Consolidation and Compounded Call Center Responsibilities
By Gregory J. Robb, Research Assistant, Applied Business Technologies, LLC
In the 25 years preceding the turn of this century, industry journeyed from a society of companies to a global arena of consolidated giants. Put simply, situation “normal” was defined by how many companies could acquire other companies. The most relevant trigger for call centers came when Citicorp, a commercial bank holding company, acquired the Travelers Group insurance company. When that merger violated the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act, the US government replied with the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLB), also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999.
Section 204, “Information Sharing,” required that the appropriate banking agencies establish record-keeping requirements for banks as previously governed by the Security Exchange Act (1934). However, the Financial Services Modernization Act went further: ” Each appropriate Federal banking agency shall make any information required under paragraph (1) available to the Commission upon request.” Simple right? Not really. The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act allowed commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms, and insurance companies to consolidate. All data was also consolidated, and all of it had to be accessible to the US government.
As global trade has removed commercial barriers, it has opened up the Information Age. Corporate giants maximize profits in many ways, but any businessperson knows that reducing costs is universal. This is why many American corporations base their call centers all over the world. Nonetheless, those companies – as with America’s mom-and-pop operations – must comply with the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLB). If the US government requests transaction data, companies must hand it over.
Call centers are not the first companies in the 21st Century to fret over how to process so much information, but call centers are shining examples of the modern record-keeping challenge. If the call center represents a company with nine arms worth of transactions, what’s the most efficient and productive way to record them?
Answer: use the call center’s primary strength: technology. Why not simply record all the voice calls for the transactions?
Good News-Bad News
The bad news is that the Information Age contains more data than at any other time in human history.
The good news is that technology has never possessed such information storage capacity. One laughs at the thought of someone in the 1980s recording a world of consolidated corporate transaction on cassette audio tapes and storing those. Scary, yet that’s what they would have had to do. Thanks to digitization, 21st-Century voice data can be stored in virtual form. It’s still a scary amount of data, but exponential increases in global storage capacity helps.
Applied Business Technology (ABT) assists companies with voice-data modernization. In fact, we design call center systems to streamline call-center efficiency while complying with the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLB). The globalized business world still carries some national regulatory responsibilities in a company’s originating nation. Don’t be daunted. Voice-call business transactions are simply a recording opportunity for regulatory compliance. There was once a day and age when business had no hard drive. Capitalize on ABT’s technical expertise with voice-call recording.
