Macquarie Bank spent 18 months redesigning its complaints management process to run entirely within Salesforce, helping it resolve issues and get to the root cause of complaints more quickly.
The bank “always had a good complaints management process”, chief data officer Ashwin Sinha told the Salesforce Live for Financial Services summit yesterday.
“We saw an opportunity to streamline and reimagine the process by simplifying some of the workflows and eliminating some of the manual steps,” Sinha said.
The bank’s head of people, culture and client experience Rosalind Coffey said complaints management in the finance sector is highly regulated.
“Complaint management is much more than just the extension of goodwill we'd like to choose to give to customers, as it might be in some other retail industries,” Coffey said.
“It's heavily regulated, and there are a lot of rules surrounding the way that complaints must be handled.
“For example, we're required to acknowledge every complaint on the day that it's received; we are required to respond to clients within a certain timeframe; and we also have rules and regulations around the way that complaints relating to certain scenarios such as hardship or insurance claims need to be handled as well.
“There's a lot of scrutiny around the complaints management process in retail financial services. In addition to that, if a customer is unhappy or dissatisfied with the outcome of their complaint ... they have an external body, the AFCA - the Australian Financial Complaints Authority - where they can escalate their concerns.”
Improving complaints handling was not just a compliance concern.
“The way that we view complaints management is also an opportunity to build trust and confidence - and sometimes to rebuild that trust and confidence with clients, generally at a time when something hasn't gone quite the way that they would expect it to as well,” Coffey said.
“So it's equally important that any technology that helped us in our complaints management process also helped us to build that trust and confidence with our clients.”
Sinha said the the bank undertook a human-centred design (HCD)-based assessment of its existing complaints handling mechanism.
“This looked at the current-state process, and all the current pain points which were there in terms of the end-to-end process,” he said.
The current-state enabled the bank to see all the handovers between teams involved in complaint resolution, said Coffey.
“We could also see where systems perhaps didn't talk to each other or processes were slightly disjointed or we performed manual intervention,” she said.
Once it had built up a good understanding of the current-state, the bank worked on a “future-state design”, which involved a collaborative effort across its client experience function.
“[This] included our complaints management team, the product team, data and analytics team, and the Salesforce platform team [looking] holistically at this,” Sinha said.
“Once we designed the future-state, we went on a journey over the last 12 to 18 months to fundamentally implement it.”
The bank now uses case management in Salesforce, such that “every complaint is captured as a case, and then it goes through a very simple workflow, all within Salesforce, with different parts of the complaints management team” progressing the complaint through to resolution, said Sinha.
“What we have achieved now is a significantly better user experience for our complaints management team - a single place where we capture all internal and external complaints,” he said.
“We have full visibility on how we go through the lifecycle of a complaint, from the point it got raised to its end resolution.
“We also pre-empted some of the analytics and reporting needs which were required with respect to these complaints, so not only we are learning what is our resolution time on these complaints, but we also have good visibility into what is the root cause, which could lead to change in some of the procedures and processes within the bank ... to really improve the resolution of these complaints for our customers, and achieve good customer outcomes.”
More broadly, Macquarie Bank has been working with Salesforce for several years as part of a push to make its operations more customer-centric and focused.
“For us, Salesforce is the primary customer engagement platform,” Sinha said.
“We use it extensively across our sales, marketing, servicing and customer experience team.
“We have also made use of Salesforce as a platform to support reporting and analytics and the data which is already available in the Salesforce platform and Marketing Cloud, and we are looking at ways of how we can use Salesforce as a platform to engage better with our intermediaries and partners.”
Coffey said that through its use of Salesforce, the bank had already achieved “much greater visibility into all the interactions we have with our customers across the lifecycle of their interactions with us.”
However, she noted there was still more to do on that front.
“We are working towards a 360 [degree] view of customers in Salesforce, whereby all their interactions, their feedback, their Net Promoter Score, data on their marketing preferences, their communication channels and everything that helps us to really know our clients and to personalise experiences for them is all designed to be housed in Salesforce,” she said.
“That will give us the capability to make things very bespoke for our clients depending on the things that matter the most for them.”
