Transforming Complaint Handling For Financial Services Organisations

This ambitious project to implement Europe's largest complaints system saw over 30 disparate complaints-handling systems replaced by a single web-based platform for data gathering/analysis and front-office complaints resolution, in order to increase the speed at which problems could be identified, resolved and solutions presented to customers by providing a single consistent view of customer data. The results the project has delivered and continues to deliver are business-changing.

This has had a considerable impact on customer satisfaction – which is measured through the Net Promoter Score – and has significantly improved across all of the bank's frontline channels since the implementation of the Equiniti solution.

Our client has taken a leading role in the industry with this deployment, and when they made a public commitment to reduce complaints and improve the customer experience by making customer service a priority at every level of the group, they enlisted Equiniti’s help to deliver the technology that would underpin this drive for service excellence. This led to the implementation of a comprehensive, enterprise-grade customer complaints system that sits across its entire organisation, making the bank the first and only financial services organisation in the UK to empower all 70,000 of its frontline staff to deal with complaints.

This approach, coupled with significant investments in process improvements and staff training, including the creation of an innovative, specialist team of complaints handlers, means that our client is resolving 90 percent of customer complaints at the first point of contact.

This industry-leading performance improvement has seen its 'complaints per 1,000 accounts' metric fall from 2.1 to 1.0. By working with Equiniti, the bank was able to replace multiple legacy complaints-handling systems that were being used across 30 different brands,including numerous internal databases, spreadsheets, and third-party applications that demanded high levels of support and administration.

The ability to use a single complaints-handling system across the entire group has clearly given our client much greater insight into its customers, and this complements the other service improvements being made across the organisation.

The management information being provided by the Equiniti system is also contributing to the bank's broader customer service goals by enabling them to perform a root cause analysis of exactly what is causing its customers to complain, so that it can address these issues quickly and efficiently, in order to make changes that make a real difference to the bottom line.

By being able to see expressions of dissatisfaction across its entire business, our client now understands why customers are complaining by channel, by business, and by brand, and can therefore quickly pinpoint and resolve the problem.

The bank credits the forensic approach they have adopted to root cause analysis as being one of the key components of the business transformation.

The real leading-edge capability that Equiniti has given our client is root cause understanding - the ability to understand why customers are complaining, so that they can fix the problems straight away. With an organisation of this size, fixing these processes early on will allow them to reduce their expenditure substantially.