Leveraging Complaints Data: Unlock the Value of Your Data

Within the operations of the financial services industry, we’re all faced with ever-increasing volumes of complaint data and the pressure is on to do more with it. However, with other more pressing business priorities taking precedence, invariably the time available to dedicate to your data is rapidly decreasing. There’s so much information to digest—and so little time to make decisions—that there’s a real need to think big and act fast.

In neglecting to make sense of the data available, businesses are doing themselves a disservice by failing to take full advantage of what can be an invaluable source of business insight. Complaints data in particular is an often-overlooked source of insight, regularly kept within the bubble of complaints. In reality, the value of complaints data can reach right across your organization, delivering a previously hidden and untapped wealth of information, which should take its rightful place alongside other key management information (MI), potentially transforming your business.

What’s the Value of Complaints Data?

Put simply, we don’t do enough with our complaints data. It can represent an all-seeing eye across the customer journey, delivering crucial visibility into not only what your business doesn’t do well but how it can make the changes needed to do things better. Used properly, complaints data can inform continuous improvements such as reducing complaints, securing better outcomes for customers, boosting customer loyalty, and, ultimately, increasing profitability. Whilst many view complaints as a cost center, by leveraging your complaints data, it’s possible to change this perception turning complaints into a valued revenue protection resource.

To achieve this, you’re required to look beyond standard reporting, moving from a reliance on operational review reports and focusing instead on building a culture of data-driven decision-making. It’s about maturing your use of data to ensure data-driven decisions are the order of the day, every day.

Collaborative Working Is Key

To gain the maximum benefit from your complaints data, it needs to form part of your wider data picture. It’s vital to remove it from the complaint bubble, extracting it from your complaint management system perhaps, and fusing it with the rest of your MI. That’s not just your enterprise data either, but data that’s in the public domain too. This is where analytical expertise comes into play, with the right skills and tools available to glean that all important insight from the information available.

But insight is only useful if it provides answers to the specific questions you want answering. This is why it’s important to ask questions of your data, such as what’s our operational performance like? Additionally, the right insight can lead to more informed foresight, facilitating modelling and advanced scenario planning that take into account not just complaints data but information from right across the wider organization too.

You might still be looking in the rear-view mirror, but when the information is all brought together in one place and analyzed, you’re much better placed to make timely, well-informed decisions for today and for the future.

Using Complaints Data to Fulfill Consumer Duty Requirements

Where understanding your data is more important than ever is with regards to the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) New Consumer Duty. Your business has an obligation to assess and evidence how and the extent to which you are acting to deliver good outcomes, addressing any issues you identify. The ability to demonstrate, evidence and justify fair and equitable outcomes can be enhanced by removing the data from the complaints bubble and incorporating it with other external and internal data to derive optimum levels of insight.

For example, you can compare your data to industry averages, viewing your data and publicly available information through the lens of vulnerability. This enables you to see if the numbers of vulnerable customers nationally are reflected in your complaints data, ensuring that you’re capturing customer vulnerability correctly. If yes, then good; if not, then why not? Data collaboration is crucial for the comprehensive fulfillment of regulatory requirements, allowing you to deliver hard evidence of what you’re doing to meet not just your Consumer Duty obligations but those of other regulatory requirements too.

For all this to work, your complaints data needs to be good to begin with. It’s no longer possible to rely on multiple spreadsheets and system workarounds to deliver the data you need, in the format you need it. As businesses are recognizing the value to be gleaned from their complaints data, more organizations are turning to robust complaint management systems for help. The right systems capture every interaction along the customer journey, distilling this information into easily accessible reports that can be used as traditional standalone reports or amalgamated with wider MI to leverage the true potential of the data, unlocking the value that lies so often hidden within your complaints data.

Aptean Respond can sit at the heart of this new culture, delivering not only the functionality but the insight needed to leverage your complaints data. Within the UK alone, 60% of the top 10 high street banks and 60% of top insurers use Aptean Respond.

For more information on how Aptean Respond can help you to unlock the value of your complaints data, get in touch today and discover why we’re ready for what’s next, now.