Piergiorgio Vittori, Global Development Director & Country Manager Italy, Spitch UK and Ireland, commented:
"This Saturday marked one year since GDPR came into effect, a pan-European regulation that has drastically changed the way personal data is used, necessitating great changes for most businesses. Businesses have had to change processes to ensure their compliance with new regulations. Yet, voice-driven customer services still remain an ‘elephant in the room’ for many businesses, exposing them to business risks - unless they were able to successfully deploy AI-led voice recognition and intelligence tools ensuring their ongoing GDPR compliance.
Whenever a customer calls a business, large quantities of personal data are being collected. We willingly and often share our credit card details in order to secure a restaurant booking. We discuss our health and symptoms to reschedule a doctor’s appointment. We still provide responses to the “Know Your Customer” (KYC) questions to prove our identity before accessing telephone banking. However, we don’t know how this information is being stored and used the minute we hang (hand) up. Under GDPR, consumers have the right to know. And businesses are responsible for ensuring that all personal customer information is protected.
This is where voice intelligence technology comes in. Powered by AI, it allows for sensitive information – such as credit card details – to be collected securely and instantly verified – outside of the main call agent-customer conversation. Voice-to-text solutions, for example, can immediately take a phone call and convert it into an easily-searchable digital form with personal customer information ‘blacked out’ via a process of ‘data reduction’. Meaning, businesses have an extra layer of protection in case of any hacks or data leaks. And perhaps, most importantly, voice intelligence technology speech analytics can be used to demonstrate compliance with GDPR, a crucial aspect of the regulation.
Being an area of potential non-compliance for many businesses, the demand for voice-led customer service will only grow. The speech and voice recognition market was valued at $5.15bn in 2016, when GDPR was first adopted by the EU, and is expected to reach $18.30bn by 2023. Moreover, by 2020, 50% of analytic queries will be generated using searches based on natural-language processing, according to Gartner, and 20-25% of searches made with the Google Android smartphones in the US are already voice searches, according to Google. If UK businesses want to remain GDPR compliant, while enabling growth and improving customer experience, they have to focus on securing their voice-driven communications first."
