What is speech analytics?

Speech analytics is a technology that processes and uploads contact center call recordings to a web interface that transcribes, scans and evaluates conversations between consumers and agents to improve call quality and performance. The most sophisticated versions of speech analytics refine this process to give managers a real-time dashboard that scores every call and quickly identifies red flags.

For the collections industry, this technology provides more than quality control—it’s the first line of defense against potential compliance violations.

Using Speech Analytics to Reduce Compliance Exposure

If all speech analytics did for the collections industry was to help mitigate risk against class-action lawsuits and government fines, it would be worth deploying. The reality is, it does much more. We’ll discuss the performance benefits in a future article, but let’s not undersell the overwhelming value it brings in limiting a company’s exposure risk .

The collection industry faces a litany of legal hurdles every day. The Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA), which protects consumers against abusive, unfair, or deceptive collection methods, can be a minefield for agents to navigate. The TCPA (Telephone Consumers Protection Act), often referred to as robocall protection, regulates how a business dials a consumer and whether they have consent to do so.

Finally, when collecting payments, contact centers must maintain strict Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards to keep credit card information secure.

Monitoring and Recording Calls is Essential—But Has Limitations

Even recording calls is more about preserving evidence should a complaint arise than about preventing a FDCPA or CFPB violation from occurring. It’s very important to have those call recordings, but reviewing files for identifying conversations that might expose your company to compliance violations is not realistic. a manual process that takes place in real time. can sometimes be like looking for a needle in a haystack. On even the most organized storage files, it might take hours to locate a specific call recording where a potential violation may have occurred.

How Speech Analytics Levels the Playing Field

This is where speech analytics can level the playing field. It takes all these conversations between debtors and collectors and filters, categorizes, scores, and visually displays them in a dashboard. In an industry so heavily scrutinized and litigated, speech analytics is a tool that does more than put out fires—it takes away the matches.  

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