When it comes to delivering the digital service innovations that consumers expect, many decision-makers still have their hands tied. Especially in highly regulated industries.
On the one hand, you have compliance and regulations to worry about. If you operate in pharmaceuticals, utilities, or oil and gas—banking, healthcare, or insurance—stringent regulations directly affect the pace of your contact center innovations.
Here are some of the more prominent rules and regulations that many contact centers must abide by:
- Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): A HIPAA violation could cost you anywhere from $100–50,000 per violation.
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): Violate everybody’s favorite data regulation, and you could be fined up to 20 million euros.
- Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS): Relevant if your contact center processes or stores credit card information.
- System and Organization Controls 2 (SOC): Affects how you manage and protect customer data.
- Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA): You know FISMA if you are or do work with a federal agency and their data.
- Service Level Agreements (SLAs): The service and performance standards you may or may not be contractually obligated to meet.
On the other hand, customers don’t care about your regulatory requirements. They expect accurate, timely, and personalized experiences, however, and whenever they decide to engage your service channels.
This must be at least part of the reason 49% of provider executives consider customer experience (CX) a strategic priority over the next five years. According to the same PwC report, 91% of pharmaceutical executives believe patient self-management will increase over the next ten years.
Consumers want the fruits of customer service innovation.
The question is, how will you meet the moment?
From On-Premises Systems to Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
One viable pathway is to shift to a CCaaS model with a provider that understands (and can meet) ever-evolving industry regulations. For many Cisco-run contact centers, it’s already happening: the company reported a 75% rise in Webex Contact Center seats for FY24.
Why?
Staying in the Cisco world, a CCaaS solution like Webex Contact Center offers flexibility, functionality, and scalability that an on-premise solution cannot. The move to a CCaaS model opens the door for cloud-based tools, many of which have today become must-haves for digital CX innovation:
- AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants: Provide instant, automated customer support that’s 100% compliant.
- Omnichannel service: Integrate different communication channels into consistent CX across different platforms.
- Customer intelligence: Extract insights from customer interactions and agent performance to enable data-driven decision-making.
- Integrations: Synchronize contact center operations with customer management systems (CRMs) and other tech for proactive service and deeper personalization.
- Enhanced security features: Protect sensitive data in the cloud while complying with industry regulations.
We’ve already helped clients in regulated industries take advantage of CCaaS. Financial services come to mind, where companies like Black Hills Federal Credit Union have leveraged cloud contact center capabilities to deliver 360° service experiences. We’re also seeing digital CX gain momentum in the public sector.
What Forward-Thinking Looks Like for Contact Centers in Regulated Industries
In reviewing the requirements of our clients in regulated industries, a few common themes emerge.
Diverse use cases for customer service AI
Thanks to the expanded capabilities offered by cloud contact center technology, these organizations can better use AI to improve the customer journey—without compromising regulatory compliance.
A healthcare provider can deploy AI-powered chatbots that guide patient service journeys 24/7, for example. A bank can scale up digital self-service offerings and enrich them with personalized offers. One global insurer deployed a large conversational AI project in Europe that automated 15 million customer dialogues, leading to a 27% decrease in Average Handle Time.
New possibilities for agent assistance
They’re able to ease the pressure on their contact center agents, too. For example, a company could deflect service volume using self-service while empowering agents with a more comprehensive—and contextually personalized—view of their customers.
Again, many agent enablement use cases benefit from cloud-based contact center AI. Webex Contact Center enables live content delivery for agents “in the flow,” automated call wrap-up, and speech-to-text transcription, which empowers real-time customer insights.
A pathway to cloud-based process automation
Across the board, these organizations are moving past the slow and outdated technologies that are standing in the way of critical process automations. Think automations for:
- Call routing and predictive dialing
- Routine workflows and processes (ticket creation, case escalation, and follow-up)
- Speech and text analytics
- Transcription
- Intelligent IVR
- Scheduling and workforce management
This alone is a top challenge for 76% of contact center leaders.
A Complete Solution from a Single Partner?
The move to a CCaaS model—the commitment to deeper contact center innovation in the age of AI—is not without its challenges.
Moving all existing customer data to the cloud while remaining secure and compliant is a primary concern. As is the question of integrating existing systems, databases, and business tools. For some contact center leaders, the thought of further expanding their tech stack to meet the needs of a cloud contact center is daunting.
But there are solutions capable of overcoming these blocks.
b+s Elevate
Recently, Bucher + Suter released b+s Elevate, which packages Webex Contact Center with b+s Connects for Service Cloud Voice. It’s a compelling cloud contact center solution that enables the best of both worlds:
- Compliance with the latest regulations
- A cloud solution capable of supporting the latest innovations at scale
For highly regulated industries, in particular, finding solutions that can ease the transition to the cloud will be critical to driving CX and customer loyalty. b+s Elevate is a strong step in that direction, as is our European-based private cloud contact center. We understand that some businesses require data sovereignty in European (and in some cases, Swiss) data centers. For companies that cannot host any data in the United States or even in AWS altogether, the b+s Private Cloud offers a secure alternative.
