| While 2020 has not been ‘business as usual’ by most measures, the year is proving just that for the FCA, especially in terms of regulatory enforcement, including the application of sizable fines. The recurring theme does not seem to change as issues continually relate to poor and/or inappropriate treatment of customers. |
| While the Lloyds Bank/Bank of Scotland/The Mortgage Business fine of £64m by the FCA may have been the ‘stand out’ amount this year, other fines were equalling eye watering. Of course, the cost of these fines is not limited to firms’ balance sheets; there is often a remediation amount to be paid plus the costs of administering the redress and the lost reputation attached. It is not only regulated firms who need to be on their game when it comes to treating customers fairly; OFCOM and utilities regulators have been equally proactive when it comes to issuing penalties against those who can’t or won’t put policies and procedures in place to ensure correct treatment of customers. Despite the severity of the fines, changing behaviours in customer service oversight is slow; firms often believe they completely understand their customer interactions when in reality they are reviewing less than 5% of their phone calls – clearly not possible with such an unrepresentative sample. While monitoring more calls used to be challenging from a resourcing perspective, speech analytics technology has never been more accessible to firms of all sizes meaning that solutions are now readily available to help gain a better insight from customer interactions. As long as firms react quickly to the results, and don’t simply ‘park them’ for later, behaviours improve, products and services develop, and the risk of attracting further fines is minimised. We are confident that we can make a difference to your business. We work on a consultative basis, focusing on your business needs. By monitoring 100% of your customer interactions, we will help you quickly and efficiently identify and fix key issues. Without our unique solutions, firms relying on internal manual QC functions are simply not able to identify or assess sufficient interactions to make a real difference – they are ‘parking the problem’ for later. In our view, that is neither a credible solution nor sufficient to meet regulatory requirements. To learn more, arrange a demo of the system or simply have a chat, give us a call to find out how we can help your business. |