Mastering Complaint Management: How to Turn Customer Dissatisfaction into Business Opportunities

Question: Name something that no business has complete immunity from.

Answer: Customer complaints.

Indeed, it’s an inescapable truth. No matter how well-polished your products and services and customer experience are, there will always be moments that slip through the cracks. That’s not to say all complaints represent bad news, though. Of course, the business of handling and dealing with complaints is never going to be easy or enjoyable for anybody involved. Yet they do harbour an untapped goldmine of opportunity for learning that can power real, meaningful organisational change. The brands that overlook these opportunities risk falling out of touch with their market and the expectations of their audience.

For BT Group, this is never going to be a problem. And in this interview, BT Group’s Head of Complaints Operations Rebecca Harvison tells us why. She speaks with our Industry Analyst Simon Hall about an assortment of topics including the training she offers her frontline staff, how and where her team fits into the larger customer strategy at BT Group, the technology journey she’s on, and the make-up of her award-winning Abusive Customer Programme.

Let’s jump in.

Simon Hall: Rebecca, let’s set some context. Complaints management is a complex and nuanced area within the broader territory of work in the contact centre. Can you unpack the essence of your role and lay out some of the key recurring challenges you encounter?

Rebecca Harvison: I lead the complaints team across the consumer arm of the BT group – the EE brand, the BT brand, and the Plusnet brand. Within that, I manage around 550 heads and together our focus is on dealing with all incoming complaints to the business. We’re on the frontlines listening to customers and collecting valuable voice of the customer data.

It’s our job to first resolve the issues and then meticulously analyse each complaint to discern underlying causes – the insights of which we share with the wider organisation. We’re able to gain a comprehensive understanding of customer trends: what’s driving complaints, emerging complaint clusters, broken customer-facing processes – fundamentally a range of data points we can leverage to improve the way we run our operations. On top of that, we provide feedback to our support advisors around areas of potential improvement – how to build better connections with customers, how to diffuse tense situations, etc.

So, in short, my role has two parts: addressing customer issues in the first instance and managing the brilliant insights we gather from them.

SH: Dealing with customer complaints is a natural part of the job agents do every day. The contact centre is often the first place customers turn to when products or services fail to meet expectations. So, with that in mind, when customers do voice or show frustration, what strategies have you got in place to drive quick and effective resolution?

RH: When our customers first contact us, everything we do is underpinned by our ethos which is itself founded upon engaging in personal conversations. It has been cultivated over an extended period and revolves around demonstrating curiosity in the needs of our customers, and ultimately, showing we understand and care. It offers our advisors, whom we refer to as guides, a framework they can use to build and develop their conversations.

Inside that structure, the knowledge they need to resolve customer queries is all housed in our internal knowledge system that we call Albert (inspired by Albert Einstein). This platform plays a pivotal role in steering the direction of conversations by prompting questions like: "Have you attempted this with the customer?", or "Have you explored that avenue with the customer?". This approach naturally guides the advisors through a process to arrive at a solution.

These two elements drive our day-to-day handling – the personal conversation piece and the support of Albert from a knowledge mobilisation perspective.

SH: By its very nature, managing a complaint is an unpleasant experience for agents, and training plays a critical role in their ability to diffuse and resolve situations in a highly stressful environment. How are you training your staff to navigate these pressures and simultaneously deliver what the customer wants or expects, thereby turning a negative customer experience into a positive one?

RH: Training in handling complaints is an integral part of onboarding for our advisors, starting from their first day with the company. It’s at the core of everything we do because customers never call in to tell us how happy they are with our products and services; they reach out when something has gone wrong.

We start by looking at indicators of dissatisfaction and use various training tools to do so, including digital content, in-person trainer-led content, and peer-to-peer learning. We’re able to adapt the content to cater to diverse learning styles within the business and that’s critical. We regularly run call listening initiatives – both with new starters and established advisors – whereby we calibrate calls and identify as a group whether there are any signs of dissatisfaction. We challenge and push the team by asking them how they would react and respond: Would you log this call as a complaint? What are the signs of discontent? What do you think of this language? It’s collaborative training and we engage in positive conversational debate to reach conclusions. But this is ongoing due to the changing nature of customer needs. Customer behaviours are evolving, which is where our Abusive Customer Programme came in (more on that later).

