"Putting in place call recording ... provides an enormous insight into the nature and professionalism of the service being delivered to customers," argued Direct Response’s Ian Mitchell in an article for the New Year 2005 issue of General Insurance magazine.
Read on for the full story ...
Ian Mitchell of Direct Response points to FSA requirements to have audit trails and how it makes sense for brokers to outsource the recording of telephone calls and emails, and the storage of data.
Regulations and the resulting processes set out by the FSA aren’t something that should be ignored by insurance companies. But while many see them as a cloud, they also bring some silver linings. New processes such as call and email recording will in fact help businesses improve service and competitiveness.
Ridding the market of cowboy players is something FSA regulation aims to achieve. But it’s also about improving communication cycles, offering better service and reducing financial crime, all of which can lead to improved customer confidence. In the same way that consumers know they should choose an ABTA travel company, regulation will provide the same ring of confidence for customers buying insurance.
Unfortunately, the regulations also make as much sense as your average flat-pack instructions – they are wildly open to interpretation and you’re never sure if you’ve got all the right pieces assembled. At the moment if you ask two different people in the FSA you can get two different viewpoints about the meaning of a particular point. There is also some contention in that the FSA say that people must have records of all correspondence regarding the formation of a contract.
So, even with the various deadlines for compliance now here, many companies are unclear of the exact steps they need to take – or whether, in fact, they need to take any at all.
The main implication of the latest round of FSA regulations is the need for an audit trail of communications between the company and customers. Companies will need to produce records extending back two or three years and they will also need to save telephone calls for two or three years.
The benefits of the process are considerable for many firms. Putting in place call recording, for example, provides an enormous insight into the nature and professionalism of the service being delivered to customers. Managers enjoy greater visibility of operators, improved sales techniques, better training facilities, happier customers and greater ROI on their advertising and marketing. Most firms we see are able to make changes to their service based on what they learn, and win extra business as a result.
But installing and managing telephone recording in-house can cost £20K upwards, so the implications to small businesses are huge (but then, so are the costs of being engrossed in a legal battle). Equally important is the issue of storing email communications in such a way that information can be quickly accessed. This is easy for a large company with an IT department, but not so simple for a small company with a handful of employees.
One way of deftly dealing with the problem is to get someone else to worry about your data, voice recording and storage. Outsourcing has hit the mainstream consciousness in a major way, so much so that it became a presidential campaign issue. But it’s not just large companies outsourcing their entire data centres to a mammoth like EDS. Smaller companies are getting used to the idea, as they choose web hosting companies to look after their website or email, and then consider other ways that it can help their business. And lots of this is much closer to home than the high profile outsourcing to distant countries. It’s driven by a desire to get specialist support to solve specific problems.
The advantages of outsourcing IT are clear: why struggle to cope with something you don’t understand and don’t have the in-house resources to tackle, when you can get an expert to do it all for you? The outsource company will also be totally focused on the regulatory developments relevant to that process and keep you informed about those troublesome ‘grey’ areas of understanding. And that expert will have to meet agreed service levels. This service will cost, of course, but probably less than having a person or a team of people employed to keep your data safe. And it will certainly cost you less than getting it wrong.
Outsourcing phone calls may be a little more unusual, but in light of the FSA regulations can be well worth doing. It can cost about a tenth of the price of installing one’s own system to set up, plus a small fee per call. And that means you also don’t have the problem of integrating it into your existing phone network or handling the day-to-day maintenance problems.
It also gives you greater control over any home workers, who can also be linked into the network-based call recording easily. From an auditing perspective, your calls are easy to retrieve using a simple web-based search engine. Once a file is found, you can playback the recording using a standard multimedia PC or you can download the audio file for later analysis. You could even send the audio file as an attachment by email.
On the data side, rather than rely on laborious tape backup to store data, companies can pay a company to provide Wide Area Backup (WAB), which will automatically backup data securely from any device, as long as it is connected to the Internet. Not only does this negate the need to physically backup data, it also means that data is never kept on-site, which is a vital part of any disaster recovery or business continuity plan.
Email can also be a problem – what do you keep and what, if anything, could you discard? Having an outsource company deal with all emails means you don’t have to worry about storing all the emails or how to manage that process in-house. And again, routing the emails offsite automatically provides disaster recovery.
Like buses, regulations tend to all come at once. The FSA insurance regulations are nipping at the heels of the recent mortgage accreditations, so all companies are facing similar voice and data concerns. But with the growing trend towards transparent business practices and corporate governance, ignited by the Enron and Worldcom accounting fracas, regulations and compliance issues are something that no company can choose to ignore. And the ones who embrace and capitalise on these regulations can see real improvements in sales and customer retention.
The one thing you can be sure of with rules and regulations is that they are always going seem to complicate matters – even if their aim is the exact opposite. Outsourcing your voice and data requirements is just one way not only of easing some of that burden, but also adding competitive edge to your business.
Ian Mitchell is a director of outsourcing specialist Direct Response Ltd and helps businesses communicate with customers through voice, data, and call centre services. To find out more about Direct Response please visit its website on www.drltd.com
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telecommunications