European trading platform operators are currently navigating a stormy sea. With regulators across jurisdictions increasingly scrutinizing platforms for adherence to MiFIID II guidelines and the UK Consumer Duty entering into force, operational teams must carefully balance the needs to drive sales, retain customers while increasing operational efficiency, and adhere to ever-tightening compliance requirements.
Satisfying these conflicting requirements isn’t an easy task. Compliance functions play a critical role in balancing this tension, but also have to deal with an increased workload. A new generation of AI-based monitoring solutions that are being implemented by call centers across numerous industries can also help trading platform operators increase sales, support regulatory compliance, and improve customer experience. Systems tailored to the requirements in the online trading space are easier to integrate into contact center routines than many leaders assume.
But how well can they really address the major challenges that most organizations face?
Let’s have a look at four main call center challenges to see how AI-based speech analytics can empower stakeholders across the organization to achieve success and exceed their goals.
Boosting Operational Efficiency
Reviews and other manual compliance tasks are tedious, time-consuming, and repetitive. By automating tasks, AI frees compliance teams for higher-level work.
Today, there are systems in the market that come with regulatory guidelines, e.g., MiFID II, CySEC, and FCA, minimizing setup efforts for operations staff. Advanced solutions automatically analyze calls, reducing review time to mere minutes. Violations are automatically logged into the system, and task management functions make it easy for compliance and operations leaders to follow up on mitigation tasks. Data analysis tools offer deeper insights into operational performance and ways to improve efficiency, performance, and compliance.
Reducing Legal Risk in Real Time
Traditional monitoring processes depend on sampling, which covers just a small percentage of interactions. Agencies remain unaware of missteps and violations in unmonitored conversations unless — or until — a complaint is filed or a regulator knocks on the door.
Even when issues are successfully uncovered through sampling, remediation is often slow. Audit results may be received only monthly, delaying intensive monitoring of problematic agents and their retraining. By the time post-training performance is assessed, several weeks might have passed.
In contrast, AI-based monitoring solutions audit 100% of calls and flag violations as they occur, providing a clearer, timelier, and more comprehensive picture of legal risks. Mitigation and agent retraining can be initiated immediately, with ongoing monitoring of “risky” agents ensuring compliant conduct and preventing repeat offenses. Advanced compliance monitoring platforms may integrate a coaching layer that issues bite-sized lessons and instructional videos to agents as violations are flagged and repeated. (To learn more about monitoring-triggered training, read this blog post).
Increasing Sales
Providing conversation intelligence and insights on agents’ strengths and weaknesses, speech analytics solutions can significantly contribute to optimizing the performance of client-facing teams in a number of ways:
- By analyzing successful calls that end with a successful sale, AI identifies impactful elements that agents can adopt to transform individual successes into repeatable processes.
- AI can improve adherence to sales best practices. So your sales leaders invested valuable time in creating sales scripts and best practices and have trained customer-facing staff — but any contact center leader knows that agents often find it hard to adhere to scripts and internalize best practices. AI monitoring can help ensure these guidelines are put in practice, ultimately improving agent and sales performance.
- AI can identify customer sentiments and provide relevant feedback to agents so they can pitch conversations appropriately — for instance, empathetically or with a business-like tone. It can also give agents constructive feedback regarding how they come across to customers (e.g., as aggressive or tentative). Feedback from an objective source can help agents fine-tune their soft communication skills to significantly improve outcomes of future conversations.
Lowering Agent Stress and Churn
While agents may initially have reservations about AI monitoring feeling intrusive, most quickly come to appreciate the guidance that AI assistance offers. Understanding what actions to take to optimize conversions and increase success rates provides a sense of control and increases workplace satisfaction.
With some AI solutions, agents can evaluate their own performance through personal dashboards and build skills by consuming micro-learning nuggets recommended by the solution. This transforms the review process from sporadic and stressful to ongoing and self-driven.
The result? More autonomous, motivated, and confident agents, reduced churn, higher productivity, and increased sales.
Multi-language and Omni-channel Monitoring: Have It All Covered
In today’s global business environment, most trading platforms cater to a multilingual community of traders. Finding skillful reps to serve this clientele and maximizing the business’ reach is only the first step. The true challenges often start at the monitoring level, where many operators find it difficult covering all these languages with their existing monitoring staff. Not being able to monitor conversations in certain foreign languages either exposes businesses to compliance risks and/or often leads to unfortunate decisions to not serve certain countries or languages.
Multilingual speech analytics systems can help online trading platforms reduce risk while growing their business. Advanced AI-based systems “speak” all major languages and translate conversations to English, so quality control (QC) staff get a full understanding of all the conversations taking place in their contact centers.
Sedric, for example, covers 40+ languages and, in addition, understands conversational context, increasing the precision of the alerts and producing much fewer false positives. The system leverages insights gained from conversation monitoring to improve the entire process, from automating remediation to building customized training programs for each agent.
For trading platforms operating in a digital environment, covering all communication channels is the next compliance management frontier. The Sedric platform monitors all interactions — voice, text, chat, and social media messages — generating interaction analytics that allow compliance officers to rest easy at night.
Sedric is used by some of the major online trading operators to monitor customer interactions in a dozen European languages.
For more information on how Sedric helps address online trading firms’ challenges, download our one-pager or book a free 30-minute demo.
