There is now the ability of Speech and Voice Analytics software, for example, to help contact agents better understand customer needs, providing instant analysis to improve their performance. This software might be helpful to rate speech conversations through standard scores or providing the agent with a “co-pilot” or “companion” during the call. These tools are aimed at improving human interaction, providing more detail for the agent to help complete transactions and enhance customer experience.  Analytics can also be used for competitor analysis to work out which other brand people mention when buying yours and provide valuable input.  There are many other challenges that may yet be met with AI and we keep abreast of latest technologies for companies for whom telephony is important.

What about the Privacy, Compliance and Ethical challenges of recording calls?

Compliance with GDPR

What data does a company retain about yourself, your transactions or past dealings with them? Complying with GDPR regulations can introduce many difficulties when calls are being recorded. Firstly, when recording calls businesses need to let customers know that the conversation is being recorded. We often place a message saying that all calls are being recorded ‘for quality compliance monitoring and training purposes’. GDPR also gives the right of the callee to request a copy of the recording under subject access request. So, when recording calls, for us there is both the challenge of securing personal data and the need to secure it and if used for analytics, depersonalise it, or redact it. The process of redacting entails extracting any confidential data (like names, companies, phone numbers, emails but also personal preferences or views) from a document or a conversation. We use for this reason supervised machine learning models that are ideal (and fast) for extracting labelled data from a conversation.

Compliance with PCI DSS

If taking credit card payments over the phone, your company will need to be comply with the PCIDSS standard. The certification process is expensive and time consuming and becomes impossible to achieve when you have a hybrid model with some people working from home.

The software that we provide allows a client to key in data on their credit card using the keyboard on their phone, sending all confidential data securely, directly to the bank, bypassing the company’s agents that are not exposed to such data. This will make it extremely easy and less costly for a company to meet the stringent criteria of the PCIDSS standard.