Customer Service

We introduced our 'Service Commitments' in 2009, a set of four principles that describe in a simple and straightforward way what service means to us and what our customers should expect during every contact with us. Our service commitments are:

  • We will make customers feel welcome and treat them in a helpful and friendly way
  • We will always strive to understand their financial needs and offer products and services of benefit to them
  • We will aim to handle their accounts smoothly and efficiently at all times
  • If something does go wrong, we will aim to put it right as soon as possible, keeping customers informed and keeping our promises.

Last year, over 200,000 customers were surveyed to find out how satisfied they were with their branch or call centre. Satisfaction has improved slightly over the twelve months to December 2010 from 80% to 81%.

Improving our service

We know that we have more to do to improve the experience of our customers and we launched a number of initiatives in 2010 to help to address this:

  • Recruiting 600 more staff for our busiest branches and 400 more staff in our UK call centres
  • Key areas giving rise to complaints such as switching accounts and the issue of cards and PINs were targeted by a dedicated programme of process improvements
  • Continued enhancement of our fraud detection processes, to make customers' money even safer and significantly improve the speed of a refund should fraud occur on a customer's account
  • Being better at how we manage complaints
Managing complaints

Our aim for managing complaints is to resolve complaints at the first point of contact, whilst the customer is present.

Employees are encouraged to resolve issues and complaints from their own experience or via an online complaints resolution tool. If they are unable to resolve the complaint they refer it to a central helpline of experts, a process known as 'Resolve or Refer'. The expert central team resolve the complaint over the phone or take it over to resolve quickly. This approach to complaint handling has seen a significant improvement in the speed with which we resolve complaints, the quality of the resolution and the number of complaints outstanding.

Complaints are continually reviewed through root cause analysis. Our Manufacturing division has an ongoing programme of process improvement based upon analysis of our top complaint issues and Marketing use feedback from complaints to review products. Direct feedback to frontline customer facing areas also helps to improve how we manage complaints.

The volume of complaints reportable to the FSA reduced by around 1 in 5 in the second half of 2010. The latest figures from the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) confirm that the uphold rates in favour of those of our customers who choose to escalate their complaints to FOS remain well below the industry average.

We typically resolve around 80% of complaints within 48 hours and we have relatively few complaints outstanding over 4 weeks.