Who Let the Dogs Out? ETHIX360's Top 3 Predictions for GRC in 2023
I suppose this won’t be the first set of predictions you’ll read on the state of the risk and compliance market for 2023, nor the last. At ETHIX360 we try to identify a few different trends: one that should have already happened, one that people think has happened but hasn’t, and one that delivers a piece of tomorrow into our world today. If not today, at least one day in 2023!
Will the dog ever catch the car?
We’ve all heard the cliché about a dog tirelessly chasing a car. Similarly, for 2023 (and likely 2024), vendors and companies alike will be chasing the fast-moving targets and evolving landscape of global data privacy. I’ve been wondering for a while when the evolution of global data privacy regulations will slow down and let the world catch up. Will 2023 be the year the dog catches the car? Maybe, in some limited ways, but data privacy regulations still have a long way to go to be sufficient. Many countries – the United States included – still don’t have the basic underpinnings of what’s needed. From our vantage point, it’s going to be a long time before this dog is chasing a parked car.
Seeing the Tipping Point in Hotlines for Incident Reporting
For years pundits have predicted the end of the live agent call center as we know it. Without argument, it has been coming … like a herd of turtles though! We can look back 10 or 15 years and see that as many as 90% or more of all reports involved an interaction with a live agent in a call center. But that number has slowly declined and in 2022 dipped for the first time to under 40%.
Millennials now comprise over 60% of the workforce and they text, not talk. When more than half of the workforce’s preferred method of communication for the first time is not the phone, it should come as no shock that the trend line then moves away from live agents to other methods. Web forms, portals, and texting have slowly been gaining ground for a decade. AI-enabled digital agents have also burst on the scene and really moved the needle.
Further, businesses are becoming more and more global – and that doesn’t just mean expanding to more countries, although that is a big part of it. Equally challenging is the employee migration we see globally. Negatively portrayed as “border security” at times, the reality is that the world is more and more mobile, and global political unrest is accelerating this migration of employees. In the United States alone, the minimum languages required to support many clients have grown a lot – from English and maybe Spanish to often 30 or more languages that represent the employee base’s primary tongue. This causes the heavy use of translators to support live agent calls, and the experience using translators and a three-way call is a lousy caller experience most of the time.
Lastly, COVID had a devastating impact on many industries, and among the hardest hit were call centers. Many have not recovered, and many never will. Like many businesses, the successful ones adapted and quickly moved to a work-from-home business model. Now it’s time to come back to the office but doing so in a call center changes the fundamentals of the cost model when you incorporate social distancing, making the cost of live agent call centers skyrocket.
A Shift from Passive Response to Active Deterrence
When we see a bomb-sniffing dog at the airport walking among the passengers and luggage, we all know why. Find the explosive device before first being alerted to it by a hijacker with a button in their hand! By then, you are in pure response mode and options are extremely limited.
This is no different in the world of incident management in the workplace. The worst way to find out that your business has an issue with sexual harassment or discrimination is being hit with a lawsuit, or even a report from an employee subjected to abuse until they were driven to report it. At that point, the incident has occurred, you found out afterward, and you are reacting.
It is now more common to give the company the ability to deter events before they happen, and that requires active surveillance. We’ve seen the acceleration of new techniques and technologies to support active deterrence including social media monitoring among other strategies, and we see that trend expanding in 2023.
The common thread across these trends is the lowering of costs and the improvement in the effectiveness of compliance programs. Now it's back to finishing 2022, but before we do, the answer to the “who let the dogs out?” question… was me. I let the dogs out.
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MEET THE AUTHOR
J Rollins is the co-founder and CEO of ETHIX360. J is a well known leader and innovator who has served on senior leadership teams ranging in responsibility from Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, SVP of Product Strategy and Chief Operating Officer.
ABOUT ETHIX360
At ETHIX360, our goal is simple: to provide an affordable, flexible, and comprehensive answer to employee communication, policy management, corporate training and case management on issues related to corporate ethics, code of conduct, fraud, bribery, and workplace violence.
