Recruitment

Understand the true costs and opportunities within complaint handling calculate the cost of customer churn, the positive impact of advocacy and the negative impact of poor customer journeys

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The Huntswood Complaints Calculator can be used to assess the opportunity available to your firm within complaints.

We go deeper than the superficial ‘cost per complaint resolution’ by calculating the cost of customer churn, the positive impact of advocacy and the negative impact of antagonism. These are typically hidden costs, and not considered when assessing the return on investment of a successful complaints department.

The calculator itself uses a set of observations and assumptions based on data from the Complaints Outlook 2024 surveys, and uses retention data linked to NPS as the main input.

The calculator gives you two main outputs and their ‘total potential revenue’, then compares the two, these are:

Successful complaints journeys, using an NPS of 39

These journeys are timely, the firm apologised and updated the customer, and the customer didn’t have to chase progress on their complaint.

Unsuccessful complaint journeys, using an NPS of -87

These journeys are protracted, the firm did not apologise, or did not update the customer, and the customer had to chase progress of their complaint.

Input your firm’s values, or, if you don’t know the figures for your firm, use the values from Complaints Outlook, which are shown on each page.

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How we dive deeper into the real costs

Churn

Churn, or the percentage of customers lost over a time period, is based on overall retention of promoters (100% retained), passives (90%) and detractors (33%). This data is taken from our Complaints Outlook consumer surveys and our knowledge of NPS and consumer markets.

Advocacy

Advocacy rates are based on consumer survey data showing that 22% of promoters would recommend others use their product or service after their complaint journey had ended. We also assume that each of these promoters will tell three people.

Antagonism

Antagonism is effectively the opposite of advocacy, where people tell others not to use a service or product. Our consumer data showed that 16% of detractors would tell others not to use their product or service, this is what we consider the ‘dehort’ rate. We assume in this case, these detractors speak to five people.

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