Aptean Respond eBook: Complaints Coffee Club 2022 Recap

IntroductionOur first six Complaints Coffee Clubs of 2022 carried on the great work of 2021, bringing together professionals from right across the UK complaints community to discuss the real issues keeping them awake at night. Providing a safe, open forum for full and often frank discussions, the Coffee Clubs explored a whole host of burning issues, including Root Cause Analysis, KPIs, digital prioritisation and complaint accountability.

Here’s just a snapshot of the interesting and thought-provoking sessions facilitated by Aptean and The Collaboration Network since January 2022, many of which have informed the next few sessions planned for the rest of the year.

We’re growing our community and it’s never too late to join the conversation, we host regular Complaints Working Groups bringing together real issues and hot topics, so please do get in touch if you’d like to take part in these always-lively discussions.

1. Root Cause Analysis – driving continuous improvements.

Whilst we all recognise the importance of thorough Root Cause Analysis (RCA), so often, it’s much easier said than done. This session focussed on how to ensure complaints are seen as an opportunity to improve and learn, not just about compliance, driving a culture of continuous improvement in the process.

The main talking points were:

› The burning platform – the importance of helping people see the dire consequences of not changing and the ‘free’ consultancy that complaints can provide, delivering valuable information and insight direct from the customer.

› Cultural change is crucial. Rather than assigning blame for root causes, businesses need to instead focus on finding a solution. This helps to build trust in the complaints function – no longer the ‘finger-pointers’ but the identifiers of areas for improvements.

› Organisation-wide buy-in is paramount, from board level down. It’s impossible for RCA to be effective and inform continuous improvement if it doesn’t involve all areas of the business. Complaint forums and communities are used to great success, sharing the findings from RCA not to blame but to resolve.

Make sure you know your audience, reporting the right information to make the business sit up and listen. It’s not always about volumes but consumer detriment too and it’s not what you report but how you report it that matters.

Bring the data to life. Go beyond the statistics and give real-life examples, make it clear just how any problems are impacting on individual customers.

Ownership and accountability are key to closing the RCA loop. Assign actions to the right people, putting the onus on operations to resolve issues. Just because the complaint team identifies a root cause, it doesn’t make it their responsibility

Sometimes it pays for the complaint handler to ‘own’ a particular root cause, able to drive a resolution and report back to the customer where appropriate. Share successes. Where root causes have been resolved, share this information not only with the complaints team but with the rest of the business. This helps to build awareness of just how valuable RCA can be.

2. Quality Assurance – more than customer outcomes

No longer just a tick in the ‘customer was satisfied with the outcome’ box, complaints quality assurance (QA) has evolved into a vital business tool. This particular discussion looked at different approaches to QA and how it can improve complaint handling performance to incorporate more than just customer outcomes.

The main talking points were:

› It’s vital to focus on not only outcomes but customer experience as well. A multi-faceted approach is required, looking at outcomes, customer experience, processes and customer detriment.

› Many businesses are moving away from a ‘pass/fail’ approach to QA, with some removing the word ‘fail’ altogether and instead adopting a more nuanced strategy that identifies areas for development and praise, relevant to outcomes and experiences.

› Some organisations have chosen to strip back their QA, reverting to a simple ‘pass/fail’ approach to simplify what can become a needlessly complex exercise. This can help identify what else can be done to refine QA processes to deliver the information needed to underpin continuous improvements.

› There’s a real need to have a robust QA framework in place, specific to the individual needs of your business. What’s important to gauge for one organisation might not be as significant for others. As is so often the case, one size very much does not fit all.

› It’s important to close the loops. For example, if QA identifies that a process hasn’t been followed but that it hasn’t resulted in a negative impact to the customer, this needs to be investigated further. Does this mean this process is redundant? Is this an anomaly? And vice versa, if customer experience has been poor but every process box has been ticked, what does this mean? This is where comprehensive QA can deliver even more added value.

› Ensure you’re able to quality assure enough cases to make it truly representative of your complaint handling function. It’s not a one-off exercise, but an ever-evolving process of continual learnings for the entire business.

› Ownership is key. Just because any issues have been identified with the complaints team doesn’t mean that it’s down to the complaints team to find a solution. Shared accountability is a must if your business is to derive tangible value from your complaints QA. Bringing QA statistics to life with reallife customer comments and feedback is a great way of securing this organisation-wide buy-in.

