Insights
From obligation to opportunity: innovating under Consumer Duty
Discover how your call center can implement consumer duty best practice to stay compliant and competitive.
The introduction of Consumer Duty by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in 2023 placed a renewed emphasis on prioritizing good consumer outcomes, fairness, and protections for customers.
While it’s essential to meet regulatory requirements to avoid heavy financial penalties and reputational risk, Consumer Duty represents much more than that.
It heralds a significant shift towards customer-centricity, and a recognition that competing on customer experience is a new reality for modern companies. From the distribution chain and retail customers to online consumers, companies must shift towards embedding the Duty’s principles into their core strategy to make significant gains.
The FCA’s Sheldon Mills, executive director of consumers and competition, highlighted in a speech:
“You’ve heard this from us before, but the Consumer Duty was never going to be a once and done act. It is an ongoing journey for improvement that we’re on together.
We’re committed to ensuring the benefits of the Duty are realized for consumers, firms, and the whole economy.
It is about reputation, it is about trust, and it is about delivering value and growth.”
So, given that, simply meeting the deadlines and creating the reports isn’t a ‘once and done act’.
What more can you be doing to identify areas for improvement within your products and services? And how can you innovate under the Duty to make your customer experience the envy of your competitors?
The competitive advantage of Consumer Duty
Rather than viewing Consumer Duty as a box-ticking exercise, forward-thinking organizations recognize the regulation as an opportunity to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive market – as well as reducing the likelihood of poor customer outcomes.
COO of Moneyhub Dan Scholey, attests to this: “Consumer Duty really should be a win for both businesses who want to work more efficiently and effectively as well as consumers who need more tailored solutions at affordable prices. The early feedback from firms that have embraced it is overwhelmingly positive.”
In short, embedding customer-centric practices, means you’ll benefit from:
- Higher customer trust: A transparent, fair approach reassures customers that their financial wellbeing is a priority – a real stand-out in a sector that’s had its issues with perception over the last decade.
- Enhanced loyalty and retention: Customers who feel valued and well looked after are more likely to not only stay with their provider, but recommend them to others.
- New customers: Reputation matters! If you’re consistently delivering good customer outcomes, you’ll appeal to prospective customers. And when 79% of consumers would switch to a different company if they found out it had a better customer experience, that’s a big audience to attract.
Examples of good practice
Consumer Duty, while prescriptive in some areas, is also surprisingly open-ended in others. As a result, the FCA has taken to sharing ‘good practice’ examples of where financial firms have successfully embedded Consumer Duty principles into their operations to deliver great outcomes.
Thorough reporting that tells a story
FCA example: “We saw firms include data on complaints as well as the source and root cause analysis of any upward or downward trends. Some reports were able to link trends to events such as technical incidents, changes to complaint handling processes, and changes to the sales strategy.”
Data deep-dives with tangible actions
FCA example: “One firm identified a monthly increase in call abandonment rate data was due to reduced resource at a time of fluctuating demand and linked this to an action to review its resource modelling.”
Proactively supporting vulnerable customers
FCA example: “Some reports showed how their monitoring approach allowed them to track whether different groups of customers, including those with characteristics of vulnerability, were receiving different outcomes. Good practice we observed included a firm that had a ‘care flag’ in place for relevant customers’ accounts, so that when a customer reports a characteristic of vulnerability, all customer support staff will see it.”
So far, so good – but all this reporting and analysis takes time. And if you’re only submitting your Consumer Duty reports annually, you’re potentially wasting a huge amount of time sat on issues you don’t know about yet.
The real innovation happens in real-time.
Using innovation to provide better customer experiences
Complying with Consumer Duty has naturally impacted QA teams – contact center interactions are, after all, a big contributor to the customer experience.
And yet, many of these teams are still only monitoring interactions to improve agent performance. They’re missing out on also using these interactions to report on customer satisfaction, identify pain points and areas for improvement within their consumer support – essentially, building Consumer Duty principles into the overall monitoring process.
evaluagentCX allows you to see the outcomes of conversations as they happen. Clear and succinct dashboards surface key insights quickly, dedicated metrics help you get to the heart of issues affecting your CX, and AI gives you coverage and intel at scale.
Leverage Auto-QA for 100% conversation coverage
Auto-QA scores customer conversations at scale, prioritizes those that would benefit from a closer look, and identifies any area where Consumer Duty requirements have potentially been missed. Critically, it also then triggers remedial workflows to resolve these, and then catalogues them for ongoing regulatory reporting.
Use AI-powered monitoring to reduce admin
Using machine learning and genAI, evaluagentCX dramatically reduces the QA admin burden, monitoring and scoring interactions accurately in seconds compared to traditional approaches. Generative AI will then give you a summary of why the interaction was scored that way, and any suggested improvement actions for agents.
Hear the Voice of your Customer with dedicated metrics
Our xMetrics (expected metrics) suite gives you access to predictive metrics for First-Contact resolution, repeat contacts, vulnerability and Net Promoter Scores, across 100% of your interactions.
Generative AI analyzes every conversation for indicators, and scores the likely outcome with incredible accuracy. With customer surveys becoming increasingly unreliable due to low response rates, these metrics offer an automated way to get the full picture of your customer experience.
Designed to ease the pressure on QA and Insight teams, solutions such as Auto-QA and xMetrics offer innovative approaches to help time-poor teams excel – especially when you’re faced with additional responsibilities due to regulations.
Want to learn more?
Consumer Duty is here to stay – and the technology to help you delight customers and outmaneuver your competitors is right here too.
It’s a win-win. You’ll not only meet regulatory expectations, but also drive trust, loyalty and wider business growth as you make impactful decisions that give your customers great outcomes.
Ready to make the leap? Book a demo with our team today to see how evaluagentCX can help you nail compliance, deliver great CX and drive performance.
