Leverage CMS Compliance Tools to Elevate the Customer Experience

Hardly a month goes by without the introduction of some new regulatory mandate, legislative requirement or addition to the compliance to-do list. For many companies, it can feel as if they spend so much time guaranteeing watertight compliance that they have little time left to dedicate to ensuring the success of their core business.

While compliance, of course, is a vital part of business today, particularly for the financial services sector, it doesn’t provide that all-important competitive advantage that businesses are striving for in today’s hyper-competitive markets. To keep one step ahead of the competition, customer service and customer experience (CX) need to be front and center. Even the most compliant businesses won’t succeed if they can’t keep hold of any customers. Put simply, compliance alone isn’t enough to sustain and grow a business, and if compliance tops everything else, you run the risk of losing your customers in a web of complex, albeit compliant, processes and procedures.

Baseline Compliance

To succeed, compliance needs to be the baseline from which businesses develop their CX. For example, the FCA in the UK mandates an eight-week timeframe within which financial services organizations need to resolve complaints. In reality, that’s about seven weeks too long, giving already potentially transient customers the opportunity to take their business elsewhere. Not that speed to resolution should be the ultimate aim, but customer experience excellence involves focusing on quality outcomes that are achieved as efficiently as possible. If a business is using eight weeks as its goal, then it really should be questioning the effectiveness of its current priorities and processes.

Compliance tools are also a good starting point for improvements to CX, with complaints management systems capturing every interaction and resulting information in a centralized, accessible, fully auditable solution. Not only does this provide the levels of comprehensive transparency required for robust compliance, but it provides your business with a unified single view of the customer, the beating heart of CX excellence.

Reduce Complexity

Many businesses now recognize that instead of regarding compliance measures as onerous, they are now simply part of doing business and need to be built into everyday processes and procedures, rather than taking priority over all other issues. In such organizations, customers are unaware of the complex nature of the multiple compliance boxes that are ticked in the background of every interaction. Forward-thinking organizations are striving to provide a streamlined, robust customer experience without adding any more complexity to what can already be a complicated customer journey, prioritizing an efficient and effective experience at all times.

While compliance and CX don’t seem like the most natural counterparts, the businesses that recognize the synergies between the two are those who will survive and thrive in an increasingly competitive and turbulent global economy. As customer expectations continue to rise and regulatory requirements embed themselves into the core of every business, customer experience needs to be the priority for every organization. By creating a customer-centric culture that puts CX excellence at its center, you’ll ensure your business is head and shoulders above the rest.

Because positive customer experience, as well as compliance, are necessary to the success of your business, a complaints management system (CMS) in the cloud can help provide the tools necessary to process improvements, manage complaints and ensure compliance. Our complaint management system, Aptean Respond, provides a comprehensive platform to do all of this.

For more information on how Aptean can help with your compliance and customer experience requirements, reach out to us.