We’re hearing more and more businesses and governments talk about compliance management – but what’s involved in setting up good compliance management systems and processes?

What can go wrong?

Firstly, let’s look at why compliance matters.

When compliance management systems are lacking, your business may be exposed to a range of risks. Your employees are on the frontline and they represent your business to your customers. If you don’t have compliance systems in place relating to employee behaviour you can be at risk of call centre staff and consultants breaching rules and procedure by error, through misinterpretation of guidelines, or through deliberate acts.

Serious breaches can include your employees:

• Inappropriately storing sensitive customer data
• Providing inaccurate advice
• Offering financial advice outside of their authorisation level
• Prioritising their own interest at the expense of your customer
• Selling customers inappropriate products

Any of these behaviours would mean your business is at risk of losing customers, suffering reputational damage, and potentially being fined. So, it’s obvious that you want to put systems in place to prevent these behaviours from occurring.

When things do go wrong you may also need to report to appropriate authorities including the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) or the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). So, you not only need to have a system that helps to mitigate these risks, but you also need a system that can help you report on breaches and the remediation actions that your business has taken to rectify breaches.

Compliance management relies on culture

Culture is key. Strong governance processes and clear compliance management workflows can help to ensure that your employees are aware of regulations and your business’s guidelines, but it’s key that leadership supports and holds people to account.

A good compliance management culture will also improve workplace transparency – which is one of the key foundations to creating a positive culture. Transparency begins with leadership and extends through your team members to your customers.
When this culture flows through your organisation you’ll find that your employee’s actions are displaying your business’s brand values.

However, while culture is fundamental it’s important that you have a system supporting your compliance management program.

What should your compliance management system do?

A good compliance management system will help to ensure that your business is operating within regulatory requirements. Compliance management software can help to minimise risks, support remediation and report on breaches.

1. Catch breaches before they happen
Having insight into your teams’ interactions with customers means you can see any over-steps or missteps. Team managers can intervene and follow up directly with a team member for isolated incidents.

YakTrak’s ability to provide end-to-end observation helps organisations to monitor and report on the regulatory-based interactions that team members have every day.

2. Identify trends
Compliance management systems that tracks observations of all the conversations that team members have with customers can help to identify patterns of behaviour that require a larger program of training to be implemented. Having a system that allows compliance management teams to observe these behaviours is crucial.

YakTrak helps organisations observe patterns of behaviour and identify trends before they become problems.

3. Support remediation
While your compliance management system may be best in market, things can still go wrong.

Having a process to effectively engage with team members when they make mistakes, alongside targeted coaching and training that focuses on remediation, will mean that you can prevent future problems while retaining staff and building capability.

YakTrak’s ability to set targeted goals supported by an operating cadence and observation leads to effective outcomes that change behaviours.

4. Facilitate reporting
Compliance systems should capture the data required to report to senior management, the board of directors and regulatory bodies. Real-time reports mean data can be provided to relevant stakeholders with ease and audit trail capability can provide proof of remediation to regulatory bodies.

Reporting functionality should include breakdowns by volume and category, trend information, and capture the activities that were taken to reduce risks such as training, customer remediation and coaching.

YakTrak’s customised dashboards provide powerful reporting capabilities with compliance workflows designed to track end to end compliance and conduct risk activities.

Take a deeper dive into YakTrak’s compliance management solution.

How YakTrak can help

YakTrak makes compliance management easier.

We work with enterprise business management teams to ensure we are providing the right functionality that enables organisations to report on conduct and performance daily, in real time, all the way to senior management and the board of directors.

Our compliance management and conduct risk module offers the following:

• Customisable workflows to manage conduct risk
• Evidence of remediation through employee coaching
• Customer service remediation evidence
• Compliance reporting
• Security requirements and data security

Watch how YakTrak’s compliance workflow and audit trail works.

Contact us today to find out how YakTrak can support your compliance management program.

Image by Gabrielle Henderson via Unsplash.