Customer Experience Excellence – The Key to Compliance, Retention and Good Outcomes

As the recent Complaints Outlook 2022 research from Huntswood shows, providing a good customer experience and making sure customers feel valued are paramount when it comes to customer satisfaction and retention following complaints. The same can be said for compliance as the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) sets out the final rules and guidance for the new Consumer Duty, due to come into force for many products and services on July 31st 2023. With its focus on setting higher and clearer standards of consumer protection across financial services, the new Consumer Duty means that organizations will need to examine and assess the customer journey, highlighting any improvements to be made, not just for the purposes of compliance, but to improve customer experience too.

With all signs pointing to increased levels of customer dissatisfaction over the coming months, it’s imperative that businesses have clear, effective complaints processes and procedures in place. Of utmost importance is making customers feel valued during the complaints journey, a factor that the Huntswood research identified as having the most powerful impact on both customer experience and retention.

Leverage the Right Complaint Management Solution

Making a customer feel valued is a multi-faceted task, again as highlighted by the Complaints Outlook 2022, and, as such, there are several steps involved. It’s here that the right complaint management solution, such as Aptean Respond, can help, underpinning the entire, end-to-end customer complaint journey, helping organizations to get resolutions right the first time, keeping them updated in the process and ensuring that customers get the vital apology that so many organizations overlook.

So, what does this look like in practice?

End-to-End Best Practice

The right complaint management solution can instill best practice amongst complaint handlers, with the ability to draw on model complaints proving very useful. For example, new functionality in Aptean Respond provides a list of model cases, the gold standard in complaint resolution for cases that look just like the one that’s being managed right there and then. Smart suggestions are also available, helping to guide complaint handlers in the direction of the next steps to take in a particular complaint journey, this helps with consistency e.g., redress payments ensuring that customers are receiving fair and equitable treatment, the foundation of the Duty. The combination of model cases and smart suggestions will reduce resolution times and the Huntswood research shows that quicker resolution leads to higher customer retention, and higher customer retention leads to improvements in the bottom line.

Keeping Customers Updated

Another core component of making customers feel valued is keeping them updated. Huntswood’s research shows that only 40% of those customers who had to chase for complaint updates stayed with their providers. Timeliness comes into play here too, with prompt acknowledgement of complaints important to customers. In fact, following a complaint being submitted, the customer’s emotional experience begins to diminish after just 24 hours. Again, the right complaint management solution can help with this.

It’s all too easy for complaint handlers to forget to send vital updates, with some communications sitting in draft until exception reports highlight that they haven’t been sent. With Aptean Respond, a simple but effective confirmation message helps to ensure that users aren’t forgetting to send correspondence, with the addition of a confirm button providing an extra level of assurance when it comes to sending out correspondence via letter, SMS or email, rather than just proceeding to continue. This helps to achieve timely customer updates at all stages of the complaint journey.

Sorry Needn’t Be The Hardest Word

When it comes to that all-important apology, the ability to personalize and tailor communications to individual customers and cases is crucial. This allows the case handler to offer a relevant, in-context and complaint-specific apology. Complaint management systems such as Aptean Respond that provide the functionality to enable users to personalize responses to customers, including letters, SMS and emails, allow this to happen, giving case handlers the opportunity to tailor responses and any necessary apologies to the needs of the customer in question.

Inspect What You Expect

Once you are doing all the right things, you need to think about demonstrating how you are doing them, proving that the actions you are taking are impactful. You need to ensure you have unfettered access to all that lovely complaints data, to analyze it not as a "data island" but in conjunction with other enterprise and public domain data. Then, evaluate how the complaints function improves customer retention, that you know your customer base and can unequivocally show that you are providing fair and equitable outcomes to your customers.

Compliance with the new Consumer Duty, improving the customer experience, and delivering faster, better outcomes for customers can all be supported with the right complaint management solution at the heart of the complaint function. Aptean Respond’s features and functionalities underpin continuous complaint improvements, helping customers to feel valued and fulfilling even the most stringent of compliance requirements.

For more information on how Aptean Respond can help you to deliver complaint management excellence, contact us today.