Who is batting for the customer?

Do you consider yourself to be working for a professional company with good governance arrangements and a customer centric culture?

Is it fair to say that you are confident that you have a sound business model that commercially makes sense and has appropriate focus on short, medium and long-term goals?

Are you confident that you have a series of robust policies and procedures in place to ensure that your staff are doing the right things for your customers?

You may well answer ‘yes’ to these questions, but how do you know that you are doing the right things? How do you know that what your staff are doing isn’t inadvertently delivering some form of customer detriment?

You’ve got an internal audit and quality assurance program, right? This takes care of that!

Or does it?

Have you stopped and challenged your internal processes and procedures? Have you reviewed your internal audit and monitoring function from the mindset of ‘who’s batting for the customer?’

Well that’s exactly what the Regulator will do.

It’s a simplistic but effective approach, which challenges even the best of businesses. It cuts through complex structures and in-depth procedures and focusses on the actual customer experience.

All too often I come across firms who have sound structures and appropriate resource assigned to monitor the quality of their output, however, the monitoring is too focussed on adherence to business processes rather than the overall customer experience.

So, it’s the monitoring process itself that is flawed from the outset.

The internal process of auditing the auditor is either none existent or not intrusive enough to appropriately challenge the existing monitoring techniques and deliver measures that are focussed on customer experience and can help drive appropriate changes and improvements.

As sales processes are developed and changes implemented, firms focus on monitoring whether staff are doing what they should be doing, rather than whether what they are being asked to do in the first place is delivering a good customer outcome.

Often processes start off delivering positive experiences, and monitoring is structured accordingly; however, the processes evolve over time and develop in line with business strategy, yet the monitoring remains static.

Using the simple start point approach of ‘who is batting for the customer’ will provide you with an opening focus that will enable you to review your internal quality assurance and monitoring processes, to ensure that the measures adopted give sufficient insight into customer experience.

Focus and challenge should also cascade through the content and structure of any customer satisfaction surveys or mystery shopping processes you may have in place. Again, a common failing within brokers is that these can be too heavily focussed on telling the business what it wants to hear. Often, they are structured to support some form of internal marketing campaign rather than actually telling the business valuable information to help improve its customer journey.

RWA have in depth experience of working with businesses to review and challenge their internal audit and quality assurance procedures. With our help, you can be confident that your audit and monitoring function delivers so much more than just a tick in a box.

Contact RWA to find out more about some of the approaches that we use.

Steve Walton
Senior Governance, Risk, and Compliance Consultant