It’s important we keep our complaints content alive and fresh – I work with the training team every six to 12 months to renew the material. Aside from identifying dissatisfaction, we also cover training in areas around how to listen effectively, how to handle conflicts, how to handle a difficult conversation, and how to deliver what may be classed as difficult news to customers. For example, we may need to escalate a problem to an external party such as Openreach and therefore it could take months to fix because then council approvals and traffic management come into play. It’s a complex business. But helping our advisors shape their conversations is crucial.

We also provide guidance on using appropriate language, especially tailored for new employees who may lack prior conflict resolution experience. Our aim is to equip all our advisors with the necessary skills to adeptly manage a wide range of customer interactions.

SH: Pivoting now on to agent empowerment through the lens of technology. What tools or solutions are you leveraging in the contact centre to support your agents and ultimately ensure you’re giving them the best chance possible to drive first contact resolution?

RH: We employ several tools.

Again, that personal conversation ethos is key. We lean heavily on speech analytics and I'm currently running an initiative within my complaints team that leverages the speech analytics platform to assist us in discerning and interpreting customer emotions based on their language. If there is a sentiment of dissatisfaction, that call gets flagged – whether it’s resolved or not. We’ll subsequently review the account and then proactively reach back out to the customer, and, if necessary, put some metaphorical arms around them. This combination of proactive and reactive strategies enables us to address issues that may have otherwise been overlooked.

Our sales team are likewise busy with a piece of software that detects customer emotions through the questions they’re asking and the responses they’re giving. The technology provides our sales personnel with guidance regarding the next best steps to ensure communication is appropriate and effective. It all comes back to selling the right way and selling the customer the right product for them.

SH: Naturally every business wishes they could limit complaints to an absolute minimum, but they do offer opportunities for growth and opportunities to gather feedback. How does all the work you do integrate into the larger customer management, customer engagement strategy at BT Group?

RH: It’s huge. The role of my team extends well beyond customer interactions: they look at strategies and tactics they can implement and improve moving forward, and the feedback they provide is taken very seriously by the business. I take great pride in the work they do and the value they bring every day.

Across the team, we have personnel working in many different areas outside of complaint handling. For example, as part of the complaints management process, customers have the option to escalate their cases to the Ombudsman for independent review, so naturally I need a team that attends to that. I also have people who deal specifically with subject access requests. So, we cover all those nuanced, specialised areas that hinge off the back of complaints. And they all contribute feedback internally through the organisation.

Every single complaint we receive undergoes a coding process, essentially enabling a comprehensive root cause analysis into that complaint instance. These analyses are then disseminated throughout the business and used during transformation meetings to catalyse practical and actionable change. We also deliver advisor feedback, which is shared with our operations managers and team leaders, and that itself drives coaching conversations designed to bolster our approach to complaint resolution. That is great for the business because we know that through these feedback loops, our advisors will continually handle complaints more effectively, and therefore our customers are less likely to repeat in. It creates a chain reaction of productivity and efficiency gains.

And the numbers tell the story. Within the broadband sector alone, our stakeholder complaints have decreased from over 1,500 to 400 a week in the last three years. The volume is diminishing, which frees up our advisors to have more in-depth, meaningful dialogue with our customers.

SH: Let’s switch focus now and dive into your speaking session at our Executive Exchange in November, where you will take the audience on a deep dive through your award-winning Abusive Customer Programme. Can you unpack what this initiative is and how it came to fruition?

RH: This is an issue very close to my heart.

As we emerged from the pandemic, I began to observe a shift in customer behaviour. I received feedback from my team around the increasing number of challenging customer interactions they were having and I could see the tangible, visible impact it was having on my employees.

Then, as I started expanding my scope and looking outwards to the wider operation, I found the same sentiment. And after peeling back all the layers, which took a great deal of time, it became abundantly clear that the processes we had in place for dealing with difficult customers across my three broadband, mobile, and Plusnet spaces were inadequate. They were inconsistent. They weren’t personal, which is what we stand for as a business. And they failed to appropriately look after our frontline colleagues.

After recognising this, I convened all the relevant stakeholders from across the business – not just those in customer-facing roles – to collaboratively conceive a strategy around how we will support my team and other frontline colleagues more effectively.

And that's where the Abusive Customer Programme was born.

