Is Compliance Just a Necessary Evil?

For too many organizations, call compliance is little more than a legal requirement. Some companies will do the bare minimum to satisfy their industry regulations, and only because the law compels them to.

Even though deploying a full-featured compliance platform is proven to be a sound investment, an all-too-common approach is to spend as little as possible on the legislative burden of compliance.

Understandably, companies attempt to save their operational expenditures for R&D and recruiting the best talent. But is it possible we’re not seeing a way to kill multiple birds with one necessary evil?

Enter Microsoft Teams

As soon as your company started using Microsoft Teams, it was clear that benefits like audio and video meetings, multi-device compatibility, and effortless file-sharing were going to revolutionize your call center.

But how were you supposed to record all those different media types across a wide variety of devices and locations? All this hassle just to stay legally compliant was sure to be costly and clunky.

Or not. It turns out Microsoft Teams can have all of its activity, audio, and video recorded, securely and compliantly using the Cloud. Deployment is fast, and all those multiple Teams-enabled devices are easy to capture no matter where they are.

But there’s more than just a silver lining to using a cloud-based compliance platform. The high volume of data coming from your Team’s engagements can be converted into market research tapped directly from your customer base, increased agent performance, and new streams of revenue. Let’s take a look at what happens when you don’t settle for mere call compliance.

1. Microsoft Teams Call Compliance Saves Money

It might sound preachy to say “compliance laws exist for a reason”. But the simple fact of the matter is that compliance laws protect consumers and companies. Logically, if consumer protection is enforced by a compliance law, whatever action that law mandates for companies provide a process for both parties to do business safely. In short, if everybody does their part, nobody gets hurt, everybody gets what they want.

Investing no more than the minimum effort in a compliance recording system for your Microsoft Teams Network is an invitation to failure. The amount of money saved will be vastly overshadowed by the money spent on exposed customer data because of your lax security efforts.

Say, for example, your Teams-based call center has basic recording capabilities, but your recordings are not encrypted when stored. Now, say a cyber thief infiltrates your network and steals credit card numbers from your call recordings.

At that point, there’s no shortage of people who can sue you, starting with your customers, then the credit card companies, and for the grand finale, your government.

Between the damages and legal fees you’ll incur, your company might have to close its doors. There’s a good reason to invest in a robust call recording platform.

Doesn’t Microsoft Teams record meetings for me?

Yes, Microsoft Teams does record your meetings, but not compliantly. The best way to protect your Microsoft Teams recordings is through a cloud-based call recording platform that uses a global storage network with military-grade encryption.

That’s not a sales pitch; that’s the standard that will protect your bottom line. And there are many other reasons other than meeting compliance requirements that should convince you to invest in this kind of call recording platform.

2. You’ll Modernize Your Workforce Through Recording Teams Meetings

No matter what industry you’re in, if you’re using Microsoft Teams to engage with your customers, that means you have the tools to speak face-to-face and share files. Your call center agents are managing more activity in every customer interaction than ever before.

You should capture all the data you can from every Microsoft Teams interaction so that you can get a feel for what constitutes a successful call.

Perhaps some on-screen processes your agents must perform are causing bottlenecks. This is visible when you use agent desktop recording. Maybe some agents need to work on their presentation skills now that they’re visible to the customer. You can check how they come off if you also record the call video.

Learn what parts of your visual presentations are engaging, helpful, confusing, or boring to your customers. This vital data helps you hone your customer-facing staff into a finely-tuned, well-oiled success machine.

The bottom line, call recordings are proven to be an incredible tool for improving workforce performance and raising customer satisfaction levels. Microsoft Teams offers more data angles than most UC platforms, and it’s a smart move to leverage that data to your advantage.

3. The Voice of the Customer Is Market Research

Previously we talked about that company that skimped on call recording to pay for other needs like research and development. Your company wants to know what product to put out next or what changes your customers want, but consultants are costly, and satisfaction surveys are often ignored.

What if you could tap into the “Voice of Your Customer” directly? Instead of paying consultants or basing your decisions on second-hand surveys, why not let your compliance platform divulge those secrets directly from your call volume?

When your customer engages with your agents, there’s a hidden gold mine of data in that conversation. All you need are the tools to detect words and measure emotional responses.

Back before Microsoft Teams even existed, companies used a flawed process called random sampling to discern customer sentiment. It was a step in the right direction, but it could only analyze a minimal number of calls every week.

Enter analytics. Modern analytics engines are hungry for data. Microsoft Teams can output an incredible amount of data for your analytics engine process and organize it for your review. You’ll look for keywords and phrases, mentions of your competitors, recurring support requests, and much more. You’ll track emotional trends with a broad sweep across your entire call volume, or you’ll tighten the focus to a single agent or department.

This type of customer service modernization repositions your mindset from reactive to predictive. It will help you spot new revenue opportunities, adjust your pitches for a wide array of target audiences, and wisely choose where to spend your OpEx.

4. Quality and Training Purposes

Historically, call centers have high turnover rates, with employees either moving on to new jobs within the company or finding a position in another organization. This makes training new employees a very difficult task because it consumes time and human resources. You need your managers to manage, but so often they pull double duty as trainers.

Do we mean it when we say, “this call is being recorded for quality and training purposes”? Microsoft Teams is capable of showing you everything that goes on during an interaction, voice, video, and application sharing.

This means that you don’t have to spend a long time forming a training curriculum because you have examples of what to do and what not to do when working for your company. Additionally, if you capture your agents’ screens during calls, you’ll provide instruction for the proprietary software your sales and support teams are using.

Hands-on instruction is a risk with brand new employees. However, reviewing successful and unsuccessful interactions provides almost all of the benefits with none of the risks of a hands-on experience. Let your call recording platform reduce the time and cost spent training new agents by using the library of great examples it’s already providing you.

And what about those agents that have been at the job for a while but are hitting lackluster performance scores? Isolate the calls of those agents and find out where they need coaching to unleash greater performances.

New employees often need more training in proprietary software practices or suffer from some beginner issues like chattiness or screen distraction. This is another reason it’s vital to extract as much data from your Microsoft Teams meetings as you can.

5. AI Makes Impossible Tasks Possible

Your Microsoft Teams recordings can contain data that needs to be removed by law (credit cards, Social Security and national ID numbers, etc). Purging all those sensitive numbers from your recordings can be a tricky task.

Often, companies will give the agent control to stop and restart recordings when sensitive numbers are being spoken during a call. That practice works but leaves the company vulnerable to agent error.

Agents usually manage several things on the screen at once, and it’s easy for the recording to suffer due to human error. Either the number doesn’t get redacted, or the recording doesn’t get restarted.

On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence allows us to reduce human error and increase agent focus on the customer. Your Microsoft Teams recording platform should be able to recognize number strings and automatically redact them from every interaction, not only from the call audio but from video and transcripts. This maximizes your security compliance and boosts agent performance.

Compliance Recording: a Need and a Benefit

Hopefully, this article has persuaded some to change how they look at call compliance, especially Microsoft Teams users, because they are in a perfect position to leverage data from their Teams’ interactions and reap tangible benefits from compliance recording.