Compensation Reduction

At Kura we have wide experience in handling customer complaints across various sectors, particularly in utilities where our staff have been supporting complaints handling for over a decade.  Continuous Improvement is at the centre of our operations, and we are always looking for ways to improve our client’s service levels.  One example of this came from a project we ran to dramatically reduce customer compensations on a utilities complaints handling contact centre operation.

A challenge had been set to reduce customer redress spending due to budget reductions across the client which required a quick and effective reduction in weekly compensation spend whilst still maintaining delivering high customer quality in handling and complaints resolution to remain stable at the same time.

We took to define the problem statements within the customer compensation process and took a holistic approach in addressing the issue from all angles.  This included not just looking at what we could improve operationally through addressing skills or knowledge gaps, but also looking at process effectiveness and where bad processes were leading to compensation that could be avoided.

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 spend

We set ourselves up an action plan with actions partitioned into the above 4 areas of advisor knowledge, risk monitoring, process and spend control assigning leads to each area with deliverable dates set for each action. We adapted our call quality process to include non-scoring questions around proactive offering to shore up coaching in this area, and also collate trends in terms of staff behaviour and improvements. We were also able to identify 2 client processes with insight shared off the back of We revised and improved our training material around goodwill spend and created a goodwill matrix shared with all staff that used tangible examples to express suitable spend. Finally, we set up internal controls around authorisation on spend over certain values (over and above the client and system limitations) to ensure tight control in place.

Kura’s was able to reduce weekly spend from circa £75k down to £15k across a period of approximately 12 weeks.

Kura’s contribution to the overall reduction target exceeded 50% vs. proportionately having approx. 30% of the staffing across several partners so had more than made an impact. The reduction Kura contributed towards helped maintain the client’s leading position in industry as set out by the industry scorecard.

Our holistic approach in terms of reviewing all angles of improvement to ensure, even where some gains were marginal helped deliver an exceptional reduction over a relatively short period of time.  We also were able to give our staff clearer understanding and tools to complete their job

The approach could be utilised as a quarterly initiative ran solely from Kura as a value-added activity and to support BAU performance in this space

The main takeaways from this project were:

• 50% complaint reduction achieved in just 10 days.
• We were able to showcase our ability to flex in resource to meet client demand in a short space of time.

Utilising the knowledge, ideas and experience of our staff with more than a decade of experience