Today’s contact centers act as a funnel for massive amounts of data that flow from silo to silo. Some forms of data are kept long term and archived; others are needed only fleetingly and are soon discarded. The sheer quantity of it, though, is staggering, on the order of petabytes of information. And that creates a bit of a problem when it comes to managing and isolating the specific pieces of data that need to be secured and safeguarded because of customer privacy concerns.
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Customers are much more sensitive to what happens with their personal information than they used to be. Breaches that can be traced to contact centers are rare, but companies need to battle the perception of insecurity as much as the reality. And attention to better data handling and security can be fashioned as a key competitive differentiator for a company that takes pains to let customers know that it is active in that area.
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Data security is a well-managed area in corporations, with regimes and protocols that guide the handling of different categories of information, including customer data. Health care and financial services firms have long had mandates that spell out proper procedures for releasing personal information about customers. From the contact center point of view, emphasis has usually been on making important data unavailable for agents to misuse or take away from the center.
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At the most rudimentary level, this has involved removing the means for agents to copy or download personally identifying information about customers — restricting disk drives and printers, for example. However, there are always ways to circumvent those restrictions (for example, you can take a picture of a computer screen with an iPhone).
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The best standard for data protection came out of the credit card processing industry. PCI, or Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard,…