FSA highlights risks in financial incentives based on sales

Lloyds TSB, Barclays and British Gas are all in line to scrap incentives based on sales and focus on customer satisfaction following new FSA guidelines.

In September, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) issued new guidelines relating to staff that are incentivised on sales. Their concerns are incentive schemes with high-risk features where advisors can earn significant bonuses and most organisations do not have effective systems in place to control the potential risk of mis-selling arising from these incentives.

This announcement has led to companies such as Lloyds TSB, Barclays and British Gas introducing new schemes that reward good customer service.

Antony Jenkins, Barclays’ new chief executive, said: “We believe that becoming the ‘go-to’ bank is about helping people and businesses get on. Therefore the key to Barclays’ long-term success is the level of service we provide, not how many products we sell.”

In October, at a London School of Economics speech, Stephen Hester, RBS said “We have reformed the way we pay our staff so that customer satisfaction and risk control rather than just profit determine whether or not you get a bonus and how big that bonus might be. I take to heart the sentiment that we should pay people to serve well not simply to sell well.”

Measurement based on customer service not on sales

As more companies choose to measure customer satisfaction, Mats Rennstam of Bright UK believes that it is important to avoid the most common mistakes

Most common mistakes:

• Measuring at an enterprise level and not at a staff level
• No real-time feedback to staff
• Surveying too late
• Basing analysis on a too small a sample
• Customer satisfaction sits within marketing

Many financial services companies overlook the huge impact customer satisfaction (CSAT) measuring has as an operational tool.

The right approach

There are now low-cost ways of measuring CSAT or NPS (Net Promoter Score) in all of banks’ and insurance companies’ channels: telephony, email, web chat, branches, invoices, on their website, etc. This enables you to measure on an individual level, say 20 surveys per month per contact centre advisor, thus creating accountability.

This also enables companies to acquire customer feedback in real-time. For a telephony channel, for example, an automated survey can call back a sample of their customers 10 seconds after the call. The scores given should then be fed back to the staff member who took the call. This real-time 360° feedback creates a self-developing and self-learning organisation.

Measuring on an individual level also helps managers focus their time where it is needed the most. The graph shows a “matrix” feature combining finding correlations between NPS drivers as well as identifying staff driving NPS (or not). If team leaders focus more of their time on staff in the grey circle, they are going to see a significant increase in NPS and customer satisfaction.

 

Mats Rennstam, Bright UK www.brightindex.co.uk