As you walk into a compliance engagement with a new client, you’ve got everything orderly and planned out. Your deck of templates is ready to go and you’ve set up your drop zone for files. A beautiful Gantt chart maps out the entire compliance assessment, with milestones.
The first day, you lay out the plan with the client: as their guide through compliance, you’ll lead them through a specified process. Together you’ll hit the milestones, cross the finish line, angels will sing and your client celebrates with high-fives. Everyone loves the plan and they’re all aligned and ready to go. They crouch at the starting blocks.
The gun goes off, and it’s like watching a race where all the runners scatter in different directions. It’s an insane scramble out of the gate, because your client doesn’t understand the process and they don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing.
They ask a lot of questions, which is good—but it also means they have a lot to learn and it’s slowing them down. Other complications enter the scene as well. Because they aren’t dedicated full-time compliance people, they have their own jobs to do. As a result, your client starts dropping the ball and the engagement falls behind schedule.
It’s a tough position for any assessor to be in. You’re charged with guiding them through the assessment journey, but your client—the one who is depending on you to get them across the finish line on time—is the one slowing you down.
You’ve got to get them back on track, and that means stepping up the accountability. If you’ve taken a proactive approach to the engagement, you have already seen this coming, and you’ve got a method ready to go.
Keeping Your Client Accountable
For most assessment firms, keeping the client accountable means tracking everyone’s activity, so you can nag the right people during status calls. If it comes to it, you inform their supervisors to light a fire under them.
While this approach may get some results, it also adds more work for you to do—work that doesn’t get you any closer to the finish line. It’s time-consuming and intensely manual work that takes precious hours out of your week.
The very act of keeping your clients on track works against you in terms of getting the project done quickly and within budget. You’re trying to speed up the project by keeping them accountable, but keeping them accountable slows you down.
How can you protect the compliance engagement in a way that doesn’t work against you? If you aren’t using compliance automation software, you’re in a catch-22.
Automated Accountability
TCT Portal compliance automation software gives you built-in accountability that gets results. When a team member submits (or doesn’t submit) a file, it’s tracked. When assignments shift from one person to another, you’ve got a record of it. When something is still outstanding, you know it. And so does your client.
Automation provides a depth of accountability that you could never do manually:
- Daily reminders to every team member with an outstanding task. No more nagging!
- Real-time status at your fingertips. Stop burning hours figuring out current project status.
- Historical audit trail, by person or by requirement. Know what’s been done, when, by whom, within seconds.
All of the reminders and the nagging automatically comes from TCT Portal, not you. You don’t have to waste time manually identifying what each person did or didn’t do, and figuring out the status of each requirement. Instead, you can immediately see it in TCT Portal. No more hunting down each person to ask for an update. Everything is tracked, and all of that information is right at your fingertips.
The automation becomes even more valuable once your client moves into ongoing compliance maintenance—which TCT calls Operational Mode. That’s when your client has periodic requirements to take care of in order to maintain their certification. TCT Portal automatically prompts each person on a timely yet regular basis to keep them on-track between annual assessments. That way, your client stays current and you don’t have a mess to clean up next year.
Most clients flake out at some point. They suddenly drop off the face of the earth, they get distracted with daily business needs or they start slacking off. If they want to get through the compliance journey in one piece, they’ll need you to keep them accountable—and TCT gives you the tools to do it effectively.
Our automated compliance software makes it easy to navigate through the chaos of compliance so you don’t have to endure the harsher aspects of an engagement. You don’t have to waste another minute on tasks that should be automated. When you find your firm falling behind your competition, they’ve likely embraced automation.
Accountability That Doesn’t Work Against You
There’s a better way to keep clients accountable—and it doesn’t involve micromanaging anyone. Automate compliance accountability management and free up your time for the meaningful work that you enjoy.
Check out TCT Portal and see what compliance automation software can do for your assessment firm.