We formulated some clear definitions and guidelines so that our staff had some concrete material to work with. What does abuse sound like? What does it feel like? How should abuse be handled? We put answers to all those types of questions. We also clearly outlined the protocols around escalating interactions with abusive customers, specifying the channels and the internal personnel that need to be involved. None of that existed before. The key to all this was the zero-tolerance approach to direct abuse. If a customer was found and verified to have been directly abusive to one of our colleagues, they would be immediately disconnected from our network. And that unequivocal stance has continued since the programme went live. We’re only talking small numbers of customers if you look at our broader base, but the point of this was never about driving cost reductions or anything of that nature – it was, and is, about protecting our people.

SH: And following on from that: how does this programme work? Does the agent have the authority to hang up the call, or is there technology behind the scenes that detects abuse, or a combination of both?

RH: There's no technology right now, but we’re working on that.

Integrating technology into this project is part of our plans. The current programme relies on an advisor taking the call, identifying instances of abuse, and subsequently either terminating the call due to the nature of the conversation or transferring it to their team leader. Said team leader will then verify the incident and endeavour to help the customer. Should the situation prove unsalvageable, the call ends.

The incident is reported to my team. We listen and review the call, we validate, and we decide upon next steps, which may be a warning letter or disconnection.

SH: And are you tracking the outcomes of this programme?

RH: We track everything. We report on everything. I can pull statistics at a moment’s notice with regard to what’s going on in the world of our Abusive Customer Programme.

We have seen improvement in attrition – although I can’t directly attribute that to this initiative. But it’s the feedback we’re hearing from our advisors that matters most. They’re telling us they feel more protected. They’re telling us they feel more supported. This was never about measuring or seeking to improve any single metric – it was purely to take a stand and demonstrate to our frontline colleagues that we are there for them.

SH: Just staying with the topic of employee wellbeing – a central focus for you. Aside from this programme, what other work or initiatives do you have in place to promote the wellbeing of your workforce and create a dynamic and healthy working environment in the contact centre?

RH: As part of our efforts with the Abusive Customer Programme, we conducted a significant piece of work to promote all the support avenues we have available when our employees need some extra help.

We have our Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) that offers staff members access to professional counselling services free of charge. That’s one piece. We have also just recently launched an online platform to facilitate direct access to GPs – it helps our people get appointments straight away, and even get longer appointments than the NHS standard, if necessary. And then we have our Women’s Health programme which is all centred around dealing with menopause and mental health issues.

These support systems are crucial for employees who find themselves in the aftermath of an abusive interaction and require assistance beyond what their team leader can provide.

SH: Let’s talk now about the future. Any initiative in the customer service space can never be one-and-done due to its constantly evolving nature. So, what’s next for this project and your work as Head of Complaints Operations more generally?

RH: You’re absolutely right.

Our Abusive Customer Programme remains a work in progress. We’re continuously looking at innovative ways to ramp up the initiative. Right now, for example, we're engaged in collaboration with our retail teams to enhance our support for colleagues who are working on the ground in our stores. We’re exploring the potential of introducing tools such as body cameras and other brilliant cutting-edge solutions like that.

On top of that, we’re actively investigating technology that can identify instances of abuse automatically, and therefore streamline the reporting process for our team leaders and advisors, alleviating the need for manual reporting. We’re also working with our counterparts in the business division of BT to replicate this process and we’re busy right now refining HR processes that effectively address and deal with cases of internal abuse.

In terms of my role in broad strokes, the realm of complaint management is in a perpetual state of evolution. We’re assessing AI tools that can help us identify complaints and then craft responses to customers in a more effective and efficient manner. And furthermore, we’re examining the prospect of overhauling our webform platform. Looking at the immediate future, we’re about to launch a new complaint management system within my team that will completely revolutionise the way we work. That goes live next month.

SH: That all sounds fantastic – so much in the works. You mentioned AI there – as a last question to wrap us up, can you describe where you are on your wider AI journey?

RH: Very early in the world of complaints. And the reason is that I never want to take away the personal element. There still needs to be a human there to review. I'm finding that balance to help and guide rather than replace, and that’s the key. I’m currently involved in several ongoing discussions pertaining to AI and I’m due to convene with our digital team soon to thoroughly assess the potential of this technology.

One tool we have been using is text summarisation. We’re tapping into AI to analyse customer complaints and provide us with summarised bullet points. We can then craft bullet points in response to aid the AI in learning our language and formulating customer replies. At present, we’re in the experimentation stage of the process. It’s really exciting. As you say, we have so much in the works.