Few things are more important than a strong approach to security and privacy in the contact center. We’re living in a world where consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about how their information is collected, stored, and used by other businesses.
If your customers can’t trust you to consistently protect their data, they’ll quickly take their business elsewhere. Not only does your approach to data management influence your reputation and your relationship with customers, but it’s also crucial from a compliance perspective.
Regulatory bodies are producing ever-more complex guidelines for companies to follow, dictating how data should be stored and used to protect consumers. Failure to adhere to these rules can lead to massive fines, and lost opportunities.
One of the most important steps in managing data correctly, according to the latest guidelines, is knowing when personal information should be redacted from recordings. Here are 3 data redaction techniques you can use to ensure your contact center stays secure and compliant.
What is Data Redaction?
Data redaction is the process of removing sensitive and confidential information from files or documents before they’re shared with other parties or stored. It’s a crucial method of protecting private information, and keeping consumers and businesses secure.
Over the years, companies have leveraged various techniques for data redaction. One common option in the contact center was to ask agents to pause a recording when personal information was about to be revealed by a customer. As technology has evolved, the solutions available for data redaction have become more sophisticated and efficient.
Today’s intelligent solutions can automatically redact data from a range of different recordings and transcripts, based on specific information like keywords. Using the right data redaction techniques in your contact center is crucial to improving not just the security of your business and customers, but your efficiency levels too.
Technique 1: Leverage the Power of AI
It’s no secret that artificial intelligence has become an extremely valuable part of the contact center. Business leaders are relying on artificial intelligence for everything from analyzing huge volumes of data in conversational intelligence platforms, to offering customers self-service solutions.
AI can also be an incredible resource for improving compliance. AI-driven tools can automatically assess the data in a recorded conversation, and determine which details need to be removed. This drastically reduces the amount of work involved in manual data redaction, and helps to eliminate some of the risks associated with exposing team members to personal information.
With tools like MiaRec’s Conversational Analytics platform, companies can instantly implement automatic data redaction strategies powered by AI. These tools can rapidly identify and remove potentially sensitive data, adhering to strict policies in the business landscape.
What’s more, AI redaction tools are becoming more advanced and impressive all the time, MiaRec’s platform, for instance, is constantly rolling out improvements to its proprietary transcription engine, helping to ensure exceptional accuracy in data redaction strategies.
“Incorporating recent AI advancements like Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Machine Learning (ML) into data redaction solutions significantly elevates redaction accuracy. This safeguards against excessive and erroneous redactions, resulting in enhanced precision.” – said Gennadiy Bezko, CEO of MiaRec.
Technique 2: Establish Redaction Rules
While AI and automation tools can help companies to streamline the data redaction process and reduce compliance issues, they do need to be configured correctly. AI systems rely on pre-set rules to determine which kinds of information need to be removed from a recording.
To ensure you’re implementing the right rules for your system, it’s important to gain an in-depth insight into the rules and regulations you need to follow. For instance, most companies accepting customer payments will be subject to PCI-DSS compliance standards. This means they’ll need to ensure they’re removing payment card numbers and account numbers from recordings.
However, depending on the nature of your business, you may also be responsible for redacting personally-identifiable health information, as well as customer details like their date of birth, or social security numbers. The right intelligent platform will make it easy to establish rules that follow the security, privacy, and compliance policies in your business.
These tools also ensure you can automatically redact information from both transcripts and audio files at the same time, reducing manual work.
Technique 3: Regularly Test and Update Redaction Strategies
Finally, while AI-powered and automated solutions for data redaction can significantly reduce the amount of work your teams need to do, they can occasionally experience errors. The complexity of the human language means it’s always possible that certain instances of sensitive information might not be instantly detected or removed from recordings and transcripts.
False negatives and false positives can both be damaging to your compliance strategy. While false negatives could lead to personal data breaches, false positives could lead to incorrectly hiding non-sensitive information. It’s always a good idea to have a strategy in place for testing, monitoring, and optimizing your redaction strategy over time.
When implementing your new data redaction solution into your business, conduct a test designed to encourage the system to redact confidential information. Create your rules, and test them on a number of recordings to ensure you achieve consistent results.
Every so often, use the search features included in your redaction tools to search for critical data and determine whether any information has slipped through the gaps. This will help you to ensure your technology is working according to expectations.
Implementing the Right Data Redaction Strategy
Taking the right approach to data redaction is crucial in today’s world. As customers continue to share more of their information with companies across a host of channels, it’s important to ensure you’re keeping that data safe. Failure to do so could mean that your business encounters issues with legal fines, reputational damage, and lost sales.
“At MiaRec, we recognize the significance of harnessing customer insights from your voice data. However, we are committed to assisting you in not only deriving value from this data but also ensuring data safety and security. Our aim is to guarantee that sensitive information is meticulously removed, thereby preventing data breaches and ensuring compliance with regulation”. – said Gennadiy Bezko, CEO of MiaRec
Using the techniques above, combined with the right data redaction tools, will ensure you can stay compliant in today’s evolving world. Just remember, as rules for data management continue to evolve around the world, it’s important to regularly assess your strategy, and ensure you’re keeping your policies and procedures up to date.
