How to Comply with Trade Compliance without Sacrificing Customer Experience

Change is the only constant in the trade compliance field, and it’s happening at a lightning pace. New tariffs and duties between countries, regulatory compliance requirements, and modern trade agreements have tremendously shaken the trade and supply chain market. Amidst it, meeting customers’ ever-changing demands and maintaining a long-lasting relationship with them while adhering to trade compliance is a pain area for traders and business leaders.

So, what can be the solution? Creating the right balance between trade compliance and customer experience is the right path. This blog helps you with some best practices for obeying trading rules and regulations while delivering extraordinary customer experiences.

Best Practices to Adhere to Trade Compliance While Maintaining Customer Experience

• Keep Yourself Updated

In the complex world of international trade, nothing is stagnant. The laws that govern the entire trading process (export and import) can be updated and adjusted depending on the financial and political situation of the country. In this case, keeping yourself updated is the only solution. For example, when dealing with the United States, check the laws that apply to the countries involved in both export and import. Read the Federal Register section relevant to your industry to understand the policies.

Knowing these can help you determine the tax, tariffs, duties, customs, licenses, and certification you require. Ultimately, you can comply with the trading rules and regulations, maintain customers’ beliefs, and stay in the competition.

• Maintain Thorough Records

Uncertainty can come without any prior notice. Hence, it’s a wise strategy to maintain a record to deal with uncertainty and save businesses. For this, you should prepare yourself with a defensible audit trail. It will help you with legal proof demonstrating that you have taken all the reasonable steps to adhere to trade compliance best practices. That way, you can avoid the events that occur due to doubt about your compliance with trading laws.

On the other hand, whenever your customers lose faith because of some compliance violation issues, you can use those legal documents to earn customers’ trust and continue doing business with them.

• Keep Yourself Updated with The Denied Party Lists

Denied Party Lists (DPLs) are the list of persons and entities who can’t enjoy the privilege of export and reexport, as per the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). When the Denied Party Lists (DPLs) are subject to frequent changes, keeping yourself and different departments updated with the current lists can be daunting. For example, warehouse staff may be aware of the latest list, but the front office often doesn’t care about these changes. They may ship the sample to a denied party. Your company would be in trouble for violating the export laws.

Even sharing the company’s vital information using digital devices or mediums such as phone or email with certain international DPLs companies may breach export compliance.

• Perform a periodic self-assessment

Whether your company exports or imports, acting reasonably is imperative so that nothing falls through the crack. Hence you should perform periodic self-assessments. By periodically reviewing your processes, you can ensure a regular practice of compliance and knowledge in your company. To successfully conduct a self-assessment process, you focus on reviewing training programs, record-maintaining processes, and non-compliance reporting measures.

• Maximize Internal Efficiencies with Trade Automation Technologies

Manual processes often lead to errors. Hence, you can maintain and lower trade compliance risks by employing trade automation tools. Moreover, you can enjoy the benefits such as:

– Regulate and streamline the trade compliance process and remove the manual activities

– Centralize the data management system and eliminates data inaccuracies and errors

– Document generation, storage, and recovery can become smooth and simplified.

– Simplifies the denied party screening process and product classification for imports and exports.

– Capture, analyze, and manage a bulk of data and extract meaningful insights for various applications. 

Adherence to Trade Compliance: Survival Method in the Overcrowded Market

According to the Export Administration Act (EAA), the penalty for not sticking to trade compliance includes 20 years imprisonment and a fine of $1 million for each violation. On top of this, violating trade compliance may put your company’s credibility at risk. You may fail to meet your deliveries, lose your customers’ trust, and move toward the demise of your business. So, following the above practices won’t only allow you to reduce compliance risks but also win customers’ trust and build an ever-lasting relationship with them.