How much would you pay to be able to measure metrics across every call made to and from your contact center? Human transcription costs about $1.00 – $1.50 per minute of audio. This delivers an accurate transcript of all voices in the recording.

Calculating Compliance Risks

Let’s say you have 50 agents, and they do about 3 hours of calls per day in a 40-hour week.

3 x 5 x 4 x 50 = 3,000 hours of audio per month

At $1 per minute, that’s $180,000 per month, to produce transcripts totaling 3,000 hours, which must then be searched against to look for evidence of compliance risks. But how else do you “guarantee” compliance to regulations if you’re not assessing every call? More specifically, how do you create a monitoring program to catch mistakes early and correct them through coaching or re-training? Do you really want to wait for customers to file complaints with regulators (or on social media!), and find out the hard way?

The High Cost of Non-Compliance

Producing monthly interaction recording transcripts can be expensive, but as we’ve seen in recent years, fines assessed for non-compliance can be much steeper than that. Penalties from banks for non-compliance under PCI regulations can reach $500,000. Civil penalties for HIPAA violations can reach $1.5 million per year, and violators may be subject to criminal penalties as well. And the debt-collections industry saw a $3.2 million penalty assessed against a single service provider in 2013 under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.

A Better Way to Achieve Compliance

Contact centers clearly can’t afford to do nothing. But transcribing every call is a huge expense. And using supervisors or quality managers to listen to every call is impractical as well. It can be faster to have a supervisor review a call (as opposed to sending a recording for transcription), but this method is typically used for quality management and coaching purposes (by ‘sampling’ typical or important call types) rather than compliance. And when you factor in the cost of the supervisor’s time, this method is even more expensive.

Speech Analytics in the Contact Center

Speech Analytics provides the answer. At prices that are a fraction of traditional transcription ($1 – $2 per hour rather than per minute), speech analytics technology can provide speech-to-text and search tools that allow for continuous monitoring of compliance to various regulations. This type of automation is an ideal application for speech analytics, since a software-based scan of words or phrases can be performed very cost-effectively. In the same example used above, the cost to use speech analytics can be greatly reduced.

$3K – $6K per month 1/30th to 1/60th the cost of a “brute force” transcript analysis

Automated and manual searches are built right into the speech-to-text application and can provide up-to-the-minute reporting (and reviewing tools) on recordings where a violation may have occurred.

Speech Analytics = Improved Efficiency & Performance

Speech Analytics, employed in this way, is highly complementary to existing quality management programs. Speech Analytics can provide the compliance-checking and other ‘coarse’ searches:

• Scanning calls for indicators about customer experience
• Call drivers
• Churn or loyalty indicators
• and more!

At the same time, quality managers and supervisors can employ traditional QA – including sampling of “high value” calls – for coaching opportunities and training needs on more subtle qualities, like sales or people skills. Using Speech Analytics combined with Traditional QA is an excellent method of prevention and proactive management for high quality, positive customer experiences, and regulatory compliance. Download our white paper, Blending Speech Analytics with Traditional Quality Management, for more on the value of speech analytics in today’s contact center.