It’s always a bad idea to overlook policy and compliance management. Sure, you have things to do that seem like more fun. You’re focused on providing products and services. New technology sparks interest for everyone in your organization. Without creating the right policies to maintain compliance, though, it can all be gone in a flash. Here’s how managing these essential elements can help you create a competitive strategy.
Keep Your Clients’ Trust
The companies that keep their clients’ trust are the ones that keep the clients they already have. They’re also the ones with the greatest opportunities to expand their client list. If you have a data breach, the customers you have will desert you. Your reputation will suffer, too, causing you to lose potential clients as well.
How do you keep your clients’ trust? One strategy is to make sure your systems and procedures are designed for compliance. You can’t keep anyone’s trust if your policies (or lack of them) create security issues.
Keeping your clients pays off big time. Author, speaker, and consultant Tiffani Bova often points out that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%.
Reduce Legal Expenditures
Your business may be rolling along great. One major lawsuit, though, and you could be putting all your resources into fighting it. Legal expenses can be massive and threaten the survival of your business. Many lawsuits that businesses face happen because their systems and procedures aren’t compliant with regulations.
Because best practices protect the customer, you avoid legal hassles by putting them in place. Your clients need their private information to be kept secure. Through the policies you implement, you create an organization that meets the clients’ needs. When their needs are met, they don’t have any reason to pursue legal action against you.
Avoid Regulatory Hassles
Being audited is even less fun than writing policies. In fact, it’s not only frustrating, but it’s also a terrible drain on your time and money. When you have compliance issues, you’ll likely hear from regulatory agencies. They’ll have questions. They may demand immediate changes. Wouldn’t it be better if you could resolve those issues before someone else points them out?
When you’re proactive in finding issues as soon as they arise, there are fewer compliance queries. Even when your procedures and systems are called into question, you have the answers you need to give them at your fingertips. Of course, audits can’t always be avoided. Yet, with the right policies in place, audits go smoothly.
Identify Compliance Issues
Compliance issues can cause lost time, lost clients, and lost profits. The worst situations happen when no one even knows there’s a problem. Recognizing you’re out of compliance with regulations and industry standards is the first step in finding a solution.
When you pay attention, you can find compliance issues before they result in any losses. You can identify issues more reliably by creating effective policies. Then, any time an issue arises, everyone involved knows how to proceed. They know what to do immediately and who to relay the information to next.
Improve Accountability
When a security or compliance issue happens, it’s important to know who was responsible for it. There are several reasons for that. That person may know valuable information about what caused the problem. You may need to train them better. You may even need to consider whether to keep them in that job.
Effective policies make identifying the responsible party much easier. Knowing this, employees take the initiative in learning the policies to the best of their ability. They work harder to use best practices in every part of their job. By having proper policies in the first place, you actually improve adherence to your policies.
Train Your Employees More Effectively
When you don’t have consistent policies, you make it very difficult for employees to learn their jobs. After all, if you don’t have a clear idea of what they should be doing, how can they? Writing clear and comprehensive policies and laying out best practices gives them much of the information they need to do their jobs competently.
Implementing a specific set of well-thought-out policies makes it easier for your employees to know and follow best practices. Training goes much more smoothly. Employees are better able to do the right thing when there is an agreed-upon right thing to do. Everybody wins.
Have Consistent Operations
It’s hard to develop a competitive strategy if you never know how your company will operate from one day to the next. If each department is doing things their own way, you can’t have a coherent organization. It’s hard to implement a company-wide system with appropriate controls to mitigate risks if everyone is following their own rules.
Having policies that can be implemented throughout your company is crucial if you intend to keep everything running smoothly. It’s also important because it keeps your business running in a consistent, secure way every day.
Stay Informed on Regulations
Regulations and industry standards have always changed from one year to the next. As technology advances, security and regulatory compliance requirements change even more rapidly. You may be in perfect compliance one day and regulatory trouble the next.
When you don’t keep your eye on policy and compliance management, you don’t know how regulations are changing in your industry. By putting the right policies in place, you can make sure you stay up to date with the latest changes in regulations.
Whatever you do in your company, make policy and compliance management a high priority. When you do, you’ll have a better system for staying informed about regulations. You’ll find it easier to run a consistent operation. You’ll be able to avoid compliance issues, legal expenses, and regulatory hassles. Most importantly, you’ll be able to earn (and keep) the trust of the clients that are so critical to your success.
Talk to JMARK today to move toward developing a competitive strategy with a rock-solid foundation of effective policy and compliance management. Call us at 844-44-JMARK, email us at jmarkit@jmark.com, or use our Contact Us page to leave us a message. JMARK is a managed services provider based in Springfield, Missouri. We’re ready to help you write and implement the policies you need to grow and thrive.
