How UCaaS Providers can Handle Compliance Challenges and Avoid Regulatory Risks

Despite all the success that UCaaS providers are enjoying, thanks to the steady growth of the subscription-based business, they often face unique circumstances and requirements when it comes to compliance.

As more and more businesses enter the subscription market, there is a dramatic rise in the number of unscrupulous subscription billing practices. Also, since businesses have access to critical financial data of customers, it becomes imperative to comply by regulatory mandates, so data is always secure, and businesses can operate and succeed, without a hitch.

With a new regulatory alert being issued every 7 minutes, it becomes critical for subscription businesses to maintain compliance levels, and ensure the business operates as usual. Any non-compliance can cost the business a lot and can have a huge impact on the company’s financial standing, reputation, and customer service.

Here’s how UCaaS providers can handle compliance challenges, and avoid regulatory risks while maintaining the highest level of customer satisfaction:

1. Build and maintain end-to-end security: For any UCaaS business, protecting business and customer data is one of the many pre-requisites for ensuring compliance. With non-compliance costing businesses $14 million, ensuring end-to-end security is a business imperative. By building and maintaining a secure network, with the appropriate firewalls, anti-virus, strong passwords, and other security measures, businesses can ensure all data and communication is encrypted – irrespective of the device or location or service being used.
2. Implement the right taxation policies: With several regulatory, legislative and tax requirements across different regions and communication services, organizations have to ensure the right tax amounts for the services offered, while constantly complying with new regulations. Tax compliance tools offer real-time tax calculations for compliance across services; businesses can configure tax definitions accurately, define tax rates based on the location of subscribers and apply taxes for specific products or specific charges within a product – while ensuring compliance across various services.
3. Devise appropriate data retention and deletion policies: Every UCaaS business deals with humongous amounts of customer data, that needs to be safeguarded at all times. While storage and access of such data need to be done in a secure manner, what is equally important is to have appropriate data retention and deletion policies in place. The right guidelines for how data will be archived, how long it will be kept, and what will be done to that data once the retention period is over makes sure customer data is not misused or altered for purposes outside business operations.
4. Have strong access control measures in place: With the failure to comply with regulatory obligations extremely far-reaching, UCaaS providers need to implement the right access control measures to restrict access to cardholder data. By assigning unique IDs and having two-factor authentication measures in place, businesses can not only safeguard cardholder data but also ensure encrypted transmission across open and public networks.
5. Ensure disaster recovery: Given the fact that UCaaS providers have to be operational 24×7, there is no scope for even a slight disruption or interruption in service. For this reason, having a robust disaster recovery strategy in place ensures services are not affected, in the event of a disaster. By continuously replicating critical IT and operational data, companies can be prepared for potentially disruptive events, and have a plan in place that clearly lists all the steps involved in preparing for and adjusting to a potential disaster.
6. Leverage the cloud: With a new regulatory requirement being thrown in every month, manually managing compliance is a fruitless undertaking. Cloud, with built-in compliance features, allows organizations to efficiently manage risk and regulatory requirements. Using the cloud, businesses can respond quickly to the evolving regulatory landscape, while meeting customer demands, and driving agility across the business.
7. Make analytics an integral part of the business: UCaaS regulatory auditors constantly demand organizations to provide compliance levels at regular intervals. Using analytics, UCaaS providers can constantly analyze the growing volume of data, and unearth insights surrounding compliance across multiple jurisdictions. Any instance of non-compliance can be instantly identified, and looked into – and organizations can efficiently limit the likelihood and impact of regulatory risks.
8. Maintain an information security policy: The growth of the subscription-based business has made the sharing of information ever more prevalent and widespread. With information now being exchanged at the rate of trillions of bytes per millisecond, there is a compelling need for UCaaS providers to ensure data is protected by law or intellectual property. With a robust information security policy in place, organizations can enact the necessary protections and limit the distribution of data to unauthorized recipients in the public domain.
9. Have a robust subscription management solution: With multiple customers all over the world, it is impossible for UCaaS providers to manually do the tax calculations for every individual customer. A robust subscription management software that can automate this process is a must-have for UCaaS providers. Such system automates the calculation of the right tax amount for products/services, generates the taxation on the invoice, and also provides an accurate liability report.

Constantly meet standards

With the regulatory landscape constantly evolving, many UCaaS businesses often struggle with compliance and find themselves having little or no clue about the regulatory risks with non-compliance. When it comes to compliance and regulation, there are various aspects UCaaS providers must consider across the various communication services. While national and international compliance laws are complex in their own way, local jurisdictions further complicate the compliance process. By having the right policies in place across security, taxation, access control, data retention, and deletion, UCaaS providers can meet the data standards for regulatory compliance and security, while being agile and scalable.

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