A video round-up from the launch event

James recognises that customers are becoming much more savvy and expecting much more from their provider – a key finding from the Complaints Outlook itself.

“The word ‘efficient’ is a very dangerous word,” he says, “because ‘efficient’ is not always ‘effective’. What we’ve done is create processes that are all about efficiency for the organisation but not effective for the consumer. We need to think about the way we are resolving and handling issues by thinking about the psychology of how we would want to engage.

“Think from the ground upwards. If you were a consumer, what would you want your experience to be?”

Even in a world in which we’re almost all online or using apps, there is still the need to make it easier to complain, he suggests. In a time in which many of us organise our entire lives online, complaints remain one of the only direct, ‘face-to-face’ opportunities for firms to put their best foot forward.

“I see there is a culture shift starting in complaints,” says Liz. “When I first started to work for CCA, we were looking at firms’ complaints handling operations as being something ‘out there’. It wasn’t part of the organisation, it was seen as the place that took the complaining customers away from the real operation.

“I think that has changed completely now.”

Like us at Huntswood, Liz is happy to see customers now being considered the heart of the operation. Firms are still figuring out what this really means, but the culture change is happening. Equally important are the people that deal with your customers, and they need processes in place that allow them to deal with complaints effectively.

“A customer who is complaining has got a lot of really good information that they can give you, and I think firms are waking up to that.”

“Put the people before the processes,” is Liz’s call. According to CCA research, frontline case handlers love to help customers, be part of a team and achieve good performance. However, they tend to have too great of a focus on targets, are often dealing outdated technologies and feelings of not being appreciated. It’s easy to see, then, that making sure your complaint handlers are happy will positively impact the end customer’s experience.

“Complaints provide a huge amount of insight to any business,” says Amy, “they provide really, really great feedback and prevent issues from impacting other customers."

Amy made the point that the utilities industry faces different challenges than the financial services industry. Complaints resolution in this space is often reliant on a number of different external factors. To get to the right outcome, Amy suggests utilities businesses need to foster a culture of “doing the right thing” and be able to justify how they make things right for customers.

“Make the most out of every opportunity to make things right,” Amy says, “if things continue do go wrong, this can be incredibly damaging for your business from a commercial perspective.”

Amy’s key takeaway from the day was around changing the perception of complaints as a simple burden on businesses to seeing them as valuable sources of information that they can use to grow and add value.