CHALLENGE

  • A retail banking firm required support on an established general banking complaints workstream within their Customer Services department to reduce the pipeline of 2,500 complaints in a timeframe of eight weeks. The client needed to increase the capacity of their packaged banking accounts (PBAs) complaints team whilst simultaneously reducing the general banking complaints pipeline. A third party was needed to allow them to focus their resources.
  • Our client required a quality assurance team and team management structure to reduce the pipeline volumes without impacting their business as usual (BAU) operation.

ACTION

  • We provided 20 complaints handlers, four quality assurance assistants, a team leader and a senior team leader to deal with general banking complaints whilst the PBA BAU team reached full capacity.
  • The team needed to include experienced complaint handlers with previous general banking complaints knowledge. As our client’s general banking team dealt with a range of topics from mortgages to credit card and personal loan complaints, a strong background knowledge of retail banking products was required. This meant that the usual training period was reduced compared to that of agency or permanent staff.
  • Furthermore, a number of our complaints handlers had experience of PBAs and were able to transition into the client’s PBA workstream as the general banking complaints pipeline began to reduce. Each complaint handler was aligned to the workstream where they had the most experience enabling the team to achieve competence in a timely manner and reducing the time required for sign-off.
  • To ensure no regulatory breaches occurred, the team were required to be flexible with their working hours as daily complaints volumes dictated.
  • We engaged our client’s operational team with ongoing discussions regarding the team’s requirements to deliver the task. Our sales and operational management teams also provided support to our client by visiting the site early on in the project enabling a working relationship to progress. Furthermore, our Senior Delivery Manager regularly visited the site and participated in weekly meetings with the client’s department management to ensure we were meeting or exceeding expectations.

RESULT

  • Our client was delighted with the level of experience, industry knowledge and performance supplied by the team. They would not hesitate to choose us in the future because of how happy they were with our knowledge and service delivery.
  • We were able to utilise our complaints handlers across two workstreams (general banking and PBAs) due to their industry experience and the success they had in working through the general banking complaints backlog. This cut down on the on-boarding and training requirements that would be associated with engaging new resources.
  • At the end of the eight week engagement, our client’s expectation (that the average complaint age would be less than four weeks old) was exceeded, with an average age of two and a half weeks achieved.
  • Due to our successful delivery which was completed ahead of schedule, our team were engaged to migrate onto the separate PBA workstream to support their BAU team. The complaint handlers provided support by working on additional cases and the quality assurers supported the other supplier’s sign-off to avoid any regulatory breaches.