KARACHI: State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has directed banks to ensure confidentiality of consumers at their call centres.
In this regard the central bank on Wednesday issued guidelines to ensure consistency and uniformity in efficient management of call centres across the industry.
The SBP said that banks should have a comprehensive policy and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) on Call Centre management.
“In order to ensure consumer confidentiality, adequate controls should be in place including but not limited to continuous CCTV vigilance, physical entry and exit checks, non accessibility to portable devices or cell phones, controlled accessibility to printers, emails, etc. at their Call Centres. Banks should also maintain and monitor comprehensive logs of call agents’ system based activities,” the central bank said.
Banks should have an independent reporting line of Call Centres to avoid conflict of interest. Banks should record all inbound and outbound calls and retain the recording in line with the record keeping requirement given in BC & CPD Circular No. 1 of 2016.
Banks should ensure that the consumers are explicitly informed about their calls being recorded at the Call Centre. Marketing of banks’ products/services on incoming consumer calls at their expense is not fair. For marketing, telesales, etc. banks should make out bound calls or deploy toll free numbers.
Banks should have adequate IT controls, contingency set ups and Disaster Recovery Infrastructure for their Call Centres.
Banks should ensure adequate IT systems in line with the scope of their Call Centres having options of Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Automated Call Distribution (ADC), combination of physical and knowledge based authentication tools, etc. Besides, banks should ensure that IT systems for Call Centres are properly evaluated as per the “Enterprise Technology Governance and Risk Management Framework” issued vide BP&RD Circular No.5 of 2017.
Banks should assess the performance of their Call Centres on regular basis and may use independent tools like mystery calls, consumer surveys, employees’ feedback, etc. Further, following parameters/Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) may be adopted with appropriate benchmarks as per international best practices.
Banks may preferably develop risk dashboards for periodic reporting to senior management along with a mechanism to escalate breaches in risk thresholds to the senior management.
In case of outsourcing of call centre function or its HR resources, relevant instructions on Outsourcing issued by SBP should also be complied with.
The SBP directed that banks should implement the above guidelines latest by December 31, 2018.
