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From Document Manager Magazine Vol 20 No 05 - September/October

It should be no surprise to practitioners of document and content management, says Martyn Christian, CMO at Kofax, that banks are struggling to manage the everincreasing volume of correspondence and complaints arising from the PPI mis-selling scandal

Financial services organisations have some of the largest volumes of customer complaints in the industry, with grievances ranging from bad customer service through to the length of time taken to deal with questions or set up an account. With the rise of social media often making these bad experiences more public, it is also difficult for businesses to stay out of the spotlight when it comes to how they deal with their customers. One recent study by business intelligence company Pearlfinders found, after monitoring six of the major high-street banks for 30 days, that negative posts on Twitter were twice as common as positive ones out of the 170,000 mentions.

Additionally, the recent national coverage of banks struggling to keep up with the 20,000 PPI complaints they are receiving daily, further damages the reputation of UK banking. Coupled with stringent guidelines on how to deal with complaints, this impact on brand reputation should give financial services organisations the ammunition they need to make sure their house is in order. However it's clear that finding an effective way to achieve this is still an issue for even the biggest household names.

GETTING IT WRONG
All companies regulated by the FSA must respond to a complaint within eight weeks and keep the customer updated on the progress of their grievance, advising them whether it has been successful or if it needs more time to look into the matter. The reputation of UK banking stands and falls in its ability to meet these deadlines, but it appears they currently don't have adequate resources.

Not keeping to this timescale can not only damage reputation but also lead to big fines, as The Royal Bank of Scotland found out. The company was recently fined £2.8 million for a range of errors including: delays in responding to customers; poor quality investigations into complaints; issuing correspondence that failed to fully address concerns raised by customers: and customers not receiving Financial Ombudsman Service referral rights in the appropriate time period.

To put this into context and show the scale of what RBS had to deal with: in 2010 it received 295,425 complaints with an associated operational cost of £3m. With an average of five pages per complaint, it is easy to see how this can become an unwieldy task, prone to manual error.

The recent PPI complaint scandal highlights this issue further. Despite the fact the Financial Ombudsman Services have 650 full-time staff dealing with 1,500 PPI complaints a day, they are still not meeting the requirements. Banks need to consider more effective ways of handling complaints.

THE SCALE OF THE PROBLEM
Effective and fast handling of enquiries and complaints is critical for customer retention, particularly in the financial services industry, but there are a number of key pain points faced by businesses when it comes to getting this process right. Cycle time can often be lengthy with a range of people needing to be involved in the process. The iterative approach can be very costly and is prone to manual data entry error.

However, one of the main problems is the sheer number of ways in which customers can now deal with a business, which can lead to an inconsistent experience across the different channels. Correspondence in general can enter a business in a number of ways: mobile data; digital images; video and multimedia; social networking; and "traditional" sources such as documents and emails. Dealing with this mass of structured and unstructured data puts a huge strain on the operational efficiency of the business both in terms of resource and money. Financial services need to consider a way in which they can better handle their data - not only dealing with complaints at speed, but also better using their resources with automated technology.

To try and manage these volumes and respond within the required timeframe, organisations need to take a twopronged approach to deal with complaints more swiftly. By putting an effective document capture and handling process in place, they will speed up response times and minimise human error, thus reducing the amount of complaints by addressing the root of the problem.

IMPROVING RESPONSE AND SERVICE
Whatever form it might enter an organisation in, data must be captured and dealt with in the same way and made available for the right people to deal with at the right time. Capturing complaints in the mailroom, extracting process-ready information, and then validating and delivering it to the right people, processes and systems ensures timely and transparent resolution. Ideally this capturing of information should happen at the point of origination, whether this is a mobile phone, a tablet or a PC. This means that data can be input straight into business workflows.

Automating the capturing, extraction, validation and classification of data will drastically reduce the time taken to decide what to do with the information and where it needs to end up. This plays an essential part in helping to deal with complaints in the required timescales and takes away some of the manual effort associated with processing a query.

Improved access to information also enables staff to make faster, more informed decisions and better handle captured content for more effective case management. This in turn creates more fluid and efficient processes, enabling organisations to reduce operating costs and provide better customer service. If applied to other areas of the business, such as account opening or claims processing, automating the process of data capture will ultimately provide a better level of service for more customers and help reduce the number of complaints the company receives in the first place. Banks need to be ready to respond, and to do this, technology needs to be commonplace. With the number of PPI complaints from January to July increasing by 129%, compared to the second half of 2011, something needs to be done to ensure this number decreases, rather than continues to soar.

More info: www.kofax.com

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