Sooner or later, each of the managers faces a choice whether to use a third party for a job or to do it on their own. One may look for reliability and quality, while another may look for speed and cost. Outsourcing of whistleblowing hotlines is quite popular already — why? Why there are still companies that use an in-house option?
While some businesses opt for in-house solutions, outsourcing your whistleblower hotline can be a game-changer, and here's why.
Ensures quick wins for a compliance team
Compliance initiatives often demand quick-win projects that can be implemented swiftly. The whistleblower hotline can be one such project, especially when working with outsourcing providers. Unlike complex ERP platforms that relate to numerous business processes, the whistleblowing hotline outsourcing is a focused endeavour since it covers from one to three business processes. Such platforms should go live within 40 hours for SMEs and within a month or even less for corporations.
Gives you a choice for your needs
The whistleblower hotline outsourcing market is highly competitive, offering you the advantage of both cost control and quality assurance. Plenty of aggregators like G2 Crowd will be at your service. With numerous outsourcing vendors vying for your business, you have the flexibility to choose the one that aligns with your organization's needs, budget, and long-term goals. This wealth of options not only fosters cost control but also guarantees a high-quality, customized solution for maintaining secure whistleblower channels.
Helps you avoid mistakes
Outsourcing companies provide bundled solutions that encompass various reporting channels. This includes dedicated toll-free phone lines, user-friendly chatbots, confidential email boxes, and intuitive web portals. By consolidating these channels into a single, unified system, whistleblowers have multiple options to report misconduct, ensuring convenience and accessibility. When it comes to Ethicontrol — unlike others, we decided to embed incident and case management functionality into all tariff plans. So you can get a comprehensive platform just for 89 EUR per month.
For global companies, good hotline vendors also offer global support, covering various countries. For example, at Ethicontrol we support more than 70 intake languages, we offer dedicated toll-free lines in most of the countries and never user interpreters for call intake — just trained native speakers as call agents.
We've seen plenty of zombie hotlines that no one uses. It is very easy to make mistakes and very hard to resolve them when it comes to publicly available hotlines. We have seen successful and unsuccessful implementations, so we developed a methodology and made it accessible for everyone — Painless whistleblowing rules.
Simplifies your work
Perhaps one of the most significant advantages of comprehensive outsourcing solutions is their turnkey nature. These solutions come preconfigured and ready to deploy, sparing your organization the time and effort required for complex setup and implementation. This eliminates the need for painstakingly defining project milestones and expedites the process of getting your whistleblowing hotline up and running.
With Ethicontrol you may go live within 72 hours. However, should you need tailoring or customisations — our project managers will help you find the shortcuts and shorten the implementation project from months to several weeks.
No servers or hardware costs from your side
Modern outsourcing operates as a Software as a Service (SaaS), eliminating the need for substantial capital expenditures and hardware costs. With a simple subscription fee, you gain access to a secure, up-to-date, and supported platform.
Best providers simply have a single invoice line – subscription. You get SLA and if not satisfied – switch to another whistleblowing hotline vendor. Transitioning to another vendor is hassle-free, as they will assist in migrating from your previous provider. Our Ethicontrol platform has the import feature. You can prepare a table of cases and import it without us, keeping them confidential. Or, if you are migrating from another vendor — we will help you create a mapping file and tailor your dump export to our import template.
Proven vendors alleviate your stress and anxiety
Finding a third party as a contractor can be risky. So successful compliance managers need to cover their project risks.
Implementing an outsourced whistleblower hotline should be transparent and manageable. For example, unlike traditional approaches that involve extensive documentation, tons of PowerPoint, and project plans, Ethicontrol employs lean and agile methodologies. We set up a pre-adapted platform and customize it for you based on a deep understanding of your company, industry, legislation, and internal policies. Together with a client, we make a few iterations to tailor the platform further, making the process significantly more efficient. Of course, all the iterations are documented. Such an approach proved to have less effort from both sides compared to traditional approaches.
Whistleblowing vendors are subject to stringent information security and data privacy requirements. Opposite to in-house solutions, the outsourced apps are frequently audited, and tested. Besides, other clients monitor vendors. In short, the number of controllers and controls can be much higher for outsourced compared to in-house. For example, Ethicontrol is certified under ISO 27001 and ISO 27701. We successfully passed two audits in the last 24 months. In addition, we had two independent penetration tests performed on behalf of our clients within the past 12 months.
Before going live, we always train client's users and help them with the communication campaign. Each stage has tangible results. At Ethicontrol we constantly cooperate with different designers to support our clients with stickers, posters, and explainer videos, and more importantly — it comes at no cost to our clients. Some of our artworks can be seen on Pinterest or YouTube.
True anonymity and increased trust from reporters
Finding and implementing tools for anonymous communication is possible, but how can you convince reporters of this? The simplest way is to entrust it to a third independent party that builds its business on this trust and values its reputation highly.
It's not just about trust! Ask yourself — can you trust your IT department? Is there really a guarantee that no one is taking digital fingerprints or has access to your cases? How will your management react if they learn about something unpleasant and worry about your line of trust?
An independent whistleblowing line also protects the compliance officer from arbitrary actions and pressure from others, as there is a third party that will never reveal an anonymous source or confidential information. For example, in the Ethicontrol platform, we deliberately did not implement certain functionalities — so that even under pressure, we could not harm our anonymous applicants or our clients. By default, (unless the law obliges our client), our contact center does not record calls, and information about registered cases is automatically deleted immediately after being sent to the incident management system.
Conclusion
Outsourcing your whistleblower hotline is an easy and effective way to enhance your compliance and ethics framework. It provides quick wins, cost control, comprehensive solutions, and hassle-free management, all of which contribute to a stronger, more ethical organization.
Compliance officers often lack resources, so why should you reinvent the wheel once more? We believe that modern compliance teams have better alternatives to spend their time and focus on their key competencies and strengths. While the remaining should be outsourced or delegated. Luckily, the whistleblowing and case management vendors and their solutions are mature enough to support you in the best way.
The choice between in-house and outsourcing your whistleblower hotline hinges on factors such as cost, expertise, and efficiency. Outsourcing can often provide a more streamlined, cost-effective, and secure solution, allowing your organization to focus on its core mission while maintaining robust whistleblower channels.
