The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has outlined new standards for how companies ensure positive outcomes for their customers. The new Consumer Duty standards are due to take effect from the 31st July 2023. 

Here at Activate Group, we’re committed to ensuring the best possible outcomes for our customers – using their feedback to inform continuous improvements to our services.

In this blog, we explore the new standards introduced by Consumer Duty, and how Activate Group is putting customer outcomes at the forefront of its ongoing strategy.

What is Consumer Duty?

The new Consumer Duty standards were announced by the FCA in 2022. They contain rules and guidelines on how companies should ensure the best possible outcomes for their customers, including:

• Fair Value: Customers must receive fair value (prices and quality)
• Suitability and treatment: Customers receive good products and services as well as fair treatment
• Confidence: Customers have strong confidence and participation in markets
• Access: Diverse customer needs are met

You can read the full FCA Consumer Duty policy here

In a blog outlining the changes, the FCA commented:

“Our rules require firms to consider the needs, characteristics and objectives of their customers – including those with characteristics of vulnerability – and how they behave, at every stage of the customer journey. 

As well as acting to deliver good customer outcomes, firms will need to understand and evidence whether those outcomes are being met.”

Consumer Duty at Activate Group

Activate Group is committed to ensuring the best possible experience and outcomes for our customers. Here are some of the steps we’re taking to ensure Consumer Duty is delivered:

“Make someone’s bad day better”

As a business, our fundamental purpose is to ‘Make someone’s bad day better”. We recognise the impact on customers who have been involved in a car incident, and seek to do everything we can to provide them with a positive claims journey.

This means treating our customers with respect and empathy at every stage, ensuring they’re kept well informed and in the loop throughout the claims & repair process.

Collaborating to improve our services

We’re always looking for ways to improve our services to provide the best possible experience for our customers. We encourage all of our employees to highlight any challenges they may find within our systems and processes, and submit these to our central ideas platform, ‘AHA!’.

We review these suggestions regularly, and focus on streamlining our services to best meet customer expectations.

Quality assurance audits

Regular quality assurance audits allow us to review all customer-centric activity to highlight necessary improvements. We assess each interaction our agents have with a customer, focusing on the quality of communication, and whether agreed actions have been adhered to on our end.

We use our findings to give actionable feedback to the agent involved, helping to improve the quality and consistency of future customer interactions. 

Data is also tracked at service-level to identify any trends in customer communication, allowing us to review our performance at both granular and operational levels.

Feedback-driven service optimisation

We place customer feedback at the heart of our optimisation strategy. Through monthly operations meetings, we review any trends in customer complaints, and focus on rectifying the root cause.

We also ask our customers to share feedback on the quality of our processes. This helps us to focus service optimisations where they’re needed most – with the goal of simplifying our processes for future customers.

Customer-first employee training 

Activate Group’s training academy encourages employees to take a customer-first approach to their roles. In our empathy workshops, we ask trainees to put themselves ‘in the customer’s shoes’ to understand the real impact of being involved in a road incident.

Our agents are tested regularly throughout their training to ensure they’re delivering a positive, ‘right first time’ approach to customer communication.

In Summary

The Financial Conduct Authority has outlined new standards on Consumer Duty, which are due to take effect from the 31st July 2023. 

The new guidelines focus on ensuring positive outcomes for customers, holding firms accountable for how they deliver fair value, positive treatment, and suitable products/services.

Here at Activate Group, we hold customer outcomes at the very heart of our operational strategy. Our core value statement, ‘Make someone’s bad day better’, encourages all our employees to take a customer-centric approach to their work.

We’re constantly working to improve the quality of our services for customers. Through employee suggestions, quality assurance audits, feedback-driven improvements, and customer-first employee training, we make regular process optimisations to ensure a more positive experience for our customers.