As the manager of an internal dispute resolution team in the financial services sector, Tim was a passionate advocate for his organisation’s customers. Any complaints that weren’t resolved within the various business lines became the responsibility of his team.  If his team are unable to resolve the dispute within prescribed timeframes it is escalated to AFCA at significant financial and reputational cost.  Furthermore, a recent acquisition had added further complexity to an already complex business, selling various products through multiple channels.

Tim needed to sustainably improve the dispute resolution process for the benefit of all parties and when QBS’s Core Operational Excellence leadership training program came along, it was the perfect vehicle to achieve this.  He took responsibility to analyse, optimise and improve his own function using proven operational excellence concepts.  

THE ISSUES

Through the lens of operational excellence, Tim was able to identify the priority issues that needed to be addressed:

• Varied, undocumented complaint processes across the business
• Insufficient dispute resolution (DR) process documentation – in addition to causing variation, this also placed a reliance on the experienced team members to support the less experienced
• Highly variable DR team capability
• Skill gaps within DR team 

ACTIONS TAKEN

With the above issues in mind, Tim was able to drive specific actions to sustainably shift the needle for his business and team:

• Documented current business complaint processes
• Dispute resolution processes agreed and documented (by the team, for the team)
• Skills matrix created to prioritise skill gaps to be closed with team members achieving Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals accreditation
• Changed the process to ensure team member speak with the customer at the outset and used open ended questions
• Developed templates and increased standardisation for common complaint types
• Increased collaboration within the business 

THE RESULTS

The results that Tim achieved within just seven months are astounding:

• Time to resolve complaints decreased from a median of 22 days down to 17 days 
• Reduction in complaints escalated to AFCA from 72% to 34% (similar total number of complaints).   Each complaint that escalates to AFCA costs ~$3,150.  This saved the company around $130k in one month alone!
• Productivity gains from less effort expended on each complaint resulted in 1 FTE headcount reduction
• Happier customers, happy regulator, happy business!

Next frontier? Work with the business to reduce the number of complaints!

This is a fabulous example of how leaders can improve their operational performance without engaging external consultants – it is usually achieved through a handful of relatively small actions to address the specific challenges in that area. In addition, the skills Tim learnt will be with him throughout his career.

If you would like your leaders to turn their function around without engaging expensive consultants, click here to learn more about Core Operational Excellence and QBS’s other development programs.