› Ultimately, it’s not about collecting or collating QA data, it’s what you do with it that matters. Make the most of the data available, turning it into valuable insight that’s specific to your individual business needs. This is where QA comes into its own, delivering the insight needed to inform continuous improvements right across your business, resulting in better outcomes, a richer customer experience and an effective complaint management function.

3. Creating a great complaints culture

Complaints excellence needs to be grounded in a great complaints culture. With this in mind, what does a great complaints culture look like and how can businesses improve their culture across operational teams?

The main talking points were:

› Colleague empowerment is key, giving complaint handlers the confidence and ability to address customer issues, focussing less on putting a tick in the compliance box and more on achieving quality resolutions.

› More businesses are moving away from the ‘complaint handler’ job title, preferring instead titles such as ‘resolution manager’ or ‘customer relations’, more accurately reflecting the all-encompassing nature of the role.

› There must be a focus on learning and improvement. Rather than highlighting failures, it’s much more effective to identify learning opportunities that can then be addressed.

› The voice of the colleague is just as important as the voice of the customer. Leveraging feedback is crucial, not only from customers but from within the team.

› Where hurdles to resolutions are identified by colleagues, organisations must work harder to close the loop, reporting back to colleagues to highlight just what’s been done to address the issue. Establish a culture of ‘you said, we did’.

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Having trust in staff is vital. So, perhaps reassess whether it’s necessary to check every piece of written correspondence that goes out, preferring instead to coach teams on how to quality check their own work, while still providing the choice to have things checked by a supervisor.

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Don’t neglect to celebrate positive feedback. Let team members know when they’ve received positive feedback from customers and encourage colleagues to congratulate each other on their achievements.

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Give colleagues the skills and confidence to go beyond compliance, putting the customer at the heart of every interaction. Of course, compliance is important but it mustn’t be the lens through which all complaints are viewed.

› Your people are your business. When it comes to recruitment, product and service knowledge can be easily taught but it’s not so easy to teach the soft skills such as empathy and compassion.

› Training must be ongoing to build complaint teams with a muti-faceted skillset. Teams are facing ever-changing challenges and need to be equipped to deal with these. Too often training ends after initial onboarding.

› Some organisations advocate the use of incentives for colleagues, rewarding quality rather than quantity.

› Ultimately, colleagues need to be given the skills, training and flexibility to make a real difference to customers, boosting not only quality outcomes for customers but job satisfaction too, building an effective, capable and motivated team in the process.

4. Digital prioritisation vs customer outcomes

Through efforts to digitise the customer experience, do we run the risk of leaving too many customers behind? This discussion looked at how organisations can strike the right balance between digital prioritisation and customer outcomes, today and in the future.

The main talking points were:

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It’s all about customer choice, providing customers with their preferred communications channels wherever possible. It might be in the interest of the business to encourage more customers to go down the digital, self-serve route, but for some, digital isn’t even an option.

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Understanding customer preference is crucial, tailoring the customer experience to suit preferred methods of communication. That’s not to say this will be the same preference every time, with a highly nuanced understanding of behaviours of utmost importance if businesses are going to attempt to digitise as many customer interactions as possible.

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Organisations need to be sure that digital is what their particular set of customers actually wants, rather than a case of what business leaders think their customers want.

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The first digital interaction is key. If apps or other digital channels are found lacking during a customer’s first experience of them, it will more than likely deter any future attempts at digital interaction. Accessible, intuitive digital tools that are fit-for-purpose are a must.

Interestingly, digital-first organisations are facing the opposite problem – how to best factor in non-digital complaint journeys. Also, the FCA’s forthcoming Consumer Duty specifies that organisations have to accommodate non-digital journeys.

The COVID effect – just what impact has the pandemic had? For some, it’s seen an upturn in digital communications, with newly tech-savvy customers now preferring digital interactions; for others, it’s had the opposite effect, with customers looking for more human interactions following the isolation of the pandemic.

It’s perceived that staff feel their jobs are threatened by increased digitisation but often the biggest concern is how it will change their job roles and responsibilities. Whilst it’s important to educate customers about the digital options available, too often this responsibility sits with an already stretched frontline. And, an increase in digital interactions can mean that only the more complex cases come through on the telephone, which can prove challenging for call handlers.

