Behind the Scenes With Risk and Compliance

Yael Stanger Sonsino at NICE looks behind the scenes with risk and compliance.

If you’ve ever watched a scary movie, you’ve seen what it looks like when people try to anticipate danger and avoid risk. Maybe they peek over their shoulder. Or they skulk around dark corners to lose a stranger. The way people brace themselves for risk determines a lot about how they will fare with it.

Given the risky, rapidly changing world of regulation, we wanted to learn more about how companies today perceive their risks in achieving and maintaining compliance. Our NICE survey included 200 senior decision-makers from companies with between 1,000 and 10,000 employees in the US and Europe.

Here are a couple of our eye-opening discoveries:

• Generally, the more data you hold, the greater your exposure – whether it’s from attackers, auditors, or even consumers. But despite the alarming headlines about cyber-attacks and account takeovers, companies are actually most concerned with saving large volumes of data and private information (74%) and adhering with regulatory requirements (73%). Meaning that while there are risks of outside attack, it is the potential lapses with your own data and system that are the biggest threat.
• A full 88% of companies are getting requests regarding data privacy from their customers, for example the right to be forgotten under GDPR or CCPA, which requires a contact centre to be able to delete all data pertaining to them. Yet 67% of companies are still handling privacy requests manually, which could lead to errors, blind spots, and misuse of team time and energy, when compared with automated solutions.

What each discovery points to is what the scary movies themselves usually reveal: the danger is where you least expect it – hiding behind the couch or right under the bed. That threatening phone call is coming from inside your own house…

Because when it comes to managing compliance, the big danger is not outside your organization, but inside it. The lack of a strategic system as you deal with compliance is what puts you at greater risk.

Simply doing the bare minimum, using manual efforts, and working without proper support, will, rather than serving as a safeguard, instead open up many potential new vulnerabilities which are, in fact, the real danger.

Just meeting compliance requirements without a larger system is the equivalent of the character in the movie who backs away from danger, escapes into another room, and locks the door behind them – only to turn round and realize the threat is in fact inside there with them!

Your organization must choose the path through regulation wisely. Know where the real dangers lurk. And avoid the shortcuts through the dark that are inevitably filled with traps.

Most importantly, trust a solution that keeps you safe and compliant with automatic processes. Because in compliance, just like in the movies, those who fall behind the others are most likely to get picked off.