TCT Portal Boosts Your Assessment Firm’s Competitive Advantage

One of the first things I noticed when I started compliance consulting was how differently each Assessor approached their compliance engagements. While the compliance standard didn’t change from client to client, Assessment firms had their own proven process (that worked for them) for running client engagements.

That process is your secret sauce — it’s one of your competitive advantages. If you’re like most assessment firms, you take pride in your proven process and you use it to stand out from the competition. 

Any compliance management tool you use absolutely must not force your firm into their canned workflow. That’s why TCT Portal is designed to be configurable to any workflow you choose. We realized from the start that the software you use must enhance your competitive advantage, not dilute it.

Let’s take a look at the ways that TCT Portal allows you to customize the way you work and maintain your competitive advantage.

Customized Templates

You need a system that allows you to use your own templates for each client engagement. TCT’s customized templates provide fully configured certification tracks that allow you to hit the ground running with compliance engagements. Templates eliminate all of the initial setup activity that you end up doing for every client. A template also provides the added bonus of dramatically improving consistency across your engagements.

With TCT’s customizable templates, you have the ability to preset the starting points for each engagement. Prepopulate item assignments, preload examples and guidance, and provide sample report text as a starting point.

Not only do you need a template for each certification, you probably need multiple templates. Under a PCI engagement, you might have any number of scenarios that you’re dealing with — for example, the client may or may not have a physical location, wireless, POS/POI devices, and more. TCT Portal allows you to create multiple templates that are tailored to every client situation. 

Customize a multitude of templates to make your engagements more efficient, and more tailored to the way you work.

Directional Guidance

Don’t overlook the guidance section in TCT’s compliance management software. Create your own directional guidance for specific requirements or line items, giving your clients tailored instructions or explanations. 

Train your clients to look up the guidance in TCT Portal. Now you have a scenario where your clients are finding the answers they need independently. This creates less interruption for you and it arms your clients to be more capable of performing their responsibilities with the directional guidance from your team, worded as you see fit. Your engagements are accelerated and your customers get more value from working with you.

Custom Certifications

PCI DSS is pretty overwhelming for most clients. To make things simpler for clients, you might choose not to present the full breadth of PCI DSS to your customers. Instead, you can create an information collection list (or possibly worded as a document request list) that boils down the multiple hundreds of items from PCI to maybe 135 things that you need from the client. Those items are written in plain English, in a way that your clients can easily understand. 

TCT’s custom certifications are essentially a collection list of line items that you’ve created yourself. Share the list with your clients, instead of the enormity of the full PCI DSS framework, and collect the 135 items that you need from the client. Because TCT Portal can map across certifications, you can automatically link the customer’s evidence from the information collection list to all the various destinations across PCI DSS.

For example, the information security policy is loaded into the customer request list once. TCT Portal then automatically populates it in all of the requirements across PCI DSS where this policy is used as evidence. Request once, use many.

Your customized certification lists are only accessible by you and your clients. This allows you to preserve your unique process and approach. Only your client sees your list, and the assessment team works from the PCI DSS SAQ or ROC side.

TCT Portal lets you make your customers’ lives easier by streamlining the process in a way other firms don’t do. Deliver your approach, your process, while leveraging the full capabilities of TCT Portal. 

TCT Portal APIs

TCT Portal’s API integration allows you to import or export data between our compliance management software and other systems. The API further integrates automation into your internal systems and procedures, so that TCT data can sit alongside your other information in customized dashboards and reporting tools.

By pulling data from TCT’s system into your own systems, you can fully integrate it with various platforms. The integration automates a multitude of tasks for you, including:

• Integrating compliance data with your analytics reports for tracking purposes.
• Displaying the status of a client’s compliance tracks on dashboards that you share with other third parties.
• Viewing summary level information.
• Pulling task and status information into your internal ticketing system, such as Jira.
• Marking a compliance task as complete within your system and sending a trigger to load up the appropriate Explanations or Evidence, for TCT Portal to mark it as done.

One-click Report Generation

One of TCT Portal’s biggest advantages — especially with PCI DSS — is the ability to automatically generate outbound reporting. Most Assessors would rather pull their fingernails out than go through all the manual labor of generating ROCs, SAQs and their associated AOCs. 

TCT Portal automates the entire process. At the end of your engagement, just click a button. All of your reports are systematically generated, without any editing or formatting work on your part.

Set Yourself Apart from the Competition

Any compliance management tool that forces you into a predefined process is diminishing your competitive advantage. TCT Portal is designed to help your assessment firm make your engagements more efficient and to preserve your unique proven process. Not only can you set yourself apart from your competition, but you’ll gain new efficiencies that further separate you from other Assessors.

The real benefits come in as you’re entering your second year with a particular client, allowing tremendous pickup of operational efficiency for both your client’s team and yourself.

All of these features and functions are available across all the certifications on TCT Portal — whether it’s a common standard like PCI DSS or a lesser known one like eCFR. Whether you’re a company with an assessor using a manual process or your organization is performing assessments, we’d encourage you to find out more about TCT Portal’s capabilities for assessment firms — request a demo today.