Compensation Reduction

At Kura, we have extensive experience managing customer complaints across diverse sectors, focusing on utilities, where our team has supported complaint handling for over a decade. Continuous improvement lies at the heart of our operations, driving our commitment to enhance service levels for our clients. We created a project aimed at significantly reducing customer compensation within the utility complaints handling contact centre.

The challenge was prompted by our client’s budgetary constraints, necessitating a swift and efficient decrease in weekly compensation expenditures while ensuring continued high standards in customer service and complaint resolution.

We systematically identified issues within the customer compensation process and adopted a comprehensive approach to address these challenges comprehensively. This approach encompassed operational enhancements to address skill and knowledge gaps and improvements in process efficiency, targeting areas where flawed processes were leading to avoidable compensations.

Our solution proposed addressed the following key areas:

• Improve the training material and tools available to our advisors
• Improve our call quality process to highlight risk to compensation reduction
• Identify key client processes leading to compensation
• Improve operational controls over expenditure

We devised an action plan with tasks categorised into four areas: advisor knowledge, risk monitoring, processes, and expenditure control. Each area was assigned a lead, and specific deliverable dates were set for each action.

We adopted our call quality process to include non-scoring questions, focusing on proactive offering to strengthen coaching in this area. Additionally, we implemented systems to monitor trends in staff behaviour and improvements.

Through this process, we identified two client processes that contributed significantly to compensation issues, leading to insights that informed our strategy.

We revised and enhanced our training materials regarding goodwill expenditure, developed a goodwill matrix shared by all staff, and included practical examples to illustrate appropriate spending.

Finally, we established internal controls concerning authorisation for expenditures exceeding specified thresholds (beyond client and system limits), ensuring stringent oversight.

Kura successfully reduced weekly expenditures from approximately £75k to just £15k over 12 weeks. Our efforts met and exceeded the client’s reduction target by over 50%, despite operating with only around 30% of the total staffing resources shared among several partners. This achievement significantly bolstered the client’s standing in the industry, as evidenced by industry scorecards.

Our comprehensive approach involved scrutinising every facet for improvement, yielding substantial reductions even where gains were incremental. We also empowered our staff with enhanced tools and clarity in their roles.

This initiative could serve as a quarterly undertaking led exclusively by Kura, enhancing value-added activities, and bolstering ongoing operational performance.

Key highlights of the project include:

• Achieving a 50% reduction in complaints within just 10 days.
• Demonstrating our agility in resource allocation to meet urgent client needs.
• Leveraging our staff’s extensive knowledge, ideas, and experience, many with over a decade in the field.

This success underscores Kura’s commitment to excellence and innovation in complaint management and operational efficiency.