider data security and privacy as well as regulatory compliance.

Recording calls in your contact center is no longer simply a "nice-to-have," not least because of the wide range of benefits it gives you, including gaining insight into customer inquiries, coaching your agents, and call quality assurance.

But for contact center teams that handle large amounts of sensitive customer data, there's an added challenge: how can they keep these customer conversations and data secure?

Whether you are evaluating your current contact center software or looking for something new, make sure it includes these five compliance features related to call recording:

1. Automatic notifications
2. Automatic pausing
3. Manual pausing
4. Exception list
5. Configurable retention policies

But first, let's look at what "compliance" means in this context.

What is compliance in a contact center?

The most common areas of compliance related to a contact center are:

• Protecting customer data due to GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA and other similar laws

• Protecting payment data for PCI compliance or similar

• Call recording laws

• Do Not Call Lists or Registries and spam call regulations if you make outbound calls

In order to figure out which areas will apply to your contact center, you’ll need to consider a few different things, like:

• the industry or industries you operate within,

• what type of information is being shared with you by your customers and,

• where your business and customers are located.

Why is compliance important in a contact center?

Staying compliant with all the regulations that apply to your specific business helps you make sure that you don't jeopardize operations vital to your business (such as taking payments) or get your company in trouble with the law—both of which could have significant consequences in the form of time and money.

And of course, issues with contact center or call center compliance can also lead to a loss of trust from your customers, which damages your company's brand in the long term and would lead to you having to spend significant resources to repair your brand reputation.

5 compliance features to look for in contact center software

1. Automatic notifications

Automatic recording notifications are basically a given at this point. You can't call into a contact center without first being greeted by, "This call is being recorded.."

With that being said, it is important to make sure you’ll have access to this feature when choosing a provider and explore how it works in detail.

Common options include choosing between a set of prerecorded options as well as the ability to record and upload your own. Uploading your own can be a great option for businesses who want to include a personal touch unique to their business.

This is also important because it allows you to include the crucial information of giving a customer directions on how they can opt-out of call recording. For example, in Dialpad Ai Contact Center, you can toggle this on and off, and upload custom messages easily in your online account:

2. Automatic pausing

Exchanging sensitive information over the phone is actually a very common occurrence in most contact centers.

Whether gathering your customer's contact information or payment details, you need to make sure that certain data isn't recorded.

To do that, your cloud contact center software should include the option to automatically pause recording when you’re discussing sensitive information—which leaves less room for human error… and helps you avoid compliance issues.

3. Manual pausing

Sometimes sensitive information comes up at unexpected times, and automatic pausing isn't always enough.

Your contact center software should give agents the ability to manually pause recording when they need to—and make it as easy as possible.

In Dialpad, we have built-in artificial intelligence that powers our unique features like real-time transcription and recordings. Agents can simply hit the button to manually turn it off.

4. Exception list

No matter where you do business, there are likely calls that shouldn't be recorded.

One common example is based on the call's origin—by law, calls coming from certain states should never be recorded.

That is why another helpful feature your contact center software should have is an “exception list.”

An exception list allows you to add area codes that can be automatically excluded from recording. So, whether you’re navigating all-party consent states or GDPR, you can feel safe knowing you won't have to worry about forgetting to pause the recording.

Here’s a look at how you can set this up in Dialpad Ai Contact Center. Just add your area codes and you’re good to go:

With Dialpad, you also have the option to record only the agent's side of the conversation for locations on your exception list, which means you still have some ability to coach or audit calls from these locations if you want.

5. Configurable retention policies

The last compliance feature you want to look for will be the ability to have configurable retention policies.

There are three main types of configuration options to look for:

• Customization based on specific contact centers or departments,

• Customizable durations, and

• Customization based on data type.

Different jurisdictions and industries may have specific requirements around retention, so make sure your software has options that suit your business’ specific needs.

With Dialpad, we not only provide the ability for customers to record their calls, but also transcribe them. (At no extra cost to you!)

This means we can provide some additional helpful compliance features to you as well as give you the ability to unlock all those rich insights contained in your customer conversations by making your voice data searchable and quantifiable.

Here are a few of those additional compliance features:

• Automatic PII detection

Whether you’re sharing your recordings or transcripts for coaching or kudos in Dialpad, you can feel secure that you aren't sharing information you shouldn't. When someone wants to share a link, we can automatically detect if the conversation contains a credit card number or other potentially sensitive number (such as a Social Security Number):

• Sharing controls

Dialpad also offers the ability to make each sharing link accessible to everyone—or only those within your organization. Plus, you can revoke these sharing links at any time to make them inaccessible going forward:

• Automatic agent notification detection

There are a variety of use cases where automatic recording notifications just don't cut it—or just aren’t great.

For example, you might be running an outbound contact center and don't want people to automatically hang up on you because they mistakenly think your pre-recorded “This call is being recorded” notification means your call is spam.

In cases like these, you might prefer to have your agents make the notification themselves instead. But how can you make sure your agents are remembering to do this?

One neat thing Dialpad can do is automatically detect if your agents are following your guidelines by notifying your customers of the recording—and help you make sure you don't run into any compliance problems.

You’ll be able to see these under your call summaries’ #Moments tab (where you can also get a quick overview of things like interesting questions and sentiment):

6. AI-assisted QA

With the sheer number of calls placed into a contact center across all your agents, it’s very difficult to review calls for compliance and consistently provide objective feedback in a way that will help agents succeed.

Dialpad's Ai Scorecards help our contact center supervisors and agents maintain compliance and pinpoint specific behaviors more easily. Supervisors and admins can easily create a QA Scorecard right from their online dashboard in Dialpad:

As the agents are handling calls, Dialpad Ai listens to each interaction and automatically suggests when the scorecard behavior is met.

For example, the scorecard behavior might be “Agent notified the caller that the call was being recorded.” If the agent did indeed do this, then whoever grades that call will immediately see that the activity was completed, without having to listen to the entire call recording or read the transcript.

This allows contact center teams to scale compliance and QA reviews across a much wider range of calls than would otherwise be possible—in turn, this means more effective agents, higher adherence rates, and reduced compliance risk.

Contact center compliance: Use AI to empower your agents while staying compliant and keeping your data secure

From empowering supervisors to oversee multiple active calls and agents more effectively, to uncovering insights that help improve training, we're only scratching the surface of the benefits of AI.

How can your contact center use features like real-time transcriptions and sentiment analysis to improve performance and provide a better customer experience?