Echopass enhances security of cloud-based contact-center platforms

This happens as soon as the billing screen appears—and cuts off both the voice recording and the screen recording.

It wasn’t easy to do, because both the data that’s coming into the agent and the data on the agent’s screen must be monitored while the call is progressing.

“And then you have to instruct the call-recording device to effectively cease and desist during that phase of the conversation,” Farris said.

The fact that it happens automatically is a plus, because it is fairly certain that agents occasionally would forget to block the recording of sensitive data if they had to do it manually, because they are focused on capturing the data accurately and/or on providing good service to the customer.

More security challenges are on the horizon, with social media leading the list, according to Farris.

“Social media in the contact center is evolving—I’d say that we’re at Ground Zero with respect to its implementation,” Farris said. “In many cases, contact-center procedures haven’t been updated yet, because we’re at this critical change point regarding adoption [of social media] into the contact center.

“Frankly, we thought it would happen a lot sooner, but it hasn’t.”

Not only has it been challenging for contact centers to implement these new multiple channels, it has been equally vexing for them to upgrade related policies and procedures.

One significant factor that exacerbates these challenges is that the entity responsible for managing social media varies from enterprise to enterprise—the corporate relations, marketing and contact center units—more or less split the responsibility evenly, according to Farris.

“The larger the enterprise, it tends to migrate toward the corporate-relations group, because they are concerned from a reputation point of view,” he said.

From a security perspective, Echopass doesn’t view social-media transactions any differently than voice or website transactions—once they enter the contact center, they simply are routed to the most-skilled agent possible.

“And, once the transaction has been brought into the company’s infrastructure, it is subject to all of the security provisions that we’ve put in across the offering,” Farris said.

There’s nothing about social media that’s inherently riskier than other transactions that a contact center would handle, despite the potential for malware attacks, Farris said.

“Once you transit past the firewalls and get into the organization, we scrub all of that data the same way we scrub everything else, so I don’t think it poses any greater risk,” he said.