How Aptean Respond Can Improve Your Remediation Process

As we all know, successful remediation can help to re-build much-needed trust with customers, delivering good customer outcomes as well as helping your business to learn from past failings. But, as explored in our recent blog, How Can Technology Help Financial Services Business Better Manage the Entire Remediation Process?, remediation can be a particularly onerous task, one that isn’t without its fair share of risks, too.

This is where Aptean Respond comes in—our complaints handling software with a robust remediation engine that can lie at the heart of your remediation processes—it helps to choreograph the multitude of moving components that are a feature of any remediation exercise. In short, it can help to simplify an increasingly complex operating environment.

But, what is it that makes our world-class complaints management system a wise choice for those who want to optimise their remediation?

A Remediation Engine and More

As you can see looking at the diagram above, alongside our core remediation engine are several remediation projects, which could be a single remediation exercise or several remediation exercises within a single project. As well, there are a whole host of remediation project templates waiting to be deployed, offering a myriad of case treatments. Completing the solution is a range of additional capabilities:

• Direct customer updates

• Quality assurance

• Ability to import / update application

• Business intelligence

• Central printing

• Configuration manager / template adaption

But, how do all these capabilities and functionalities support the multiple processes involved in a remediation exercise?

For Every Stage of the Remediation Programme

Aptean Respond has a key role to play in all stages of remediation programmes, delivering different ‘case treatments,’ based on configurable criteria, and a variety of capabilities dependent on the nature and complexity of the remediation exercise that you’re undertaking. For example, there may be sufficient information to apply a case treatment that expedites a particular case right through to a settlement stage. Another case treatment could automate two-weekly communications with customers, for instance, if this was required.

Our complaints management system can help with the key stages of remediation:

1. Ingest records

2. Determine validity

3. Select communications plan

4. Investigate

5. Decide

6. Settle

But, as we all know, remediation is a highly nuanced process, meaning that one-size-very-much-does-not-fit-all when it comes to the various processes involved. Indeed, in some cases, some of the steps are bypassed altogether.

So, what does this look like in practice and where can complaints management software with an inbuilt robust remediation engine make a real difference?

Determine Validity

Having ingested the information, where a data set for a specific customer cohort has been provided and uploaded, either all at once or in tranches, Aptean Respond has a list of cases that it can analyse. Business rules, pre-defined by you, are leveraged to determine if the ingested records meet the criteria for remediation. In most cases, this is automated, with most of the legwork being done behind the scenes. Once cases have been analysed, a determination is then made within the software as to the next course of action. In almost all these scenarios, what follows next requires communication with the customer in some shape or form.

The key takeaway here is that Aptean Respond can help to determine not only case validity but also the next course of action, in terms of both remediation process and communications.

Select Communications Plans

Depending on the validity of the cases examined in the first instance, Aptean Respond then selects an appropriate communications plan. So, this could be fast-tracked to a settlement letter, or a ‘no further action’ letter. It could also mean that further information is required to remedy incomplete data. In this instance, the software can automate the sending of a customer questionnaire, via SMS or email, recording the customer responses, analysing these responses and then, based on the responses, automatically routing the case to the next appropriate stage in the remediation exercise.

The important takeaway here is that Aptean Respond can help to determine the best communications plan for an inordinate number of scenarios and cases, helping to ensure consistency and accuracy of customer communications throughout the remediation journey.

Underpin Further Investigation

Let’s say that further investigation is required; investigation that requires human intervention. Applying pre-defined business rules, Aptean Respond can generate a list of tasks that the assigned investigator will need to complete. These are all highly configurable and easy for the user to navigate around. Software then helps to ensure consistency of approach and best practice when it comes to investigation. Once the investigation is complete, the information gained is input directly into the platform, which can then automatically route the case to the next step in the process.

The key takeaway here is Aptean Respond’s ability to help underpin further investigation, providing the framework and guidance to ensure consistency of approach and best practice throughout the entire remediation journey.

Decide and Settle Remediation

While cases might take a few different routes to get to the decision stage, ultimately, this is where they all end up. Aptean Respond fully supports this stage of the process, accumulating the information required to decide, either automatically or with human intervention. It then routes the case to the next course of action in-line with the decision.

When it comes to settling, the software can be configured to assist however your business would prefer. So, this could be a closed loop process, where the platform communicates directly with the finance team to instruct them that a settlement payment is waiting to be approved and/or paid. Or, perhaps you would rather download a spreadsheet report of payments to be sent to Finance. Similarly, you can configure the solution so that once a settlement has been paid, it clears a specific task or closes the case automatically, too.

The important takeaway is Aptean Respond’s ability to be configured to support the specific needs of your business, both in terms of making a final decision and facilitating the settlement stage. It’s this ability to achieve a consistent approach, albeit tailored to different remediation exercises that is so valuable, with the platform providing the necessary guidance, control and governance that remediation demands.

Remediation Coupled With Quality Assurance to Mitigate Risk and Achieve Fair Customer Outcomes

Making use of Aptean Respond’s Quality Accelerator helps you ensure almost constant reviewing of the multiple and often complex stages involved in a remediation exercise. So, this could be pre-configured questions for quality reviewers to ask at different stages of the process, as well as the ability to add more nuance with additional information. Also, the reviewer can navigate the case while critiquing it, all within the software, without having to open different applications or documents to record quality judgements and assessments.

The key takeaway is how quality assurance capabilities underpin the end-to-end remediation exercise helping to mitigate risk and contributing towards those all-important fair customer outcomes.

Adaptation as Remediation Exercises Evolve

As we all know, all remediation programmes and exercises have their unique features and so templates and set processes need to be tweaked and changed, often evolving mid-exercise. Aptean Respond’s Case Manager and Configuration Manager capabilities allow you to do just this, adapting the solution to suit the changing needs of the exercise. This could be something as straightforward as adding new fields and options to drop-down lists or fundamentally changing how cases are routed through the process. What’s important is that your business can do all this without the need for IT experts or additional consultants to be employed.

The key takeaway here is the speed at which remediation programmes can be launched and adapted, delivering the levels of flexibility and agility that complex remediation exercises often require.

Delivering In-Depth Management Information

When it comes to management information (MI), Aptean Respond really helps to provide the oversight and control that remediation demands. This is both in terms of operational MI, providing real-time visibility into an ongoing exercise, and analytical MI, offering a more holistic approach, sharing data with analytical and business intelligence (BI) tools to help to secure that all-important in-depth remediation insight. Again, this is all highly configurable, with a whole host of searches and reports that can be carried out, delivering data in accessible, intuitive dashboards, which you can then drill down into.

The important takeaway is how Aptean Respond provides visibility into the comprehensive production statistics, learnings and outcomes that help firms to manage their operation minute-by-minute, as well as taking a longer-term, more holistic view.

Aptean's complaints and case management software really does represent an extensible remediation solution, providing the tools, functionality and capabilities on a complaints management platform that can scale, flex and evolve to support a wide range of remediation projects.

Ultimately, Aptean Respond can help to optimise your entire remediation process, boosting operational efficiency and underpinning consistency of outcomes—helping you to nurture long-term relationships with your customers, while learning valuable lessons from past failings.

For more information on how Aptean Respond can help your remediation processes, contact us today.