How to improve call compliance ahead of the new consumer duty

If you work in the FSI, no doubt you’ve heard plenty about the new Consumer Duty rules due to come into effect at the end of July. The time has come to start preparing, but what does it actually mean in terms of your contact centre?

The new rules require businesses to put the consumers’ best interests at the heart of what they do. This means positive NPS scores will no longer be the yardstick for successful consumer interactions. The customer experience will be directly linked to how effectively you can serve their needs and achieve positive outcomes… and it all starts with a 'ring ring'.

The bar for FSIs is low. Our Moments That Matter research found that 38% of customers say speaking to automated voices is their leading source of frustration with FSIs and, shockingly, 19% of customers are waiting almost 30 minutes before FSIs even pick up the phone.

In this blog, we’ll provide handy tips on how to improve call compliance and customer experiences ahead of the new Consumer Duty. Most importantly, we’ll outline how to avoid ending up in hot water by having the right processes and compliance measures in place before the new Consumer Duty goes live.

What is call compliance?

First of all, let’s get something really clear, what exactly is call compliance? Contact centre compliance is defined as making sure agents adhere to certain legal and regulatory requirements on inbound and outbound calls.

The rules for call centre compliance differ from country to country and, given that failing to follow them can lead to large fines and reputation damage, it’s important to take the time to understand the rules relevant to your country.

What is the new Consumer Duty?

In the UK, the new Consumer Duty will come into force in July 2023 for new and existing products, and as of July 2024, this will also be applied to existing products as well as those no longer available but still in use.

Consumer Duty sets out to improve customer care and help ensure customers always end up with the right financial products and services depending on their specific needs and requirements. The primary focus of the new Consumer Duty is to ensure agents in the FSI space truly get to grips with what customers need and want and do everything they can to guarantee customers get the best possible outcomes.

To achieve this, FSIs must consider the outcome of every action they take from the customer's point of view – considering their needs, characteristics, and objectives – at every stage of the customer journey.

As well as working to deliver 'good outcomes' for all customers, as outlined under Principle 12, you must demonstrate that you understand those outcomes, actively monitor them, and can provide evidence that all agents are delivering the best outcomes for customers to meet the new standard. This will soon become a very time-consuming and manual task without the right tools and technologies in place.

How to improve call compliance to comply with new consumer duty

While consumers increasingly rely on digital channels for everyday browsing of financial products and services, when it comes to big decisions, they want to speak to a person. This makes calls one of your most powerful tools.

And yet, many businesses don’t have the tech solutions and tools in place to improve their call compliance and enhance the customer experience. Contact centres that want to analyse and understand customer frustrations, and understand where call centre conversations break down, will need to invest in call intelligence software.

Here are some of the ways call intelligence helps improve your call compliance.

Monitor all your calls, at scale

How many calls do you monitor a month? Five? Ten? Given that your contact centre handles hundreds, if not thousands of calls, every single day, that’s a pretty minor sample size and it doesn’t paint a clear picture of what’s happening on every call.

Call tracking and intelligence tools automatically monitor every call, inbound and outbound, extracting insights at scale to make sure you’re always on the front foot. It makes it quick and easy to spot what is and isn’t working and, more importantly, whether agents are asking the right questions and delivering the best outcomes.

Provide tailored training

With every call logged and analysed, you can start to extract those golden nuggets of information from your best calls to enhance your training across the board. Discover the keywords and phrases that lead to positive outcomes, and weave these into your scripts and coaching, to create your very own team of all-star agents.

This goes beyond your initial training programme, regularly taking stock of customer outcomes paves the way for continuous coaching and improvement. On the flip side, call monitoring also enables you to quickly identify when agents aren’t adhering to scripts or asking the right questions. Having this intel means you can quickly put corrective measures in place to ensure agents always hit the mark and deliver the best possible outcomes for customers.

Implement quality control

If you’re expected to provide good outcomes, you need to put some kind of quality control in place. In addition to extracting insights for your scripts, you can also monitor calls to ensure your agents provide required disclosures, such as opt-out instructions, and flag any language that could be considered misleading or deceptive. This will ensure everybody follows proper compliance procedures and minimise the possibility of complaints or unsuitable outcomes for customers.

Get real-time compliance notifications

With call intelligence, you can make use of real-time call monitoring to provide real-time compliance notifications to your agents, alerting them if they are at risk of violating regulations. You can create prompts that give your agents a nudge if they’ve forgotten to provide required disclosures or if a particular word is said that’s likely to raise a red flag. This can go a long way to providing better experiences for your customers and keeping your contact centre out of hot water.

Want to get ahead and make sure you’re ready and raring to go when the new consumer duty is introduced? Start a conversation with us today to find out how we can help.