Businesses that must adhere to compliance regulations have unique challenges when it comes to monitoring customer interactions. Healthcare-focused contact centers, for example, must ensure their agent-customer interactions abide by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Any contact center dealing with credit card holders who share their data must abide by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). Other regulations abound as well, and they put extra pressure on those call centers that have to keep compliance measurements in mind at all times. Here is where interactive voice response (IVR) systems and IVR monitoring solutions are critical for such businesses.

IVR Systems and Compliance

IVR systems themselves have measures to ensure various forms of compliance. Let’s take the PCI example. When a customer calls a contact center to transmit credit card information, that business must ensure security beginning in the instance that customer gives his or her information either to a live agent or plugs it into an IVR system. Employees must comply with PCI if they are interacting through any channel with credit card data – a much more risky process than having the customer go through an automated system. Because IVR systems allow users to make automated payments over the phone without interacting with live people, the technology ensures that the payments are PCI compliant and the contact center stays within the guidelines of the PCI regulation.

Such an IVR system can only do its job and guarantee compliance for a contact center if it’s up and running. This is where IVR monitoring comes in.

IVR Monitoring and Compliance

IVR monitoring is a tool that keeps tabs on an IVR system in order to generate alerts when something goes down or wrong. IVR monitoring includes testing that can be set to perform at certain intervals to test the system frequently over a long period of time. It monitors the uptime of the automated call system, ensuring IVR systems stay glitch-free and customer interactions stay compliant as a result of the IVR itself remaining online.

In a scenario in which contact center managers are performing real-time call monitoring to try to make sure that there haven’t been any compliance violations or series of interactions that could be flagged as non-compliant, those managers will lose valuable data if the IVR suffers an incident. They may lose data critical to ensuring their centers stay compliant. IVR monitoring ensures managers can keep track of when and how their IVR is disconnecting or not responding properly so they can keep their businesses in line with the law.

IVR systems are one of the crucial tools contact centers use to stay compliant, but sometimes they suffer outages or downtime just like any other technological system. IVR monitoring can not only alert the right people at the right time that something is amiss in your IVR system, it can help you save critical data and your compliance status as a whole. TelcoAlert provides IVR monitoring services that help businesses and contact centers maintain peace of mind about their compliance needs. Reach out to us to discover how we can help you.