When it comes to digitising the customer experience, what needs to come first is a thorough understanding of customer personas and behaviours. Only once this has been achieved can businesses hope to provide an accessible, appropriate and, perhaps most importantly, effective digital experience, one that’s augmented by a human touch where necessary.

5. Complaint KPIs – measuring outcomes and closing the customer loop

In an era where we’re all inundated with data and reports, how can complaint teams refine their KPIs to not only best demonstrate and measure good outcomes, but to close the loop with complainants too?

The main talking points were:

› Most businesses report on similar quantifiable metrics, including complaint volumes, complaints referred to relevant ombudsmen, and time to closure.

› The tracking of reopened complaints is a useful metric, helping businesses to understand why perhaps a closed complaint doesn’t always equate to a good outcome.

› Case progression metrics can highlight the importance of keeping customers up-to-date, maintaining regular contact to try and achieve good outcomes alongside customer experience excellence.

› Having KPIs in place that follow the end-to-end customer journey makes it easier to understand not only where exactly things do go wrong, but can provide a comprehensive understanding of the entire customer experience.

› Customer surveys can be sometimes problematic as a means of generating outcome KPIs. With many customers unable or unwilling to distinguish between outcomes and the complaint handling journey, what can emerge are flawed survey results if questions aren’t phrased correctly and specifically.

› Tracking customer interactions even after complaints have closed can provide a more comprehensive view of the customer, investigating if there was any impact post-complaint on how that customer interacted with the business. This type of data proves invaluable when having conversations elsewhere in the organisation about the business-wide complaint value proposition.

› Making more use of the telephone can be a key driver of quality outcomes. This could be contacting the customer after the initial complaint is received to clarify that the business knows exactly what the customer is complaining about and what the customer expects the business to do about it. Or, it could be closing written complaints over the phone to ensure full customer understanding of the outcome and giving the customer the opportunity to raise any issues or queries. However, it’s still very important to communicate with the customer via their preferred communications channel.

› For complaint outcome KPIs to be meaningful, it’s crucial that the business understands the impact of the complaint on the customer. If you don’t understand the initial impact, it’s impossible to know if the outcome was right.

› For board-level reporting, it’s not uncommon to over report. What’s needed instead is more qualitative reporting on the quality of outcomes and the customer experience.

› It’s important that there’s feedback on KPI reports. Reporting for reporting’s sake is a sure fire way of developing a long list of KPIs that are neither relevant nor important to the business. Businesses need to close the loop, feeding back on KPI reports to pinpoint just what measures the business is taking in response to any findings, both positive and negative.

6. Complaint ownership and frontline accountability

First-point-of-contact resolutions go a long way to boosting customer satisfaction, but how can organisations create ownership and accountability for resolution of complaints in their informal periods with their frontline teams? Also, how can an RCA framework help to achieve better outcomes, especially for vulnerable customers?

The main talking points were:

› Whilst organisations often use management information to inform KPIS in an effort to achieve faster resolution rates, some are a little further behind in their understanding of why complaints aren’t being resolved at the frontline. Understanding the barriers to frontline resolutions is key.

› When it comes to empowerment, examples of best practice include: making clear the kind of scenarios where employees are expected to achieve early resolutions; providing the tools and information to enable and inform informal resolutions (e.g., a simple redress table or examples of appropriate responses), and ensuring easy access to team leaders on the frontline.

› You can tell people they’re empowered, but if they don’t have the tools and training to support this, they almost certainly won’t feel empowered.

› Complaint teams may manage complaints but it’s not often that it’s their actions that have resulted in the complaint. It’s therefore imperative that the right department / people are accountable for addressing and resolving any root causes that are identified by the complaint team.

› Daily calls with complaint teams and different departments, giving complaint teams direct access to other parts of the business for instant advice, can help to prevent any unnecessary escalations and bring down the average age of complaints.

› Some organisations make team leaders accountable for their own teams’ complaints and RCA. It’s their responsibility to identify any blockers to frontline resolutions.

› It’s important to expose senior management to real-life customer examples, highlighting the successes and the challenges of complaints, bringing them to life to ensure decision-makers can see the real impact of their decisions.

