Compliance: Daily Affirmations

I promise you, I am not a “Yes Man.”

Sure, I’m an amicable guy, and I definitely like to say yes to things; come to think of it, I might have locked myself into dog-sitting and a trip up to wine country on the same day this weekend. But don’t tell me that’s mutually exclusive! The dog is very cute, it should be fine. Still, don’t call me a “Yes Man.”

However, I certainly felt like the fabled Yes Man on a conference call with one of my customers the other day. Don’t put the blame on me though, blame ZL’s Compliance module for Pete’s sake. Its features just make it a little too easy to say yes. Honestly, when it comes to compliance – I’ll stop you right there: yes.

Sure, ZL did secure messaging and several other things before building out deep compliance functionality, but as far as core modules go, it is our oldest and still a major part of what we do. I guess that is what happens when you work at something for a decade and a half: you become an expert and a leader.

But back to compliance and — specifically — this customer I was on the phone with. A national bank that I work with brought in a new compliance officer who had worked with a different software at her last job. Being new to the ZL software, she was still trying to work out all of the details. So, I hopped on a call with her boss, another officer, one of their engineers, and her. To be honest, started out a bit tense; they essentially had a list of demands for me. But what did I tell you about compliance questions?  The answer is yes, yes we can.

We need to be able to monitor LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. We need to be able to heighten the supervision of specific users. We need to vary the retention timeframes of various departments. We need to monitor overlapping users from different review groups.  We need to be able to perform robust searches and export to PST. We need reports on every action we take. We need the system to adjust based on specific false positive review triggers…

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. As you may imagine, the conversation was much more jovial by the end of the call. I’ll let our compliance module take the credit here, and I will go ahead and take the fall for not suggesting training earlier (I know, facepalm) but we worked all of that out going forward. Several of the things they were looking for they were expecting us to pitch as product enhancements, because their past product experience led them to believe that it could NOT all be included off-the-shelf. And they were probably most interested to know how easy it is to adjust the lexicons to improve what was flagged for review.

One of the examples they specifically gave was that their lexicon flags emails that have the word “sex” in them, so any paperwork or form that specified a box for male or female was getting flagged for review. In a few clicks, we showed them how to exclude that word from the rule if it existed within a few words of “male” or “female.” And instantly, the lives of their reviewers improved. We then went through how to automatically exclude disclaimers at the end of emails, and so on. It’s great being on calls like these, where the customer sees noticeable improvement in the work they have to do every day, and is truly appreciative of it.

So, in conclusion, I am definitely not a yes man (unless it comes to enterprise compliance)!

compliance lexicon review social media

When I’m not immersed in the technical sophistication of ZL’s software or answering the needs of my venerable customers, you can probably find me watching one of my favorite sports teams. I may be a transplant to this crazy hotbed of cutting-edge technology we call Silicon Valley, but I will always root for my Braves and Falcons; hopefully, that will remind me to keep my southern charm as well! I’m not afraid to laugh and smile like I mean it, especially if there’s a nice glass of wine in my hand and friends to share it with. Suffice it to say that my other interests are slightly nerdy: I simply can’t decide if I would rather reference Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones here. As a tiebreaker, I guess I will just sign off by saying, “may the force be with us.”