Whether you’re a compliance Consultant or a secure hosting provider, you have customers that need your help with compliance. And that means out of the gate you’re constantly delivering the same documents, answering the same questions, and providing the same information — time and time again over your engagements.
For service providers like you, it isn’t just damn tedious. It’s a waste of time.
Unless you’re using the Service Provider Template in TCT Portal.
Service Provider Templates eliminate all of that initial setup activity that you end up doing for every customer. The template also provides the added bonus of improving consistency across your engagements (Pro Tip: ask your QA department how much they would love your personnel to do things consistently!). With a single setup request, you can provide everything you know they’ll need from you for their compliance engagement.
Discover: How Does TCT’s Compliance Management Software Compare to the Competition?
What Is a TCT Service Provider Template?
TCT’s Service Provider Template is a canvas to create your own customized approach to any certification that your client is using.
Think of a template as an empty set of bookshelves. You can fill the shelves with all of the documents, resources, and information that your customers need for their compliance engagements. Arrange the books on the shelves however you like, in any way that fits your approach.
Note that while the TCT Portal is a SaaS offering, this template is specific to your organization and only used on your engagements. TCT has been in this space a long time, and we realize that this is your secret sauce for your engagements, which differentiates you from your competition.
Just a single setup request and the template is applied to your client’s TCT engagement and layered directly into their compliance engagement. Everything is populated right where it needs to be — clients don’t need to do any sorting, setup, contemplation, or organizing. They hit the ground running, and you’re their hero.
How It Works for Consultants
As you spin up a brand-new engagement for a client, you can submit a single request to apply your Service Provider Template to that particular engagement. The templates are certification-specific and you can have multiple templates for a given certification. With this single request, you can rough-in that engagement.
Place editable sample word docs, PDFs, and references exactly where you want them. You can add in customized guidance on your engagements. This guidance is populated LIVE to your active engagements connected to that template.
Instead of answering the same question repeatedly across your engagements, you can simply update your guidance and advise the client to look at the latest guidance for that item.
All of your requirements have the right things attached, the right guidance, the right explanations — from the word “Go.”
TCT proves compliance doesn't have to suck.
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How It Works for Secure Hosting Providers
As an example, if you’re a secure hosting provider with PCI customers, you’ve probably also attained PCI yourself to support them (this example works whether we’re talking ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA or any other industry standard certification).
Nearly every client comes to you with the same requests. They need your compliance paperwork. They go off to review the standalone PDF you provided to them and then they have a bunch of follow-up questions that you know they’re going to ask, because many customers ask the same questions.
TCT’s Service Provider Template streamlines those requests so you don’t have to.
Typically you’ll have a standardized approach to do that. Your items and elements will fall into three buckets:
- Your responsibilities
- Your client’s responsibilities
- Shared responsibilities
Add additional Explanations to the template that provide detail to the Client regarding which items fall into each bucket. If you like, include guidance to help them understand what they need to do and what you’ll take care of.
If there’s anything you need to repeatedly tell your clients — instructions, advice, or even a quick heads-up — that’s what this template is all about. You can even use the template to provide referrals to specialists that you collaborate with. Add a comment about the special deal you can offer if they use a promo code.
Attach your latest compliance paperwork to the right items — automatically!
Finally, if there are requirements that you as a Service Provider address in their entirety for a Client (such as a shared hosting provider taking care of physical security), when the template is applied, not only will it attach your compliance paperwork to that requirement on the certification but it will also move that item up the workflow automatically.
So if your secure compliant hosting organization takes primary responsibility for one third of the PCI items for a given client, this means that over 100 requirements are immediately moving up to the next person in the workflow and your Clients never even need to deal with those at all! They’re going to love you for it.
From our experience, very few of the Service Providers have harnessed the power of the TCT Portal — be ahead of the pack and crush your competition with client kindness.
Related: How One Cloud Provider Mastered Compliance Audits
You’ll Never Want to Go Back
With TCT’s template, it isn’t Groundhog Day every time you start a new client. Just a simple request and all of the wasted time you used to spend on setup tasks are automagically done for you. Consistently.
- Use the template to explain how your engagements with clients work.
- Fill it with all of the documentation and resources your customers repeatedly ask for.
- Add comments and explanatory notes that answer your frequently asked questions.
- Provide instructions and guidance you know your clients will need.
New personnel? No problem!
If you have newer personnel on your team, you don’t have to hope that they can figure out all the right places for specific things. Instead, rest assured that your newest Consultants can replicate your processes during an engagement, starting on Day One.
Impress your clients
Your client has absolutely no idea whether you were grinding away for 36 straight hours to get their track set up or if you took five seconds to make the single request. But time is money and it sure looks impressive when you walk into a brand-new client engagement and you already have an enormous amount of visible progress.
Imagine the advantage TCT’s template gives you over other service providers — to be able to tell your clients they won’t have to lift a finger when you deliver the pile of documents they need and preconfigure their engagement perfectly (every time).
Live updates
Your firm is continuously improving, and that means your templates will need some updating once in a while. When you make a change to the guidance provided through a TCT Service Provider template and make it live, that change is automatically implemented across every single client engagement leveraging that template.
You won’t have to deal with different versions, or obsolete templates in the middle of existing engagements. Every client is always using your latest and greatest template.
Honestly, it’s as if clouds parted and angels started singing. You’re going to wonder why in the hell you used to do things the old way.
Related: There’s a Better Way to Fill Out Security Surveys
Get Started with TCT’s Templates Today
TCT’s templates are easy to use, but we can get you jump-started if you need a boost. TCT can take your existing templated material and load it into the TCT Portal for you. And from then on, you can easily maintain it yourself.
Use the Service Provider template with any compliance standard you’re running in TCT Portal. The platform is designed to be your “one-stop-shop” for all of your compliance management needs.
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