Tips to Manage 3 Common Challenges in Compliance Training

Compliance training demands more from collection businesses with the rollout of new rules and new regulations. However, the hustle to keep up with their daily operations often leads businesses to create new blind spots in their training programs and add additional compliance risks to their profiles.

Putting certain checks and balances in place can help these businesses identify gaps and mitigate risks. To discuss best practices in training and development and more, Research Assistant hosted a webinar with Sara Woggerman (Executive Director of iA Research Assistant and President of ARM Compliance Business Solutions) and Missy Meggison (General Counsel and Executive Editor at insideARM and Executive Director of the Consumer Relations Consortium). In two-part series, we will summarize key excerpts from the same webinar. This is the first part of the series.

Challenge 1: Knowledge retention does not come easy

Training is not just about broadcasting certain information. It is also about helping your training subjects retain the same information. It is about learning and development. One of the best ways to achieve this is by introducing gamification in your training programs. Gamification makes your training more interactive and user-friendly. With the younger generation joining the workforce, it is a good idea to cater to different learning styles via gamification. To instill new styles of learning, you can implement something like trivia games into your login systems. Simply pop a question in your agents’ screen before they log into their systems or try a contest that instils healthy competition and a sense of gratification among your agents.

It is also important to monitor and maintain employees’ knowledge of certain subjects. Do pulse checks on the 30th, 60th, and 90th days from the first training day on each subject to determine if your trainers were effective. Some mini quizzes on the above-mentioned milestones can help uncover potential gaps in your compliance training processes. Just make sure that these quizzes do not disturb your regular testing framework. As a rule of thumb, make sure the passing criterion for all tests is at least 95% for old agents (that have been trained and retrained on a certain subject) and 85% for newly hired agents. Brainstorm with your teams to know what corrective actions you should take when an agent fails a test.

tips to manage 3 common challenges in compliance training

Challenge 2: It is hard to determine what agents should and should not know

To deliver training successfully, you should determine what your agents and various staff members “need to know” without getting them overwhelmed on subjects they need not train on. To navigate this, classify all compliance training topics into “need to know” and “nice to know” labels per each role. The best time to take up this exercise is during your risk and assessments.

Post this exercise, create course curriculums keeping role-based training in mind. Ideally, multiple subject matter experts should work on building the curriculum for each role. The course curriculum should also follow relevant stakeholders’ typical “create-review-approve” process.

Challenge 3: Compliance training is usually uninteresting

Long-winded or monotone compliance training can quickly lose the interest of your agents, which is directly linked to knowledge retention. To combat this challenge, you can experiment with different learning styles and create training material in more interactive formats. Many collection businesses have found success in microlearning. Microlearning as a learning method lets you break the big subject into logical pieces. Microlearning sessions (usually no longer than 10 minutes) can help you be specific about certain acts or subjects.

Remember – providing examples also make the training more memorable. So, make sure your training sessions are complemented with as many examples as possible. For a technical and high-risk topic like Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, Regulation F, Fair Credit Reporting Act (if you are into credit reporting), and Telephone Consumer Protection Act, have training material available in multi-media and multi-format such as videos and FAQ guides. It is also important to make it easy for your agents to find this training material. To achieve this, you can either utilize a SharePoint site in-house or sign up for (or switch to) a learning management system that can help your agents self-test their knowledge via quizzes.