Progress on the Customer Experience Programme is reported each month to the Group Chief Executive and, in line with our ABI Customer Impact Scheme commitments, we will be publishing our Customer Experience report during the second quarter of 2007.
We remain committed to delivering the vision we established in 2005: Employees, customers and advisers want to join us, stay with us and recommend us.
Training and communication are key elements of the programme. During 2006 we extended our training to frontline employees, with over 5,000 attending workshops to develop their understanding of their role in delivering a positive customer experience. There will be further training for managers in 2007 addressing their role in leading the delivery of our vision. A dedicated intranet site and monthly electronic newsletter also kept employees well informed and engaged in the programme during the year.
Ideas in Action, our programme to encourage employees to give us their ideas on how service can be improved, has gone from strength to strength. Last year, over 3,000 ideas were put forward, with over 600 already making a difference to the way we work and others still being considered. We also received a strong endorsement for the way employees are involved by winning four trophies at the independent annual ‘ideasUK’ awards.
Our Customer Executive programme has been running for two years now and continues to enjoy strong commitment from the senior team which leads the UK business. During 2006 they’ve been working in a diverse range of customer facing areas, getting closer to our customers and the people who look after them.
When things go wrong it’s important to us that we put them right in a way that encourages customers to stay with us and recommend us. One of our customer experience projects has focused on improving how customers feel about us by delivering improvements to the complaint handling process. In response to what they told us they want, we’ve developed and delivered our ‘Complaints Operating Principles’ across the UK Business (Source: ICM Complaints Research).
Our Principles include:
Our computer-based complaints handling training has been revised to focus on doing the right things for our customers – not just abiding by regulations. This has been rolled out to the majority of customer facing teams across the UK business. We’ve also tried to make it easier for customers to register a complaint by updating our internet pages to display just two phone numbers to make it easier to find the right person to speak to.
Our Business Partners are a very important link with our customers and, when we got feedback from them telling us that they would like more direct communication, we set up a major project to look at how they wanted to receive information from us.
We wanted to make sure that we could deliver a good communication experience by ensuring that our messages were relevant and went to the right people. Using a mixture of external research and internal review we implemented a number of improvements which have resulted in extremely positive feedback in our Business Partner satisfaction survey.
Our improvements included:
frontline employees attended customer experience workshops in 2006
“I was impressed at the level of interest Kate showed at looking into the real issues.”
Alan Slack, Kingswood
“I was left feeling really confident that Kate will do something about some of the issues we raised.”
Daniela Mulas, Kingswood
Employee feedback following Group Director (Wealth Management) Kate Avery’s visit to Business Systems Development