6 Key Areas That Need Your Attention for Top-Notch Compliance

Compliance is a critical topic for any collection business that is often divided into a host of diverse, complex sub-topics. From audits to complaint resolution to training and procedures, each area where compliance is needed to have a solid foundation has certain unique challenges that can easily be overlooked. This can, in turn, cause issues in the background that are hard to pinpoint.

Here are some tips that can help you approach and address complex, hard-to-pinpoint issues by examining important aspects of compliance within your collection business.

1. Risk Assessment and GAP Analysis

It is important to build a strong and well-defined compliance function with a formalized risk management program. To strengthen the governance and compliance culture within your organization, it is important to identify the risks involved in your business activity as well as vendor relationships. A Gap Analysis lets you know where you are and where you want to be, helping you determine the nature, extent, and timing of your compliance initiatives.

2. Policy & Procedures Management

Not every policy or SOP in your docket needs to be updated every month. However, there are a few documents that need to be updated very often because of either their regulatory nature or changes in client requirements. Identifying these documents and topics and then auditing these on a more frequent basis can make a huge difference to not only compliance management but your training programs too.

What can be worse than making a change to a policy document based on a regulatory update but not having the staff members certify that update? The Consequences of failing to communicate policy changes can be grave (and expensive) for any collection business. Hence, make sure the compliance management system you use in your business can help you disseminate policy changes in real-time by having required certifications flagged to concerned team members.

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3. Employee Training & Testing

Automating processes to manage and monitor employee training enhances accountability and compliance responsibilities across business functions and departments. Remember – creating interactive and user-friendly training courses helps to keep agents engaged during the training.

You must also be able to monitor agents as per their test performances. Having or switching to an advanced training and testing system can help you identify agents that may be finding certain processes challenging. This will enable you to assign further/supplementary material to these agents or even rewrite your training modules for better education. A good training system should easily help you identify (either via feedback loop or data interpretation) if certain portions of a module are non-comprehensible to a wide cross-section of agents.

4. Complaint & Disputes Management

Certain accounts from each customer are prone to complaints more than others. Identifying these complaint clusters can help you connect the dots and find the root cause of most complaints. This can come in handy when you write training modules for your compliant analysts and compliance staff.

Given certain types of complaints take longer to resolve, it is also a good idea to identify them and bucket them together. One way to identify these outliers is to compare the resolution of each kind of complaint with the average resolution time across complaints.

5. Vendor Audits & Oversight

Monitoring & auditing your vendors is one area of compliance that is often overlooked. Conducting regular audits and listing out findings and remediations is not enough. Classifying audit findings and documenting them with their respective recommendation(s) can make best practices repeatable. Doing so can also help you segregate compliance concerns as per their priorities and average “time-to-fix” metrics. This will help you divert remedial efforts to a more pressing issue promptly and timely. A robust compliance software must be able to track non-conformities and corrective actions taken to remediate the non-compliant areas.

6. Digital & Technology Enablement

Investing in automation and digitalization of compliance risk management activities is the need of the hour. The future compliance environment needs to be integrated, adaptive, predictive, and digitally- enabled. Businesses should aim to invest in the digitalization of the compliance risk management process, including continuous monitoring, assessments, and reporting. Organizations now have the opportunity to leverage technology to improve strategic decision-making through a well-defined compliance program to achieve their compliance objectives.

Provana’s IPACS Compliance Management System can help you analyze and track all critical areas mentioned above, providing effortless control over process-intensive operations that are unique to collection businesses. IPACS keeps a 360-degree focus on compliance and streamlines key processes* and performance management with a layer of analytics. Want to connect with us? Click here to book a demo.

* key compliance processes