Research: Most FCA Firms Confident on Fair Treatment despite Widespread Compliance Breaches
Contact centres are facing growing pressure to demonstrate fair customer outcomes and identify vulnerable customers. However, new research commissioned by CCaaS provider MaxContact has revealed a significant gap between confidence and evidence.
While 85.6% of FCA-regulated businesses believe that they could evidence fair treatment if a regulator reviewed their calls tomorrow, more than half (54%) of UK contact centre managers and directors have discovered a compliance breach outside of their routine quality assurance sample.
Of more concern is the fact that 16% discovered breaches on more than one occasion. The commercial implications are clear. Half of organisations (50%) have admitted that they have lost a sale, contract or customer because of a compliance issue in the past 12 months alone. 18% of those businesses say it has happened more than once.
In FCA-regulated sectors where businesses must provide clear evidence of decision-making and fair treatment for customers, this gap between confidence and evidence is something that the contact centre sector can no longer ignore.
Ben Booth, CEO of MaxContact, says,
“Businesses should never make decisions based on confidence without having the evidence to back it up. Our research tells a worrying story, that many organisations believe they are doing enough yet they’re recording compliance breaches that are happening outside of their routine reviews.This should be a wake-up call for companies who are still relying on small sample sizes to assess compliance and customer outcomes. It’s not enough to be confident in your processes. You must be able to show that you are checking every interaction to be able to fully stand up to regulatory scrutiny.”
As regulators demand greater evidence of customer outcomes, MaxContact’s research shows that businesses need to do more to close the gap between confidence and evidence and to accurately demonstrate fair customer outcomes in every customer conversation.
MaxContact launches Auto QA as businesses face pressure to evidence customer outcomes
MaxContact is responding to this challenge by launching Auto QA, a new capability within its Conversation Analytics solution.
Available as an add-on to MaxContact’s existing contact centre platform, AutoQA allows businesses to quality-assure every customer interaction.
Unlike traditional quality assurance processes that combine manual monitoring with multiple systems, AutoQA at Scale lets businesses mature their processes without adding workload for contact centre team leaders. The solution automatically applies an organisation’s own QA scorecard across every customer interaction. It assesses each question against transcript-linked evidence, rather than creating a generic AI summary. This means that businesses can consistently assess against their own standards for quality, compliance, and customer outcomes.
Auto QA provides real-time visibility into vulnerability indicators, helps investigate potential concerns, and supports automated escalation triggers. For businesses, this means they can evidence fair treatment for all customers and identify compliance risks much more effectively.
Ben Booth adds, “For years, organisations have accepted sampling as the only practical way to manage quality assurance. But the industry is now operating in a very different environment.” He continues:
“When more than half of contact centre professionals have uncovered compliance breaches outside their routine sample, it’s clear that this isn’t a theoretical risk anymore. Businesses are already experiencing the commercial consequences of compliance issues that may have previously gone unnoticed. They must move away from just being confident in their processes and be able to show evidence that they consistently treat customers fairly. This is going to become increasingly important as regulatory expectations continue to change.”
