Circuit Test your Complaints Process

Issue

The Banking Code Standards Board (BCSB) has released the latest report on
complaints handling by financial services organisations. Another black eye for the
industry. The temptation is to “try harder”.

However, pushing staff harder to respond within the eight-week guidline will not
address some fundamental issues such as:

New technology and changes to work flow have made complaint handling easier to
manage by creating virtual queues and focusing on the drivers of productivity. To
improve consistency, much has been taken out of the hands of the front line. Good
start. However, when customer complaints are revisited many times over because the focus is on handling and not on solving, any gains have been lost.

Many of the complaints noted by the BCSB are fees related and the response from
the industry as a whole is to justify them. However, a fair portion of the issue is when and how fee-charging structures are communicated to clients.

If simply trying harder is not the answer, then it is tempting to pull out the big guns
and commission a large-scale Six Sigma project. However, you need to respond
quickly and get some things done.

Setanta has developed a methodology to quickly identify and prioritise breaks in your
process that hinder timeliness, contribute to multiple contacts, escalate costs and
leave the original cause of the problem unfixed.

How we can help

Setanta offers a range of diagnostic, process improvment and customer experience
capabilities. We examine five critical areas from five perspectives:

Analyse service quality data. We analyse your internal and external service quality data and provide you with benchmark feedback.

Audit the complaints handling process. We audit the complaints handling process
from the outside in – starting with the customer and ending with final problem resolution.

Prioritise cost of (poor) quality. Identify sources of top five (volume, cost or risk)
complaints and potential savings from resolving them.

Examine customer contact. We review customer communication channels,
frequency and content. A key metric here is number of contacts to final resolution.

Evaluate productivity measures. We observe staff skills and productivity in handling
complaints – face to face, by telephone, by email and by letter. Scripted or templated
responses improve productivity but often impact quality of problem resolution.

Blitz and prove. Having agreed your priorities, we teach your teams to use our oneweek ServiceChain Blitz™ methodology to make things different, not just better. Then
prove the gains.

How it is different

Ojective assessment. Challenges institutional thinking

Fast, insightful and comprehensive. Activity can be completed and recommendations made available within 3 to 5 weeks. As early as three weeks in, opportunities for improvement can be identified and acted upon.
Buy-in is built-in. The project team consists of “the people who do the work.” This
means buy-in for the team’s recommendations is built-in as part of the process.