› Some businesses provide incentives for good quality outcomes, rewarding quality rather than quantity, however it’s important to not constantly financially incentivise one particular metric as it can be a driver of incorrect behaviours. Recognition of best practice is recommended, highlighting the behaviours and / or skills that could be replicated elsewhere.

› It’s possible to successfully remove all targets for complaint closures, instead focussing on outcomes – not only fair and right outcomes, but good outcomes.

› When it comes to RCA, there could always be more resource. If organisations are unable to demonstrate a record of root causes being fixed with a positive impact on the organisation, there needs to be a change of processes or more resource.

› You need the right processes in place to ensure the tracking and ownership of identified root causes by the right people in the organisation. Complaint handlers are often bestplaced to initiate root cause process but that doesn’t mean it should stay with them.

› Getting RCA categories right is of utmost importance. Too many or too few and organisations risk the inaccurate identification of root causes, never finding where the real issues lie. Reducing and refining RCA categories provides deeper, better insight.

› Some complaint management systems feature vulnerability flags, which signpost to anyone dealing with that customer that there is a vulnerability.

› As always, training staff on how to spot signs of vulnerability is crucial, as well as equipping them with the tools and knowledge to know what the next steps should be in that vulnerable customer’s complaint journey.

7. The Collaboration Network

With representation from across all sectors, The Collaboration Network is an inclusive and dynamic community of professionals, working together to improve business practices and raise the level of support for their customers and employees. Whether it’s complaint handling, regulatory compliance, service recovery, behavioural risk, situational vulnerability or operational strategy, we help you stay one step ahead.

We support and promote collaboration between regulated and non-regulated companies, not-forprofits, public sectors bodies, regulators, ombudsman, Government departments and consumer rights advocates. Through our exclusive services and our panel of expert consultants, members benefit from up-to-date guidance and insight into best practice across a range of crucial topics and on-the-pulse issues.

The Collaboration Network is a subscription based professional membership organisation. Our members enjoy access to exclusive content and engagement platforms, including our bi-annual conference, monthly journals, monthly webinar series and our exclusive members-only app, which provides access to all of our content at the click of a button. Members can also take advantage of our discounted training services from leading industry experts as well as accessing other members and partners for networking opportunities and peer-to-peer discussions.

8. Aptean Respond

The Aptean Respond Complaint Management System has been used by a diverse roster of organisations across the globe for 30 years. In the UK alone, 65% of FCA regulated complaints are processed using Respond.

Faced with ever-increasing customer expectations and the pressure of stringent regulatory requirements, our customers have to work harder than ever to achieve complaints excellence. With Respond at the heart of your complaints function, it’s possible to nurture longterm customer relationships, managing complaints and leveraging feedback to drive real business improvements, all while optimising customer service and ensuring water-tight compliance with even the most stringent regulatory requirements.

Respond’s functionality has been finely tuned to address the very issues businesses are facing on a daily basis. We understand the individual needs of complaints handlers and teams, as well as the end-to-end complaint journey, using our knowledge, experience and expertise to help businesses best manage the entire complaints and dispute process.

8. What does the UK complaints community have to say?

“The Complaints Coffee Club has really helped me to consider alternative ways of approaching similar issues. Its always good to know that other organisations face some of the same challenges and by sharing different ways of tackling them we can consider what would work best in our business areas. I’ve also enjoyed sharing my experiences and ideas that have worked, and I hope that this is helping others.”

“The Complaints Coffee Club has always provided interesting and useful topics for companies to discuss together and share thoughts which allow us to review our own processes and see how we can improve our own complaints department.”

“The Complaints Coffee Club has really helped us understand all the great stuff, and the challenges that are occurring in all aspects of customer complaints, across a variety of industries. We talk openly and honestly about processes, customer behaviour and emerging trends. I always take a gold nugget away which helps form some interesting discussion points within my business.”

“The Complaints Coffee Club is a great platform to discuss shared issues with likeminded complaint handlers and leaders from across sectors. It provides a means to collaborate, share and bring fresh insight to your business.”

“The challenges that we had set upon us recently may have seemed a setback for most but at a difficult time during the pandemic and beyond, the complaints coffee club supported us and other organisations to understand we weren’t alone and others were facing similar challenges. By shaping the coffee club around a question it adds value to hear of successful outcomes but also allows an honest approach to the challenges.”

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