Although doubt remains as to exactly when the Protection of Personal Information (PPI) Bill will be passed as law, one thing is certain - organisations need to be ready when it is.
The PPI Bill, submitted before Parliament in October 2009, is still under review. The Bill deals extensively with the way organisations view and manage information, especially the personal information of the people they serve.
Under its law, the responsibility to obtain explicit consent from individuals before any data can be used or stored, lies with the organisation. Furthermore, proof of where the information was obtained and the consent for its particular use needs to be accessible.
Many organisations using contact centre services are already keeping recordings of their agents' interactions with callers for quality purposes, but ensuring that this information is readily obtainable will soon become a necessity.
In light of this new Act, the recorded interactions between the company and the people it deals with will not only serve as evidence against possible fines and imprisonment, but can help assess the impact training has had on staff.
Call centre agents will have to be trained according to the new law's specifications, especially with regards to obtaining and using personal information gathered from callers. Through careful evaluation of how this proposed Act pertains to the business operation, the entire organisation needs to understand how it will impact customer engagement and contact tracking.
For the record...
A good solution to implement is a single multi-channel platform that incorporates both monitoring and recording capabilities, and permits the recording of all critical interactions regardless of media type: phone call, fax, e-mail or Web text chat. Similarly, a single database for managing multimedia recording files can speed the retrieval of interaction data when needed.
As a recording strategy is planned, it is important to note that call flows across the organisation most likely will change over time, and customer interaction needs will change as well based on the evolution of the business and ongoing changes to legislation.
With regards to training employees and agent teams for PPI, an integrated recording/storage framework provides a powerful interface for coaching and scoring, while an integrated platform provides real-time interaction monitoring to view performance across your contact centre and enterprise, including historical reports for continuous improvement.
Ongoing training and mentoring is essential to keep employees apprised of regulatory changes. The recording solution should assist in not only the initial, but ongoing, compliance education programmes. Scoring a recorded interaction such as a product or service order, can demonstrate good faith towards complying with regulations. Unfortunately, doing so remains a significant (and troublesome) need in many customer-driven organisations. When choosing a recording solution, ensure it offers tools to create compliance-based templates that include a date and time stamp for scoring each event.
A key issue to consider is the availability and rapid retrieval of recordings. The company should be able to search for archived recording files using standard attributes, such as the recording's date, time, the user (agent), the workgroup the interaction was assigned to (if applicable), the caller ID, the e-mail sender address, and or other information relevant to the external participant and recorded interaction.
The ability to search by customisable attributes such as these makes it easier, and faster, for organisations to retrieve critical recordings to prove compliance. It can also potentially save the organisation from paying exorbitant fines for non-adherence.
Recording all interactions subject to law serves as a good insurance policy in many ways and shows that the organisation takes compliance seriously, demonstrating its good faith effort to auditors and government officials for any legal issues that may come in to question.
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