How good are you at listening? I mean, truly listening? For a long time, I thought I was. Despite my well-intentioned impatience and confidence, I was sure I already had the answers. I'd nod, smile, and solve the problem I perceived to be at hand.
Then I had kids. And when they started communicating, miscommunication abounded, as is common with early listeners. That experience was eye-opening. It made me question: How well do I actually listen and absorb accurate information at work?
In many ways, sitting down to read your customer complaints—line by line, every single word—is a similar exercise. Yes, you're bound to encounter plenty of complaints akin to "you're the worst mom ever," often because customers don't like your rates or want to shift blame. But if you truly listen, you'll also see real people with real problems, often caused or exacerbated by your own organization.
By taking the time to listen to your customers, your business can critically examine its policies, procedures, and employees. From there, you can genuinely envision how to better care for customers and develop a "good" experience, which ultimately translates into fewer complaints.
This is essential today, as federal regulators increasingly pressure financial institutions to prioritize customers by better managing complaints. When a Top 10 bank struggled across the entire lifecycle of complaints, they tasked our team with designing a customer-centric program to better identify, track, and resolve them. The goal was to leverage data insights to make necessary internal changes, ultimately reducing complaints.
To start, our team grounded the bank's own definition of a customer complaint against regulator, industry, and internal expectations. We also ensured every front-line employee knew how to consistently identify and escalate complaints.
Leveraging our business analytics expertise, we compiled complaint datasets from across the organization. This allowed us to introduce tools that could dig deeper for insights and opportunities. We built and deployed a text-analytics model to more accurately categorize complaint types and regulatory risk, leading to greater accuracy during reviews and training. We also launched a reporting suite to arm senior leaders and associates with actionable insights. Finally, the team introduced monthly reviews and tracking processes to ensure the bank could understand the root causes and align resources to drive improvements.
Our client now has a single, shared definition of complaints used across the entire organization, including operations. With ready access to and confidence in comprehensive complaints data, the bank can leverage interactive analysis and reporting to identify hot spots and emerging trends and sort complaints based on various attributes.
This integrated view of complaints and related customer feedback means the bank can now respond faster to regulatory requests and provide leaders with critical information to understand customer pain points. This enables them to work on making changes that ease friction and, in turn, reduce complaints.
To learn more about our data-driven approach to complaint management and the meaningful outcomes we generated, check out our Complaints Management case study—and how we positioned our client for rave reviews from regulators for its new oversight program that puts customers first.