GDPR for Contact Center Industry — Shaping Future Trends
There has been a significant coverage over the last few months in the compliance, risk and privacy domains on the impact of the radical new EU regulation, the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), which will come into effect from May 25, 2018.
Most of the coverage and analysis has been about the tactical impacts to the current enterprise functioning along with a review of the financial and operational effects. While these are indeed of paramount importance for the risk professionals involved in the operational aspects of enterprises, a more strategic understanding and analysis of the impact of this regulation has not been attempted.
In a series of articles, we shall attempt to shed light on the strategic footprint that the GDPR regulation will leave on the contact center industry.
This article is the first in the series ‘GDPR for Contact Center Industry’ and outlines how GDPR is different from other regulations.
Contact center industry — a unique amalgamation
The contact center industry works in unique ways. It is an amalgamation of a large, low-cost workforce, high technology, Sophisticated business arrangements and peculiar vulnerabilities.
It is an industry that sees high employee dissatisfaction, with an average turnover rate bordering on 50% of their workforce and a 60% quit rate within that. It is also an industry where international cross-border transfers of data and service are the norm, rather than the exception, with complex business arrangements involving captive and third-party organizations. Additionally, the contact center industry is also a high-technology industry with its communications infrastructure typically being on the cutting edge, involving an amalgamation of voice routing, bots, digital communication and hybrid infrastructures.
This combination of factors brings unique vulnerabilities into the contact centers.
GDPR recognizes data as the new currency
For some time now, the world has accepted that data is the new driver in the world.
“We’re entering a new world in which data may be more important than software”
- Tim O’Reilly, Founder, O’Reilly Media
“Everything is going to be connected to cloud and data, and all of this will be mediated by software”
- Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
And the crown jewels among all the available data is the personal data of the people. This data is the most valuable and also most prone to abuse.
“Before Google, and long before Facebook, Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected”
- George Packer, author of the New Yorker
The contact center industry deals with this currency of the modern world, personal data, like tellers deal with cash at the banks. To take a banking analogy, trusting personal data to contact centers is like trusting your cash to a bank having 50% employee turnover who are lowly paid, across the world in jurisdictions where you have no control, and where the cash is stored in gym lockers and readily accessed by all the employees.
GDPR has recognized the value of personal data in the modern world and established its primacy through stringent, enforceable regulation.
Not just another regulation, but a strategic shift for contact center industry
Every few years, a new regulation comes into effect which changes the operational processes of the enterprises, whether it was the introduction of HIPAA in 1996, SOX in 2002 or other more recent regulations like the MiFID II.
GDPR too requires enterprises to make many changes to their operations and processes. GDPR, though, is more than just another regulation. It attempts to make a significant shift in the seriousness attached to personal data like it has never been attempted before.
Going beyond the tactical impact, the seminal regulation (GDPR) has a significant strategic footprint in the contact center industry.
All the current trends in the contact center industry, like the preference for third-party contact centers, the move to omnichannel communications, the increasing sophistication of the self-service infrastructure, social media expansion, the squeezing of margins, or the geographical spread, will have to be re-evaluated through the lens of GDPR. Some trends will change, and other new trends will be seen.
Over the next few articles in this series, we shall delve into some of these trends and how GDPR will shape the future direction of the contact center industry.
