Contact Center

The Importance of Regulatory Compliance in Business

All organizations must adhere to a set of guidelines, rules, and regulations that are specific to their industry as part of their operations. Violation of these standard regulations often results in lawsuits, federal fines, and social media backlash. But compliance is often a moving target. Government regulations change. Best practices evolve to meet changing technology.

To maintain compliance and avoid putting your brand at risk, organizations have to understand the ever-changing regulatory environment and monitor changes closely. You must also adapt, and any business partners you entrust with customer data have to update their protocols, training, and technologies accordingly. Here’s what you need to know about why this is so important to businesses and customers.

What Is Regulatory Compliance?

Regulatory compliance is having a consistent standard of adherence to:

Laws established by government agencies
Industry-specific regulations
Guidelines and best practices for your industry
Regulations established by a certifying entity

Depending on your industry, these regulations can vary widely. For example, depending on your industry, you may be most focused on varying types of compliance:

HIPAA for Healthcare. HIPAA requirements apply to private practice, hospitals, and treatment centers.
FERPA for Education. FERPA regulation applies to universities, trade schools, private and public schools.
PCI Compliance. PCI is relevant for any business that handles credit card payments. PCI compliant companies include eCommerce, Brick-and-Mortar, Online Software, and Service Providers.
SOC 2 Compliance. SOC 2 governs businesses that handle customer information. SOC 2 compliance applies to any organization that collects customer information in any capacity.

And these regulations not only apply to the company itself. Any business associates, partners or other third parties with access to protected information must be equally compliant.

Why is Regulatory Compliance Important?

Regulatory compliance ensures your organization is able to mitigate risks, and continues to meet qualifications. Compliant companies and those who work with them can run at peak performance, saving you costs while keeping customer data safe and satisfied with their brand experience.

What Are the Benefits of Compliance?

Improved customer trust

Companies who prioritize compliance—and demonstrate that to their customers—earn customer trust. Customers who can trust a company or brand spend more, purchase more frequently and also tell (on average) more people about their experience with the company. After all, customers want to work with and purchase from brands they can trust—so if you earn their trust, you can directly impact your bottom line.

A culture of compliance

Companies who prioritize compliance send a message to employees about the importance of complying with regulatory statutes. As a result, employees have more incentive to be mindful about their own participation in compliance and are more engaged in compliance procedures.

Cleaner data

Clean data is essential for delivering exceptional customer experiences, and yet, so many companies overlook this benefit when prioritizing compliance. In order to deliver a great customer experience with personalized and effective experiences, you need to be confident in your data. Compliant companies have systems in place to ensure data is collected, analyzed and stored accurately, allowing you to be more effective in your marketing and customer experiences.

Efficiency and scalability

Being compliant allows you to be more efficient and scalable with your processes. How so? Compliant companies are able to streamline their processes, while still being confident that customer data is safely and accurately stored. As a result, you can maximize your efficiency while delighting customers—and keeping their data safe.

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How Do Global Response’s Compliance Services Stand Out from Other Call Center Outsourcing Companies?

Your call center partner should be your ally in your compliance efforts. Here are just some ways that Global Response delivers on its promises.

At a basic level, firewall adjustments, system updates, and encryption are some of the resources available to ensure a call center is fully compliant. Global Response goes beyond the basics:

Fully integrated technology, including a customer relationship management system that balanced security with accessibility and delivers the right customer experience.
Customized call center workflows that minimize the number of interactive checkpoints necessary for resolution. Because of this, you have greater control over the information generated and shared during the customer service process.
Industry-leading hiring, training, and culture-building programs to ensure that every brand specialist managing customer interactions is not only compliant but also empathic, mindful and passionate about your brand.

Beyond generic compliance, let’s look at Global Response’s industry-specific knowledge, experience and certification across several important industry verticals and compliance types.

HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is a national legislation that sets data privacy and security provisions for protecting medical information in businesses where medical information is stored.

Global Response has state-of-the-art systems and infrastructure in place to protect your health-related business. And while you may or may not give your HIPAA call center access to actual medical records based on HIPAA need-to-know guidelines, it helps to have a skilled HIPAA compliant customer service representative prepared to handle sensitive and urgent matters.

FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) was established to protect the privacy of students as it relates to their educational records. Global Response is a FERPA compliant contact center. We have the people, technology, FERPA training programs, and procedures in place to meet FERPA regulations and deliver a compassionate and compliant customer experience.

PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is a set of payment card industry data security standards formed by major credit card companies and administered by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC), with the objective of safeguarding credit and debit card transactions against data theft and fraud. PCI compliant companies must work with PCI compliant partners.

Global Response is PCI DSS Level 1 certified. This means that not only does Global Response undergo an internal audit, an external auditor has also reviewed our systems, controls and card data environment to establish compliance. We take pride in protecting your business and customers from a data breach.

SOC (Service Organization Controls) 2 is a standard set of systems designed to keep businesses’ and customers’ data safe. Global Response is uniquely positioned to offer your business a SOC 2 Type 2 partnership. With trusted expertise in many industry verticals, Global Response understands and is prepared to meet your business’ needs by designing a customized security architecture to meet compliance.

Across industries, Global Response goes beyond meeting compliance standards to build customer trust and satisfaction. To learn more, contact us for a consultation.

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