Four Things Every Compliance Officer Should Know

Mark Stanley | December 06, 2012

Will Rogers said, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” In terms of compliance, we can try to

train our way to make sure that employees follow the rules, but we keep digging and the hole just keeps

getting deeper. This quote characterizes where we are with risk management and compliance efforts –

especially within customer service organizations. Why?

Making Sense of the Myriad of Regulations

Compliance is getting tougher and more extensive every day, and even with the best companies, with the

best intentions, who have a top-down attitudes, meeting compliance laws is risky business. This is

because Compliance Officers must depend on great processes and training when humans get involved.

Is this getting the job done? For example in the financial services area alone, firms are subject to a

complex array of compliance regulation from the FTC, SEC, CFPB, state and self-regulatory regulations

(FINRA). Training alone may not be able to make sense out this myriad of regulations.

Top Pain Point

The top pain point we hear from compliance officers is when employees become involved in a compliance

process. This is when risk increases because procedures for compliance become manual. Compliance is

not supported by end-to-end workflow systems at this point, and we rely on people remembering to do the

correct thing at the right time. So today, attempting to stay compliant typically depends on strong

processes and great training, but it’s difficult to really know if regulations have been followed.

We actually observe the following behaviors and conditions:

• Prioritization of tasks including compliance steps are self-selected by employees. They decide what

tasks are important, or what order tasks should be accomplished.

• Employees may mark a compliance task as complete, but they actually don’t do the task.

• They fail to update the system so the audit trail is lost.

• While workflow systems are wonderful at HOW something should be done, they fail to identify WHO

is the best skilled person to perform a task.

• Managers have little insight to what tasks have been completed, or if they have been completed in

the right order.

Why It Matters

Let’s look at an example to see why this matters. The State of California recently enacted a Homeowner’s

Bill of Rights that contains a provision for fines and penalties of up to $50,000 per incident if it can be

shown that a loan servicer acted intentionally or recklessly. The target audience is people who are about

to be evicted from their homes, and they are likely to complain. It only takes 100 complaints to equal

$5MM in fines.

That is simply not sustainable over the long haul...for the company...or for you!

A New Way

A new method exists that can help avoid problems and the resulting fines by addressing how employees

engage with regulated work items. The new method allows you to:

• Prove that tasks were actioned and provides an audit trail

• Prioritize, assign and push tasks to the most appropriately skilled and available employee

• Optimize resource utilization to control costs

The new way involves a new solution called workload management. It addresses how employees engage

with customer work and how they perform regulatory responsibilities. How can Compliance officers

benefit?

Workload management provides four key things every compliance officer should know:

1. Task Validation proves that a task was auctioned and provides an audit trail. It does this by

controlling and tagging all of the interactions customers have with your company – inbound and

outbound. The tags are the links that allow tracing so that you can prove things actually happened.

2. Prioritization and Push of tasks to employees based on business rules, SLAs and employee skill.

3. Employee Process Improvement provides reporting tools to provide insight into performance, task

completion and workload. Knowing what happened is important; using that information to continually

improve what you are doing is critical.

4. Resource Optimization to forecast, schedule and track all resources for activities.

Now any questions? If you want to find out more about workload management solutions and about

Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution, a key product in a workload management solution, read how

to Optimize Your Customer Service Throughout Your Enterprise, a Genesys white paper.

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