How much is your contact center security policy costing you?

Information security is the most important but least discussed pillar of any contact center regardless of scope, size and industry. One simple data breach can easily expose sensitive information, damaging either your relationship with customers, your reputation or both.

Security should be a top priority for all aspects of contact center operations, from the way agents access customer support systems to how and where customer data is stored. However, the rapid shift to remote work brought by COVID-19 has also presented new challenges with security while introducing a newfound focus on cost-saving strategies for business.

After overcoming the first phase—where business survival was the first and only option—organizations are now building plans to optimize operational costs while maintaining high standards for security to deliver an excellent customer experience (CX).

Calculating cost-effective strategies for security can be tricky because security is not usually an investment that provides a tangible profit. But the cost of loss is far more important to consider while building your financial plans. Let’s take a quick look at the return on investment (ROI) for contact center security as well as some tips to maximize this calculation.

The importance of return on security investment

Let’s start with some important concepts. First off, your single loss expectancy (SLE) is the expected amount of money that will be lost when a risk occurs. Secondly, you should also measure the probability of that risk occurring in a year, which is called the annual rate of occurrence (ARO). To calculate your annual loss expectancy (ALE), multiply your ARO with your SLE. Seems simple enough up until this point, right?

The European Network and Information Security Agency shows us that return on security investment (ROSI) combines the quantitative risk assessment—as explained in the previous paragraph—and the cost of implementing security countermeasures for this risk. As such, this simple formula will do the trick:

When implementing countermeasures, be aware of how much they will cost and what their mitigation ratio is—in other words, how far your solutions can help cover expected losses. This is called monetary loss reduction, another way of showing how your security practices will reduce your ALE. The higher the number you get after calculating your ROSI, the more reduced is your ALE—which means your solution is highly cost-effective.

A lot of security solutions use artificial intelligence (AI) to proactively monitor contact center activity and surface risky interactions, nefarious activity or system breaches. Security suites such as Talkdesk Guardian™ provide clear dashboards, analytics, and alerts to keep customer data safe and operations running smoothly at all times. When building your financial and tactical plans, it’s important to equip your company with the best security capabilities to reduce the risk of unforeseen costs from breaches.

Want to know more?

• Learn more about Talkdesk CX Cloud™
• Go through security and compliance at Talkdesk®
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