Customer Services & Telecommunications
from market regulators - not for the delivery of poor products or services but for consistently failing to handle complaints in a timely, effective and satisfactory manner, and one that complies with regulatory guidelines.
This year has seen British Gas fined £2.5 million by the energy regulator Ofgem for the way in which it deals with customer complaints, while Ofgem is also investigating Npower and EDF Energy over the way they handle customer complaints. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has fined the Bank of Scotland £3.5 million and the Royal Bank of Scotland and National Westminster Bank £2.8 million for multiple failings in the way they handled customers’ complaints.
Yet complaints handling is a fundamental component of business practice. Poor complaints management not only leads to fines and the loss of customer loyalty but also undermines customer confidence and affects business reputation. And with customers increasingly taking to social media to air grievances with companies that have failed to respond well to complaints, the risk of business damage is significant and growing.
So why do the vast majority of organisations bury complaints managers in a separate, isolated department? Complaints management should be a core part of the business; tightly integrated with all customer facing departments. It should be transparent across the organisation, enabling customers to follow up any problems and concerns during day to day business discussions with any customer facing employee.
Providing customers with the chance to discuss a problem or raise an issue directly with any customer facing staff, face to face or via telephone, addresses one of the key issues associated with poor complaints management: the lack of immediate response and feeling of irrelevance to the organisation.
Providing staff with the information required and empowering them to make decisions in response to customers is proven to significantly improve customer engagement and reduce incidents of complaints mismanagement.
Furthermore, it enables the highly trained centralised complaints team to concentrate on those issues that require serious investigation and handling, minimising the chance of such cases being escalated to a regulator.
Empowering individuals across the company to handle complaints and effectively embedding complaints management within customer service requires a new way of working. It demands complaints focused training for all customer-facing staff to ensure they understand the importance of complaints resolution, the processes that need to be undertaken to reflect regulatory requirements and the sensitivity of customer information.
It also requires the provision of real time access to relevant customer information – and the training to know how to identify complaints and how to respond to them. A customer should not have to use the actual word ‘complaint’ for the issue to be registered and managed appropriately. And when should a complaint be handled locally and when should it be escalated to the dedicated team with the skills to manage more complex issues – or those that will demand a higher level of compensation authorisation?
Of course, organisations fear losing control by empowering individuals to undertake frontline complaints management as part of an existing role. With good reason. No company wants its staff to be handing out compensation to customers without following the due process. This policy, therefore, can only work if organisations put in place excellent complaints recording processes. Routinely monitoring complaints handling, resolution and any
compensation allocated is essential both to deliver a consistent customer experience and confirm a complaint is handled within the requirements of any industry specific regulation.
It is also essential that a feedback loop is in place to ensure all customer problems, including those that can be resolved at first call – and are often not recorded – are considered and evaluated. Without this process in place, organisations will struggle to highlight trends in complaints or address any underlying problems.
The regulators are under growing pressure to reverse the trend in customer service complaints, from the imposition of severe fines on those organisations failing to adequately manage customer complaints to the creation of new processes. The Australian regulator, Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), for example, has been given power to impose fines of up to $2m should a telco firm fail to abide by a new Customer Service Guarantee (CSG); whilst the FSA is looking to condense the current two stage complaints process into a single stage – reducing time to review and handle each complaint significantly. Failure to respond will only result in more damaging headlines that undermine customer confidence and trust in the business.
Complaints management needs to go back to basics. Organisations cannot afford to incur the wrath of customers, or massive regulatory fines, in the constant search for elusive new business. It is those organisations that opt to prioritise the complaints management process and embed complaints handling within core business processes that will transform effectiveness and, as a result, boost customer rating and revenues.
www.usefulfeedback.com
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