Elevate Your QA in the Complaints Process With Aptean Respond

When it comes to complaints, quality assurance (QA) has evolved to become so much more than a tick in the compliance box. As discussed in our recent blog on complaints quality assurance, robust QA can underpin good and fair outcomes for customers, but it has a wider role to play, too. Potent QA can help mitigate against many of the inherent risks involved in the complaints process, while boosting employee morale at the same time.

However, good quality assurance can be easier said than done. That’s why more complaints teams are turning to technology for help, moving away from generic QA tools towards solutions designed specifically for the highly-nuanced and often complex complaints function.

Our complaints management system, Aptean Respond, is one such solution. The Quality Accelerator capability helps complaints teams to do more with their QA, using insights gleaned from the quality assurance process to underpin continuous improvements, not only for customers, but for complaint colleagues as well.

Why Use Aptean Respond for QA in your Complaints Process?

Low morale has an inevitable knock-on effect in complaint handling, sometimes negatively impacting fair and timely outcomes. Our expert teams recognise the important role good QA must play in helping improve morale and, as a result, built Quality Accelerator to go above and beyond standard quality assurance solutions.

Our performance dashboard scoring system allows you to reward consistently good case handlers, as well as providing insights for Personal Improvement Plans (PIPs) for those employees in need of additional training. With an employee reward strategy based on performance reporting as part of the solution, it means there’s no need for you to spend time creating your own incentive plans.

Additionally, poor morale can cause high staff turnover, increasing training costs and time spent mentoring new staff through their journey to competency. Aptean Respond can help here too, removing the need for lengthy shadowing periods and freeing-up senior case handlers for more complex tasks instead of training and monitoring new recruits.

The proactive QA checks and balances that our software provides can stop mistakes happening in the first place, preventing errors reaching complainants and speeding-up time to resolution. And, Aptean Respond delivers “dynamic” QA too taking a more prominent role in case handling if necessary, depending on the level of performance of your agents.

What Sets Aptean’s Complaints Management System Apart?

As well as helping you boost employee morale and better manage new staff onboarding, Aptean Respond delivers a host of other benefits when it comes to improving quality assurance in your complaints process.

1. Better Managing High Case Volumes - Aptean Respond is an enterprise-level solution, able to flex and scale to deal with hundreds of thousands of quality reviews, cases and complaints. It’s designed to handle the large quantities of data that are part and parcel of complaint handling today.

2. Making Live Changes - Aptean’s complaint management system enables real-time reviews as part of your quality assurance process in addition to after-the-fact analyses. This helps to proactively rectify errors or poor practice—even preventing them from happening in some instances.

3. Leveraging Real-Time QA Management Information - With Aptean Respond in your corner, you’re able to report on operations from a QA perspective at any given moment, with accessible, intuitive dashboards delivering the information you need to inform tactical decisions and continuous improvement.

4. Tracking Employee Performance - Aptean’s complaint management solution facilitates the ability to track your employees’ performance through their quality results, identifying areas for improvement and recognising where changes have already been made, providing objective measures to demonstrate a route to competency.

5. Developing a High Performance Culture - Aptean Respond’s out-of-the-box quality assurance dashboards show case handlers their specific QA performance and give them access to comparative metrics against their colleagues in real time. This feature enables case handlers to track their own scores—empowering them to take ownership of their individual improvement plans and better strive for excellence.

6. Tailoring QA Procedures - Good quality assurance isn’t static and should evolve in-line with the needs of both your business and your customers. As such, Aptean Respond delivers the ability to adapt quality assurance processes to suit the specific needs of your organisation, its complaint handlers and its customers. It’s almost like Whac-a-Mole once as you have focused on and improved one area of performance, another area that requires attention looms on the horizon. Our Quality Accelerator can provide your complaints teams with the tools to quickly adapt to the most pressing areas of focus.

Lest Not Forget Compliance

Quality assurance is so much more than compliance, but that doesn’t mean compliance no longer matters. As such, it’s important that your software helps you double down on requirements in this area. The QA capabilities that Aptean Respond provides can help your business become more compliant in the following key areas.

• Consumer Duty - By now, your business should be taking care to ensure it’s delivering against Consumer Duty guidelines, ensuring good outcomes for all your customers. The proactive, Consumer Duty-specific quality assurance checks facilitated by Aptean Respond, rather than retrospective checking once an outcome has been reached, mean that good outcomes are far more likely first time, mitigating against non-compliance with Consumer Duty.

• Customer Vulnerability - As mandated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), your business should implement a vulnerable customer complaints process. Again, with Aptean Respond, it’s possible to put in place a layer of relevant quality assurance checks to ensure vulnerable people are treated fairly and provided with the appropriate support in-line with their specific needs.

• FCA Regulations - Put the necessary checks and balances in place to adhere to FCA requirements with Aptean Respond. With regards to quality assurance in particular, these tools helps to instil best practice as the standard across your complaints team, as well as helping your organisations to perpetually scan the horizon for any improvements to be made.

As your teams face higher volumes of increasingly complex complaints, getting to the right outcome the first time has never been more important. With Aptean Respond as your compliance solution for case handling, the complaint function of your business can benefit from a comprehensive quality assurance tool that’s specifically designed for the multi-faceted complaints process.

Helping to increase efficiencies and speed-up time to resolutions, all while boosting employee morale, raising performance and mitigating risk, Aptean Respond can help your organisations derive optimum value from its quality assurance processes, informing continuous improvement, optimising complaint handling procedures and underpinning good outcomes every time.

To learn more about how Aptean Respond can take your quality assurance to the next level, get in touch with our complaints experts today.