Achieve Complaints Excellence
Customer Complaints
Reduce complaints volume for business wide benefits
Poor management of customer complaints can seriously harm your business reputation, and drive a significant increase in your cost to serve.
Complaints represent a wealth of insight into the root cause of problems across your business. BFY identifies these underlying problems and supports process improvements to reduce complaint volume.
Our experts can also improve your complaint handling procedures, and upskill agents to improve complaint management speed and effectiveness.
Example support scenarios:
- You have a backlog of complaints requiring urgent intervention
- You need to reduce the in-flow of complaints by resolving root causes around your business
- You need to upskill the capability of the people handling your complaints, both on your front-line (customer service) and your escalated complaints handling teams
- You need to use data analytics to support pro-active working, and automation, of exceptions
As a complaints team, it's important to understand your performance and how it compares to the competition across your industry. Our analysis of the latest Ofgem data shows a rise in overall complaints in Q3-2023, highlighting opportunities for improvements and strategic advantages.
Leanne Armstrong
Senior Consultant
Customer Complaints
Are we facing a complaints crisis?
Suppliers are under the microscope in respect of transforming service quality and delivering better customer outcomes, now more than ever, following Ofgem’s Statutory Consultation decision to implement new rules and requirements in the industry.
There's a particular focus on the requirement to publish customer service ratings, as provided by Citizen’s Advice and the latest results clearly illustrate the need for change:
- ~65% of energy suppliers scored 1/5 for complaints performance
- ~90% of energy suppliers scored lower than 3.5/5 for overall customer service
Complaints teams now find themselves in the spotlight, with the pressure ramped up on overall customer service functions.
Suppliers should consider customer advocacy or ombudsman roles for cases that can’t be resolved through regular escalation channels. This provides an independent review of complex or unresolved complaints.
Craig Sutherland
Senior Consultant
Managing Complaints
Improving satisfaction through effective escalation
By implementing a well-structured and customer-centric complaints escalation process, suppliers can demonstrate their commitment to resolving issues promptly and efficiently, ultimately improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
How to achieve this:
- Establish clearly defined levels of escalation (Front line and second line support to resolve real-time and increase SDC)
- Conduct an operating model review
- Encourage ownership of cases and enforce SLAs
- Review of contact channels and strategy, providing accessible channels for customers to escalate their complaints
- Ongoing RCA and performance coaching to close skill gaps on more complex complaints
It's crucial to maintain open lines of communication between frontline agents, management, and customers. For optimal results, share insights from complaints monitoring regularly - celebrating successes and communicating any changes made based on customer feedback.
Jon Vincent
Senior Manager
Managing Complaints
Monitoring to deliver continuous improvement
Continuous monitoring and improvement of the complaints process is crucial. This helps suppliers to be actively responsive to customer feedback, evolving where necessary to meet customer needs.
How to achieve this:
- Real-time tracking of complaints to identify patterns, trends, and areas that require immediate attention. This enables proactive problem-solving and prevents recurring issues
- CSAT – Analyse customer feedback to gain insights into the customer experience and identify areas for improvement
- Thorough root cause analysis for escalated or complex complaints. Identify underlying issues that contribute to complaints and address them at their source to prevent future occurrences
- Generate reports and insight on complaint data, trends, and the effectiveness of resolutions. Use to inform decision-making and guide improvements
- Foster collaboration between different departments and teams. Complaints may highlight systemic issues that require input and action from multiple departments
The Impact
Benefits of Complaints Excellence
Implementing the four pillars of Complaints Excellence can help you to:
- Reduce overall demand
- Improve front line closure
- Resolve early escalated inflow
- Address the complaints backlog
- Improve advisor effectiveness
- Improve D56 resolutions
- Reduce Ombudsman unit costs
See how we've supported our clients with complaints management in the Case Studies section below.
Case Studies
Celebrating our clients' success
BFY helps medium sized supplier reduce complaints by 33%
Our client was recording a high number of complaints and wanted support in identifying where and how to make rapid improvements. A new complaint recognition process was formed and rolled out across the business, leading to a 33% reduction in complaint volumes for the following quarter.
Large supplier complaint management efficiencies deliver £250k in year benefit
We helped our client understand its cost per complaint, highlighting cost reduction opportunities through our complaints model. We designed cross-function processes and communication to reduce non-value add interactions, along with an improved approach to customer contact.
Large supplier gains £0.4m reduction in Ombudsman fees
BFY did a collaborative data review with the Client, before completing off site analysis and call listening activity for customers who took their cases to the Ombudsman.
Latest news
Insight from Complaints experts
Closing the gap between complaint volumes and service ratings to save £m’s
There's generally little correlation between customer service ratings and complaint volumes for energy suppliers. A good Trustpilot score doesn't typically mean less complaints, but as we show here, suppliers can save £m's by closing this gap.
Energy suppliers face a third party complaints problem
Energy complaints increased in the latest data, and although volume is normalising at pre-pandemic levels, there’s a concerning trend emerging with third party involvement.
Complaints are an increasing burden for non-domestic suppliers
Energy suppliers will need to offer enhanced complaints services to more than 200,000 small businesses under new Ofgem rules, BFY estimates. The Complaints Handling Standards (CHS) are expanding from December 2024 to cover both micro and small businesses, and as volume increases, some will need to adapt more than others, to build the required maturity for higher demand.
Meet the team
Our Customer Complaints experts
Jon Vincent
Client Director
Jon helps clients resolve problems with billing, settlements, and customer service.
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Kev Brown
Senior Manager
Kev leads continuous improvement and lean transformation projects with our clients, supporting customer operations to deliver our Leadership and People Excellence programme.
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Joseph Cooper
Manager
Joseph supports our Retail clients to improve their operational processes and business performance.
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Leanne Armstrong
Manager
Leanne helps clients to achieve operational excellence through demand reduction, process optimisation, and cost to serve initiatives.
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Craig Sutherland
Senior Consultant
Craig has experience working on both large and small-scale business transformations, IT and people migration programmes, change management and leading cultural transformation.
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Wade Robertson
Senior Consultant
Wade specialises in Transformation, Value Creation and Project Management, helping clients to identify and deliver on opportunities of significant value.
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