KARACHI: The State Bank on Thursday issued regulatory instructions to all banks for deploying toll-free numbers at their call centres and ensure that these are displayed prominently at the banks’ premises and websites.

Recently, the SBP conducted a thematic review of call centre management at banks. In the light of the findings, banks have been told to bring ease in lodging complaints.

“Banks are also required to take measures to reduce the call wait time (the time before connecting to an agent) as much as possible to avoid inconvenience to the customers,” the SBP said.

Further, banks will also ensure that call agents do not refuse to lodge complaint and a proper complaint number is provided to all complainants, it added.

“To ensure confidentiality of consumers’ data, banks will put in place adequate controls at their call centres including continuous CCTV vigilance, physical entry and exit checks, restriction on portable devices like cell phones, controlled accessibility to printers and emails,” instructions by the SBP read.

Banks will allow their call centre staff access to customers’ data on a ‘Need-to-Know’ basis only i.e. restricted only to the customers contacting the call centre. Proper logs of access to customer’s information will be maintained and monitored to detect unauthorised access.

“Banks will ensure masking of the Credit or Debit card numbers so that the call agents could only view the last four digits of the cards,” said the SBP.

The SBP has also instructed banks to deploy sufficient call centre resources to ensure a satisfactory customer experience. For this, the banks will have adequate IT controls and contingency and disaster recovery set-ups for their call centres.

Published in Dawn, April 2nd, 2021