Unlocking the value of customer complaints

The current state of customer complaint management

In the past decade, regulators and consumers have recalibrated their expectations around how organizations, both within financial services and beyond, should handle customer complaints. Across some sectors, it is now an understood regulatory expectation that organizations holistically focus on customer outcomes, be it through their direct interactions or how their products and services are offered. Significant consumer-centric reform, our instant ability to reach a wide audience through channels such as social media, and a number of very public consumer-focused regulatory actions all point to a clear need for all consumer-facing organizations to ensure they are acting in their customers’ best interest, which includes the way in which they address their customer complaints.

Complaints management within most service-driven industries is not new. Many major organizations have formalized their complaints management program. However, there is a broad spectrum of formality in processes and procedures, as well as how technology is employed. Technology systems across industries (as well as between organizations within the same industry) range from basic (disconnected, incomplete, and reactive) to advanced (integrated, proactive, and semiautomated). This spectrum often underpins an organization’s general attitude toward complaints management; some organizations still view complaints as a negative and address remediation in isolation (or as required), whereas others are investing in their complaints management program, resulting in an increasing ability to unlock value from captured data and insights and improving their organization’s overall ability to manage customer complaints.

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Getting started: The complaints management maturity model

Through our work with executives undertaking the journey to develop capabilities to more effectively manage their organizations’ complaints processes, we have identified five distinct maturity stages, increasing in level of the overall structure, proactive management, and use of technology and data analytics.

While many organizations in the United States have implemented elements of a complaints management program which could be considered elements of formal and structured (stage 4) and even optimal and intelligent (stage 5), there are very few organizations (or industries) that can lay claim to achieving a stage 5 maturity level. As organizations move up the stages of the maturity curve, the more proactive they are in being able to resolve customer complaints (including the ability to preemptively identify and resolve issues). These organizations often capture and leverage data and use more advanced technologies.

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By targeting actions, processes, and systems within the complaints process, resulting in a move up the Complaints Management Maturity Curve, organizations can expect to unlock increasing value, such as:

• Increased structure and efficiency, driving more transparent and timely outcomes
• Increased levels of customer satisfaction while improving the overall customer experience
• Increased risk- and issue-sensing ability; proactively identifying potential noncompliance and hotspots to manage complaints
• Reduced longer-term cost through decreased operational, legal, regulatory, and compliance risk(s)

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Let’s talk

For more information on the value a mature complaints management system can provide, we encourage you to contact one of our complaints management specialists: