Collector - January 2018 - 14
PERSPECTIVE Evolving Compliance Strategies in Light of Advancing Voice Technologies Advice and insight on implementing speech analytics from an ACA International member who has been there. By G. Scott Purcell "We look for the words 'painful,' 'horrible,' 'terrible' and 'disappointed' to identify conversations where there is potentially great feedback to consider." 14 W e saw the business case for one of the newer call recording and speech analytics systems in our agency. Now that we have one, what's interesting is the continual evolution of the technology's power, and how we should, and do, continue to change how the system is used to ensure the greatest value is created at the lowest cost. And that value must be evident in addressing any immediate fires, such as a call that didn't go well, as well as easing and eliminating the flames of any future fires. If you are bringing speech analytics into your operation, our biggest piece of advice is to schedule formal reviews at least twice a year to evaluate how the system is being used, challenge your assumptions as you learn more about what it really can accomplish, and understand the potential impact of continued enhancements created by your vendor. The reality is that there are probably more than 20 different value drivers to our organization in using a platform like this. Here are some of the processes that have evolved for us. We use a call auditing and speech analytics solution from KG-Hawes, a sister company of ours. We have used the call auditing solution extensively to have a very large population of our calls audited by humans each day-with nextday feedback to the collection supervisors. Now we are focused on reducing the proportion of calls audited by humans versus machine audits done by the analytics platform, while achieving an even greater proportion of work audited. This is evolving in two ways. One is simply looking at how many more calls the machine can audit with a corresponding reduction in human audits. The other is looking to see if there are any questions the humans are testing for that realistically could be done entirely by the machine. Auditing certainly serves the needs of the business by ensuring our collectors are compliant and as effective and efficient as they can be. It also serves the needs of the regulators-which are already quite aligned with the needs of the business. At ACA International's Annual Convention & Expo in July, there was a fantastic presentation: "Incentivizing Accomplishment and Discouraging Negative Behavior." From the insights we gained in that presentation, we're now auditing a sample of payment plan arrangements to ensure they are properly authorized. We've also added to our internal audit plan an additional emphasis on collectors whose variable compensation has large fluctuations to ensure their behaviors are consistently compliant. This is a good place to plug the quality of ACA's conferences. The world keeps changing quickly-and getting practical insight from how peers are addressing these evolving issues is exceedingly valuable to us. Using trend information is really helpful to determine if coaching is paying off and tracking word usage is one of the ways we gather trend data. As an example, the words "tax refund" are used in the talk-off starting Jan. 15. On the morning of Jan. 16, I know which collectors haven't bought into the fact it's now tax season and can coach them accordingly. The power of these systems allows for very targeted analysis. For example, we scan for various ways of saying "attorney ACAINTERNATIONAL.ORG