We recently took some time to meet with Jeffrey Larosa, Vice President, Research Operations to learn more about the Court Operations team within Equifax Workforce Solutions. We wanted more insight into how this team relies on the “4 Ps” to drive innovation and efficiency to better serve our partners and customers through the constantly changing demands of the court research industry.
What does the court operations team specialize in?
The Court Operations team specializes in background screening services that aid in the pre-employment process in partnership with background screening companies. On behalf of our partners, we leverage technology, people, and processes to provide court research services to get information back to our partners reliably and quickly, so they can evaluate and help their customers make highly informed hiring decisions.
Can you explain the 4 Ps (people, process, partners, products) of the court research structure?
From the people perspective, our operation is heavily dependent on human resources to retrieve requested information, because it is critical data for our CRA customers and their end users making life changing decisions. It is imperative that we have a structure of organization around our people, specifically around training, to ensure they understand the content.
Our processes indicate how efficient and how reliable our team is. We are constantly looking at different ways to refine our processes so that not only are we faster to serve our customers, because that's something that is measurable in the industry, but ensuring that we are not being fast at the expense of quality.
Partners and products go hand in hand, because they are key to what we focus on in our work. We strive to deliver on our partner outcomes and always align our solutions on how we can leverage technology or leverage other data sets to deliver on different products.
How is the Court Operations team important to the success and growth of Equifax?
We represent a large service within the Equifax business. From a pure volume perspective, it's a key component for our partners to have a service like this, in addition to our data products, so that they can streamline their supply chain for pre-employment data and service needs. It's a market that is continuing to grow and we also continue to grow year over year — the volume that we are seeing is significant.
How is the team dealing with challenges brought on by DOB redactions?
We have to make sure we are really diligent in performing quality assurance measures for our customers. We use a strong network of on-site representation to make sure that if we can't get information that is available electronically, we are using our strong in-court presence to make sure that we're tapping into all available resources to get the information requested by our customers as close to the source as possible.
Equifax as a whole is looking for different ways and different solutions to bring to the marketplace, like our CourtSmart product which uses other non-reportable data sets to provide supplemental information that helps our customers have confidence in the data they receive through our services.
Combined with making sure that we're prepared at all times, because DOB redactions can happen anywhere, we're constantly monitoring changes in the industry, making sure we are set up well with our in-court representation, and partnering with Product to find new solutions.
What other challenges (outside of the DOB redactions) does the Court Operations team face?
Because of the limited information, DOB redaction is the biggest challenge. We see a lot of bottlenecks at the court level that cause delays. When we think about our limitation on access to data in certain areas, that's certainly a challenge that will continue to happen. Especially, if states continue to remove information from online repositories.
Limited clerk resources at the court level is something out of our control. So, we go back to making sure that we're nimble and that we have appropriate representation in the courts to obtain the data that's necessary.
What are the most significant successes that you have achieved as a team?
Our successes have been our ability to scale, or grow our business by increasing staff and volume of work, and our ability to maintain quality and turnaround time. We've been able to grow significantly over the last three years, last year alone we saw an increase of over 30% in volume. We've been able to put in a structure to make sure that we're supporting our researchers appropriately and making sure that we're maintaining our court representation without losing our success from a turnaround time and quality perspective.
What sets our operations team apart from other organizations?
Being able to scale at the rate that we have is significant. Other organizations have not been able to scale as quickly without having some significant negative impacts to their customer outcomes. Our ability to scale also puts us in a position to produce new solutions in partnership with our Product team and provide some different solutions in the marketplace.
What we're trying to do also when we scale is we're trying to take advantage of technology. It's not just about adding people. We're at a point right now in our growth where we have a significant amount of support as a part of Equifax, so we can make sure that we have the right investments and technology to create efficiencies that increase our quality and minimize the risk of any human errors.
What are key focuses and goals for 2023 and beyond?
Continuing to scale the operations using technologies that are at our disposal will continue to be a focus for us. One of the benefits of being part of Equifax now is our exposure to a lot of different options from a technology perspective, so we want to find a way to incorporate those. Those technological solutions will help us operate faster and more efficiently, so we can provide the best possible outcomes for our partners. So, continuing to raise our performance through technology, continuing to scale our business through technology, and keeping up with the customer and marketplace demands will be our focus.
Thanks to Jeffrey for taking the time to give us more insight into the Court Operations team and how they are working to deliver reliable and timely data to our partners and customers for faster and more confident decision making.
If you are in need of faster, more reliable court services, we are ready to help!
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