How to Solve the Disconnect Between Compliance Regulations and Customer Experience

In the previous sections of this series, we discussed what customer experience is, why it’s important, and how you can achieve it. To recap, customer experience is a lifetime journey across all touchpoints and communication channels. The push towards providing this experience is influenced by the growing spending power of millennials who demand a unique, yet cost-effective experience. To meet these demands, businesses need to use customer data to provide an omnichannel experience and adapt and evolve to meet future requirements. But what happens when a business frequently deals with personally identifiable information (PII) and the customer experience strategy must be in compliance with industry regulations?

A disconnect between compliance and customer experience

Oftentimes, businesses put processes in place to meet regulatory demands – but don’t take the extra time to review the program from the user’s perspective. This may result in a user having difficulty sending and retrieving information, a compliance team wasting time jumping through hoops to review communications, or even worse, accidentally gaining access to information they shouldn’t see! What else? End users may be responsible for remembering to press a “secure” button or forced to remember which “keyword” to put in the subject before sending confidential information – this should automatically happen in most cases.

So, what should you look for when developing a compliant and user-friendly method of sharing confidential information with your customers and business partners?

Before implementing any electronic communications program, we recommend businesses ask these questions:

• How will the program impact the users (employees)?
• What kind of compliance risks may it result in?
• What impact does it have on their customers?

All three of these are key for successful implementation of the program. If the program works great for employees, is easy for the compliance department to review, but the business fails to make it easy for the customer – then this dramatically impacts the customer experience.

Using a Secure Message Center to solve the disconnect

One solution to this disconnect is a secure message center within a self-service website, customer portal, or mobile app. If implemented correctly, it can provide value to both the business and the customers. Based on feedback from our customers, they want to add more channels to their support process to give customers access across multiple devices and empower their agents to more easily communicate with customers.

While introducing these extra channels is great for increasing customer communications, it often makes it harder to ensure security and compliance. This is where an integrated secure message center comes in handy. By using a secure message center, you can add web-mail, file exchange, and web-form services natively to member service portals and mobile apps. Enable your business to provide an integrated communication channel between agents and your customers – effectively adding another channel in an omnichannel strategy – a compliance channel.

Want to read more? Check out our blog post Why is Customer Experience Important – And How Can You Achieve It?