Leigh Caldwell
In June of this year, after a multi-firm review, the FCA concluded that financial organisations need to make improvements in their monitoring to determine whether they were in fact delivering good outcomes for retail customers. Of the firms reviewed the FCA felt that few were able to provide clear evidence of where the monitoring of outcomes had directly led to proactive action being taken to improve customer outcomes. Ultimately, they cited a focus on testing and processes completed rather than outcomes delivered.
Now the FCA Consumer Duty is pivoting focus to ongoing monitoring of customer outcomes. For retail financial brands this represents significant challenges. Customers can’t tell if they have got a comparatively good outcome and can often rely on gut feeling to inform any positive or negative statement. We need to measure outcomes in a careful way, and not just ask about feelings.
The FCA guidelines suggest more than 30 metrics that can be collected to help monitor outcomes across products and services, price and value, comprehension, and support. These include results of the initial testing, market conditions, customer usage and behaviour, complaints analysis, and satisfaction surveys, to name but a few.
Yet to properly monitor outcomes you need to start with the questions, rather than the data sources. These questions are:
Products and Needs
- What do customers need from their financial products?
- Are your products meeting those needs?
Price and Value
- How much financial value are customers getting?
- How much emotional value are they getting?
- Are customers price-aware?
Comprehension
- How well do customers understand key communications?
- Do they have an accurate grasp of key facts about the product (financial services generally and your specific product)?
Support
- How they got equally good outcomes post-sale as pre-sale?
- Do they get value from the product?
- Are they satisfied subjectively and objectively?
It may seem at first glance a very complex series of metrics to answer a whole raft of questions. However, there is an simple way to collect all the data you need. The Irrational Agency method requires a simple small scale behavioural quant and/or qual survey every quarter. This will allow you to monitor outcomes in the four key areas: products and needs, price and value, comprehension, and support. Measuring against industry benchmarks, providing vulnerable customer analysis, and creating an easy numeric scales for ongoing tracking.
To understand more about this process join us on 5th September in our a new webinar that outlines the process and will help you get your ongoing monitoring right first time.
