Compliance officers perform a critical function: ensuring that an organization is operating within well-defined regulatory and statutory parameters. Whether it’s making sure to abide by HIPAA, PCI-DSS, the Telemarketing Sales Rule, or a number of other mandates, your organization and your employees need to be careful, today more than ever. Why? Because the penalties associated with non-compliance can be crippling, particularly for smaller organizations. Just look at the average fines associated with these regulations:

• PCI-DSS: $50,000 per infraction
• Telemarketing Sales Rule: $16,000 per infraction
• Do Not Call Implementation Act: $11,000 per infraction
• Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform & Consumer Protection Act: $7,500 per infraction
• HIPAA: $1,000 per infraction

To help your organization contend with these compliance requirements, many organizations are deploying call recording software to protect the interests of both themselves and their customers. These systems enable an organization to capture every telephone call (and accompanying screen activity, if needed) and store this information for a set period of time. By classifying calls containing sensitive cardholder information, patient data, or other compliance-related activity, call recording systems can provide assistance later on when an organization needs to provide evidence of compliance or mitigate a dispute.

In addition, compliance call recording systems can help you as a compliance professional, both in motivating staff as well as training new employees. For example, you can create a meta-tag for all calls containing sensitive information (credit card or healthcare data, for example). You can then review select interactions at team meetings to demonstrate how or how not to handle the collection of such data from customers. You can also record best practice calls that involve sensitive information and make a library of these best-in-class interactions to share with new or under-performing staff members.

If you’re a compliance officer seeking out a call recorder, here are some of the features you need to look for when evaluating a system:

• Ability to mute a customer’s voice when credit card or other personal information is being given
• Ability to mask the credit card or personal information portion of a screen
• Ability to permanently delete recordings containing sensitive information
• Ability to encrypt recordings, if desired
• Ability to restrict playback to only those individuals (e.g., supervisors, trainers, legal personnel) who need access to such interactions
• Access to both voice and screen recording, to capture the full interaction

In our litigious and closely monitored business environment, the question isn’t ‘should you use a call recording solution to aid your compliance efforts’. The question should be: ‘How can you afford not to?’