The primary purpose of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) is to protect consumers from abusive or harassing behaviors, yet, little exists to protect agencies. This has made call recording and monitoring practices especially appealing because it offers an authentic record of consumer interactions. However, those practices alone still leave a large margin for human error. It is highly impractical to audit 100% of an agency’s call volume through traditional methods and impossible to be notified of a potential compliance risk in real-time. Advances in speech analytics technology can offer a solution.

The FDCPA regulates what they call “cruel or deceptive” collection tactics such as intimidation, misrepresentation or false threats of legal action. This includes the use of rude, abusive or obscene language, as well as elevated or aggravated tones. Implicating potential legal action, falsely representing oneself or the debt amount, threatening the consumer with misrepresenting their credit information, public humiliation or bodily harm are all explicitly prohibited under the FDCPA.

Speech analytics technology can be applied in two different ways to alert and monitor FDCPA compliance risk:

1. Keyword & Phrase Recognition
2. Thorough Analysis of Emotional Indicators.

By employing speech analytics, agencies have the opportunity to monitor the use of specific words or phrases. This allows calls to be flagged and alerts to be issued for the use of words like “harassment” or phrases such as “attorney represented.” Any kind of abusive language can be introduced to the analytics system for monitoring, offering endless possibilities for detecting risky calls.

Emotional indicators such as tone, pitch, and volume can be monitored by speech analytics technology as well. These indicators can be used to gauge the stress level of a call. Calls can be flagged and alerts can be created if an agent is displaying an inappropriate degree of any emotion that could indicate an oncoming complaint, such as assertiveness or anger. Insights into the consumer’s and collector’s emotional states can offer a three-dimensional impression of the interaction for supervisors without requiring them to be tuned into an individual call. This means, supervisors have the ability to keep a close watch over large numbers of agents engaged in consumer calls at any one time.

Closing the Gaps in Compliance

These broad applications of speech analytics technology can be used to close the gaps in compliance efforts that are present with traditional monitoring and recording practices. Applying speech analytics to an agency’s call auditing process can provide an additional layer of defense against FDCPA violations and even act as an alarm system, alerting supervisors of any calls that are at risk and offering real-time opportunities for intervention.

Compliance is a serious challenge for collection agencies. Estimated costs of FDCPA violations vary and consumers can be awarded for a number of damages including; physical or emotional distress, wage garnishment recovery, statutory damages and attorney fees. With the awards for reparations against call centers seeing exponential growth in the last five years, agencies need to consider whether the gaps in their compliance efforts are worth the gamble.

Want to discover how speech analytics can be used to protect your agency? Contact us today or visit our VoizTrail® page to learn about our exclusive communication and compliance suite.

Media Contact:
Gerald Jonathan
541.335.2283
gerald.jonathan@kghawes.com