CUnet Blog Post 7/31/2013
My name is Jeff, and I am addicted to process. If you’ve ever had a conversation with me, you know I am always thinking about ways something can be done better. “Tighten this up here. Tweak that over there. Remove this extraneous step that adds no additional value.” It’s like a puzzle. Once you figure out where all the pieces fit, everything just falls into place.
My name is Jeff, and I am addicted to process. If you’ve ever had a conversation with me, you know I am always thinking about ways something can be done better. “Tighten this up here. Tweak that over there. Remove this extraneous step that adds no additional value.” It’s like a puzzle. Once you figure out where all the pieces fit, everything just falls into place.
As the CUnet director of operations and leader
of the quality assurance team that we call MOQC (it
stands for Marketing Operations Quality Control), I have found my calling. With
the increasing regulations in higher education – especially in the proprietary
side of the industry – a detailed process to ensure compliance has become a
necessity.
A number of compliance offerings have shown up
over the past few years, some better than others. You’ve likely come across
“solutions” that promise compliance with no work required. Don’t I wish. In
reality, compliance monitoring done correctly requires a combination of people,
processes and technology along with expertise of the industry and the
regulations.
The CUnet MOQC team has a clearly defined set
of operational processes to monitor, enforce and address misrepresentation. Our
technology, Sparkroom Monitor, houses all known affiliate URLs and crawls their
content daily to track changes to school-approved content. Our team addresses
and resolves brand and compliance issues with necessary haste.
With new regulations coming out seemingly all the time, the updated Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) being a perfect example, a team of people capable and flexible enough to adapt quickly and implement new process that make sense for all stakeholders is a requirement in this industry.
For the TCPA changes, in addition to figuring out how to ensure
“express prior written consent” (a new requirement when contacting any mobile
number by automated dialer) on all internal and external forms, we also had to
determine the best way to enforce this requirement for call centers. In
preparation for the changes, we teamed up with CallMiner, a leading
conversational analytics solution, to improve our call center performance and
monitor our partners to verify compliance. The CallMiner tool creates
categories to flag calls where non-compliant or questionable language may be
used and uses this data to monitor how closely agents are adhering to scripts.
By highlighting specific calls with non-compliant language, manual monitoring
can be focused on riskier calls, resulting in better utilization of our human
capital. It is our goal to have 100 percent of affiliate calls uploaded into
CallMiner for compliance monitoring so we know exactly what is being said to
prospective students before they speak with our schools.
Every conversation about quality should also be a
conversation about compliance. Whether you’re talking about regulatory or brand
compliance, enforcing a consistent message delivers both peace of mind and
student prospects who display greater levels of engagement and intent.