As much as you enjoy working with clients on engagements, sometimes compliance assessment can feel more like babysitting than anything else. Don’t get me wrong—your clients are great people, and you’re grateful for their business. But let’s be honest a moment: some of your compliance engagements require a lot more individualized attention, and more of your time.
Needy clients pull you away from your core work—and it takes a lot more emotional energy to deal with their questions and do all the cat herding that’s required. It can put you behind schedule and lead to some frustrating days at work.
Until now, dealing with difficult clients was just part of the job for a qualified security assessor. You could pre-screen your clients or try to coach them up, but there’s always going to be someone who is high-maintenance. That’s why we built TCT Portal.
TCT Portal automates a lot of the babysitting you have to do for your clients, so you can focus on compliance assessments. And, so you can enjoy your clients a lot more. Here are five key ways TCT Portal makes it easier to deal with clients.
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1) Less Handholding
Your job is to do compliance assessments, not consulting. But if your clients are new to the assessment process, they’re probably pretty clueless about a lot of things and they’re going to ask you anyhow. Or they don’t know the difference between an assessor and a consultant.
So a simple request for evidence turns into a volley of half a dozen emails explaining what kind of evidence is acceptable, why the evidence they’ve already provided won’t work and why the evidence is needed in the first place.
Assessors who use TCT Portal don’t have to go through all of that ridiculousness. The portal allows each assessor to configure, then continue to build, plain-English answers to all your clients’ common questions. Every requirement is explained in detail so that your clients know exactly what passes muster, and why. Since every assessment firm is unique, you can configure your own guidance and provide example documents to your clients.
Anytime you run into a question that the portal doesn’t already answer, you simply update your guidance. You only have to deal with the question once—all your active and future engagements automatically get that information as well.
2) No More Hounding
Ever have to send a request for information more than once? (Don’t answer that!) Sometimes getting assessment clients to submit compliance evidence is like pulling teeth from a herd of cats. To be fair, your point person is probably working long hours, trying to keep several balls in the air at once, and navigating the compliance process with little to no internal support. So they might not always see your email or be able to respond right away.
That’s cold comfort when you have your own tasks that are getting delayed by your client’s non-responsiveness. And it takes time out of your day to hunt down that missing document, discover it’s still not delivered, and type up another reminder.
TCT Portal takes that responsibility off your hands. Our automated reminder system nudges your clients on a regular basis until they fulfill your request. And you don’t have to keep checking your inbox—once the evidence has been delivered, you’ll immediately know the status from the TCT Portal interface, with an option to get notified. So you can send a request to the client once, and focus on other work until the portal notifies you.
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3) Consistent Submissions
Tired of hunting through emails, texts, FTP folders and online drop locations for the files you’ve requested? TCT Portal is your centralized repository for every piece of evidence. Clients upload the files and the portal stores them in a convenient, easy-to-find location. No more hunting through all your accounts and devices, wasting time hoping nothing has fallen through the cracks.
4) Immediate Mapping
Not only are your clients’ submissions consistently delivered in TCT Portal, they’re also automatically mapped to every requirement that they fulfill. While the assessor across town is manually mapping every file to each requirement in an unreliable spreadsheet, you’re enjoying an extra coffee break! Or, maybe you’re slaying them by getting more work done in less time.
Either way, TCT Portal takes hours of work off your plate and frees you up from the nagging worry that you’ve accidentally typed something on the wrong row, or overwritten something without realizing it.
5) Greater Efficiency
TCT Portal makes client assessments incredibly efficient the first assessment period, and even more efficient the second time around. TCT Portal keeps everything organized that a client submitted in previous assessment rounds. So a year later, or five years later, you can go back into the tool, pull up any requirement, and see the evidence that your client provided. It’s all right there at your fingertips. There’s less documentation to be resubmitted, and no searching back through your foggy memory to remember what your client provided last time around. Repeat engagements take just a fraction of the time.
Don’t Be a Babysitter
You don’t need to spend your time on compliance engagements micromanaging your clients and holding their hands. TCT Portal can eliminate the distractions and interruptions that some clients create. Instead, you can get down to business and enjoy all your engagements much more.
Ready to stop babysitting your clients and do more of your core assessment work? See a demo of TCT Portal today!
