How to accelerate compliance investigations using voice technology

Why compliance has become a significant and growing challenge

There is no denying the financial implications of compliance or regulatory breaches – they cost organizations billions of dollars every year. Businesses are, therefore, motivated to ensure all the rules and policies are adhered to and their actions tracked for good corporate governance and to prove their compliance in the event of an investigation or audit.

he vast number of customer and employee interactions each day means compliance monitoring has become a significant and growing challenge.

Organizations are required to make all call records relating to transactions (even if the final agreement was not completed) accessible upon request by both regulators and customers. This means in-depth record keeping is necessary.

In addition, the requirement of surveillance and monitoring is difficult and time consuming to extract useful information and tag key events for compliance analysis from audio recordings – requiring large teams of people to manually listen to calls that are under investigation or as part of a random selection. With the number of calls increasing and the need to improve the identification of misconduct, there is a growing objective to review more calls or improve the tools to be able to achieve this.

Voice technology enables companies to search for specific terms, phases or interactions over millions of hours of recordings quickly and efficiently. Converting call conversations into text using voice technology is essential for proactive surveillance (relevant with regulation such as Dodd Frank, CPA and MiFID II) with the ability to automatically alert based on rules and policies across the spoken word.

The key benefits of voice technology for compliance analysis

With more than 300 million pages of regulations that businesses must adhere to, it’s impossible to remain compliant without the assistance of technology. Using voice technology to convert all recordings into text means compliance managers can monitor all interactions with the business and ensure regulatory compliance. It's easy to search for regulatory keywords and go straight to the relevant segment in a call if there's an issue.

By tracking all telephone interactions, voice technology can help protect businesses from non-compliance and the resulting fines, lengthy investigations, reputation damage, and reductions in share price and revenues.

How real-time analytics speeds up compliance investigations

Speech analytics is vital for business intelligence, performance improvement, quality assurance and compliance analysis. Traditionally, this has been done post-call using historical data. But this method only identifies issues after they have occurred. Organizations desire is to identify issues in real-time as they occur on calls.

Research by contact center industry analyst firm Call Babel has revealed a growing interest in real-time analytics – with 40% of those surveyed looking to use data within their organization to flag non-compliance issues.

While real-time call analytics do not completely solve compliance problems instantly, they provide an opportunity to highlight issues in real-time. This can trigger additional workflows, which could provide hints direct to an agent's dashboard, for example, or route the call to a supervisor before it escalates.

The financial industry is governed by regulations with strict rules around compliance and procedures to inform the authorities when a compliance breach occurs. Real-time compliance monitoring enables organizations to inform regulators of potential issues in time to avoid additional punishments. The deployment of voice technology helps organizations monitor standards, flag issues and implement data-driven activities to ensure compliance while delivering exceptional customer experiences and showing good corporate governance.

Conclusion: Voice technology is crucial to accelerate compliance investigations

Research conducted in 2019 by a prominent contact center solution provider found that 91% of respondents believed increasing investment in compliance software should be considered a priority in the next year. And 83% of contact center professionals said their organization’s efforts towards customer privacy and private data safety needed to be improved.

Voice technology provides significant efficiency when it comes to compliance monitoring. Transcribing voice data into text is the first step in understanding the content and context of a conversation – and gaining valuable new insights to reduce the risk of regulatory and compliance breaches.

But if the worst happens, voice technology enables organizations to accelerate compliance investigations with accessible customer records – saving time and money, while protecting your brand.