The successful handling of customer complaints has become a fine art, particularly in a digitally-driven world where, if not handled correctly, complaints can spiral out of control quickly.
In our recent survey, involving over 100 consumers of wealth products, we found that nearly one-fifth of respondents had changed providers because of their complaint. That’s a huge chunk of a client base to lose and very few providers can afford to, whether knowingly or unwittingly.
The research also revealed that 44% of respondents expressed difficulty in even complaining to their provider and 25% of complaints raised were not dealt with to the customer’s satisfaction.
This suggests a large proportion of customers continue to face barriers to voicing and expressing dissatisfaction. It is crucial that firms make the complaints process easy for customers, via their preferred channel of choice. If they don’t, customer loyalty will decline and reputational damage could well ensue.
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Not every firm needs to focus all their attention on closing cases at the first point of resolution. Indeed, many firms choose to perform a more thorough investigation, which could in turn lead to a lower upheld rate. As long as a complaints strategy seeks to meet regulatory requirements, deliver good customer outcomes and leverage Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to drive improvements, success can be achieved.
Getting the strategy right
So, what does a first-class complaints strategy look like?
While a focus must be on how to best deal with complaints, firms must also consider how best to prevent complaints arising. The Root Causes of the complaints themselves are key and there must be a relentless focus on pre-emptive actions that reduce the risk of an interaction spiralling into a complaint.
It is important to make communication a frictionless experience so customers with cause for complaint are not left even more frustrated in making themselves heard. While email has rapidly become the complaint channel of choice, providers should make it easy for customers to get in touch via their preferred channel whether by phone, email, webform, WhatsApp, text or chatbots.
While disenfranchised customers may revert to social media to voice their dissatisfaction, any strategy must focus on two objectives: firstly, making it as easy as possible to raise complaints via internal channels (to avoid the risk of complaints being voiced publicly) and secondly to have a mechanism for responding to those complaints that are inevitably raised externally in a way that shows the company is listening and reacting.
Fundamental is ensuring that complaint handlers, case managers and those undertaking corrective actions have the right skills to resolve complaints when they arise. Robust training and competency frameworks, accompanied by comprehensive soft skills training and regular refreshers is crucial.
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Here are some tools and techniques for achieving a world class complaints strategy:
- Deliver exceptional customer experience
- Regular planned propositional reviews are needed that consider Vulnerable Customer impacts.
- For any planned service disruption such as a system outages, notify customers well in advance, and for un-planned disruption, ensure you have rapid methods of informing clients.
- Provide knowledgebase repositories to customers so they can better self-serve. Eg FAQs.
- Ensure Customer Journey mapping is performed regularly to understand and address potential pain points.
- Maximise the feedback
- Ensure Net Promoter Scores (NPS), which gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction are used effectively and online feedback (e.g. Trust Pilot reviews) gets a response – not only could issues be quelled more quickly, other potential customers will see a proactive service offering.
- Train team members to pick up on cues that indicate dissatisfaction (or use AI to help identify those prompts).
- Make logging a complaint as simple and easy as possible to encourage customers to raise issues of dissatisfaction via private channels.
- Put it right if it goes wrong
- Ensure customers are compensated appropriately. According to our research, financial compensation is, perhaps unsurprisingly, important in dealing with a complaint.
- Utilise root cause analysis to understand not only what happened, but why it happened, and what can be done to prevent it happening again.
- Ensure a joined-up approach to risk events and quality control insights is in place.
Call to action
Firms should challenge themselves to implement a wider customer excellence strategy, inclusive of the complaints strategy. It must look at end-to-end customer journeys and take every opportunity to support customers by deploying the right tools and support structures to drive better outcomes and reduce complaint volumes in the longer term. The strategy should cover three distinct areas of the complaints journey:
- How to identify triggers for dissatisfaction and manage issues before they become complaints.
- How to monitor and react to how complaints are received, responded to and investigated.
- How to capture root cause, drive a culture of continual improvement and incentivise teams across servicing functions to focus on addressing dissatisfaction at the earliest point possible.
In building an effective complaints strategy, firms will not only be delivering better outcomes for clients and be meeting Consumer Duty requirements, they might well reduce the risk of losing a large portion of their clients.
Kate Monserrate is director at Simplify Consulting
