Complaint Management

Our client approached us for our expertise in debt collection with to reduce their high balance debt book customer numbers who have open complaints. Kura were provided with 338 complaints with an overall outstanding balance of £1,086,335.00

Our key objectives were to open dialogue, resolve complaint and collect outstanding debt.

To resolve this, we first identified the advisors most suited not only in the experience they hold but also the ability to have empathetic difficult conversations need within the first contact process.

To begin, we utilised the expertise and experience following the information gathered within that first 10-day period and established what if any technical fix were identified and moved into the appropriate channels.

Our solution was to apply the best people for the outcome objectives from existing resource within our utilities teams. Agreed from the very start of the focused customers the key repayment options extended instalment plans, direct debits and bank transfer available to them and what success looked liked for the client and customer. We also reviewed the client scripting to support the customers, implemented the correct debt recovery scripting to ensure that full debt recovery compliance was achieved this was to include making the customer aware of the impact the high balances will be having on the account and potentially the credit rating.

We set ourselves not a monetary recovery value with the customers initially but an understanding and fix implementation, this making the conversation around the high debt balances easier. Once the understanding was established and the fixes had started to be implemented, we knew if the original debt on the account was genuine. Once a debt was deemed as non-genuine, we then looked to see why and if any adjustments were needed, this would be in the form of billing adjustments (BBA/BTA) in line with Ofgem’s billing regulations.  Where an affordability issue was identified it was important to assist the customer with identifying what help they can get and where to get this help for by providing them with the contact information for the financial aid agencies.

Debt Team A complaint value reduced from 338 to 170 over 8 week period -a 50% reduction. Volume of debt outstanding during this period reduced from £1,036,885 to £625,472 – a 40% reduction.

Through our work with the high value debt complaints we were able to deduce that 23% of the complaints with high value debt were due to account errors that we could resolve – a great boost for customer satisfaction, from a client perspective we were able to determine that 60% of these debt balances couldn’t be collected until additional work was completed such as EUKs and BBAs.

The original debt pilot file was very difficult to use. Access was an issue at the start of the pilot which we took time to correct, it’s also important to have the right type of advisor in these roles. We were proactive in approaching the client with our issues and any blockers from their end.

We need to have a concise and live tracker of the high value debt complaints, it needs to be easy to use/update, we need to ensure advisors in the role are confident having difficult conversations around financial hardship and are knowledgeable about support available to customers. We also require a dedicated escalation chain to the client complete with Client SLAs to ensure we can drive resolutions and facilitate collection.