By now, organisations should have scoped the changes that are required within their front-line operations (and have made uplifts, where required) in order to demonstrate compliance against Consumer Duty. In this article, we assess how some firms are approaching their people strategy within the contact centre environment and evaluate potential pitfalls.

Customer service leaders generally agree that their agents have one of the most difficult jobs to do within the organisation; not only do they have a myriad of information to learn and retain to do their job, they also often have to put up with a lack of investment in infrastructure and systems to do it with – not great conditions for happy and capable agents. So now, with Consumer Duty being added to the “learning” mix, expectations around the role and critical importance of the front-line will change too; so firms have really got to shore up their agent support and training programs to make sure that staff capability and competence is evident in their approaches.

It’s also enforceable, which is why there is probably a bigger sense of anxiety around it, and why the element of mitigating foreseeable harm, for example, might well be keeping some operational leaders awake at night.

This is why it’s important for firms to focus on understanding what they have to do differently in relation to their individual people in order to ensure they comply. A lot of that is looking at processes, training, and thinking about the things that will – in particular – impact their front-line staff; the individuals that are interacting with customers and prospects on a daily basis and are – in reality – owning most of the risk.

This is fundamentally reliant on agents having a sound understanding of all policies, processes and products: the “hard, quantitative, metrics” – if you like. But it’s also critical that firms understand the qualitative metrics too. And it’s within this qualitative and quantitative training assessment scope that we can understand the FCA’s continual referencing of organisational culture and the central role it plays in underpinning Consumer Duty deliverability and compliance.

The regulator wants it to be a daily conversation within the firm, not just a ‘once-and-done’ e-learning exercise, because the FCA recognise that consumer demands and financial conditions are subject to continual and sudden changes, hence the focus on vulnerable customers and, more recently, the cost-of-living crisis. Therefore, processes around training, for example, need to follow suit to ensure it is continual and kept front of mind for employees. In this respect, Consumer Duty doesn’t end on the 31 July 2023 – it’s a continual journey of compliance that has only just begun.

These indicators tell the firm – and the regulator – that some form of training has taken place, how many people have completed it, and where satisfaction/dissatisfaction in training approach/delivery may exist. Valuable as lagging indicators but, arguably, not useful as leading indicators of real-time people-based risk.

Most mandatory training sessions – if e-learning based – generally require every employee to sit through the same module course, often disregarding tenure or existing mastery of the subject knowledge being assessed, and compete a test questionnaire at the end of it. Following completion, a certificate provides the employee – and the firm – with a pass mark (usually 100%). Competence can therefore be rubber-stamped as being maintained and optimal for the job.

In our opinion – and our customers agree – these assessments are measuring the wrong thing. What firms should be measuring is ongoing competency through continual assessment. A single-point-in-time assessment enables employees to quickly assimilate the learning required and then answer a multiple-choice test at the end. How many of us have been through a cyber security module, for example, passed with flying colours, and can subsequently remember everything about email phishing or removable media, three months down the line?

The problem with single-point-in-time assessment isn’t just related to the fact that people struggle to retain the required learning. “One-size-fits-all” training is fundamentally disenfranchising for employees, as it assumes that everybody requires the same learning content, at the same moment in time. To compound matters, adding more mandatory training just further compounds compliance fatigue, which doesn’t help to embed regulatory learning.

It’s also not great for business productivity either. Just think about how much productive time is lost on pulling agents away from their day jobs to complete mandatory training – all valuable time that could be spent serving customers.

It is also worth remembering that – over the last three years – FCA Final Notice action has regularly identified deficiencies in firms’ training programmes, highlighting a reliance on “one-size-fits-all” approaches, a culture in which employees did not complete mandatory training, infrequency of training, and the provision of limited and generic training which was not sufficiently targeted at employees’ roles to enable them to understand their responsibilities.

What’s more, a new generation of employees are literally crying out for learning and development opportunities in the sector. Even the FCA is pushing the learning agenda. In a recent speech made by Emily Shepperd, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Director of Authorisations at the FCA, she stated that:

Every firm is likely to be more forensic in their approach to analysing complaints and dissatisfaction drivers in order to show proactivity in mitigating foreseeable harm, for example. Yet this level of proactivity in predicting what could go wrong also needs to be applied to front-line agent competence.

Agents want to do the right thing, yet how many of your agents, for example, openly say that they are concerned about dealing with a vulnerable customer because they don’t feel they’ve got the appropriate skills, knowledge and capabilities to handle the interaction? If you’re in the dark on this, your firm – and customers – are open to risk and harm, respectively.

Frontline agents are handling (potentially) thousands of customer interactions every day – and here is where the majority of risk resides. The question that firms need to critically evaluate is: how do you know that your individual agents are able to apply their training when interacting with a customer in the context of Consumer Duty?

• Do they understand how to apply friction to the sales process?
• Do they understand unreasonable barriers to pursuing financial objectives – what does this look like in nuanced cases?
• Do they understand the (potentially) 100s of process and policy changes you have made? If not, how many errors are being made/going to be made as a result of this, and what foreseeable risks could these errors pose to your customers?

Town hall meetings, 1-2-1 coaching and regular communications throughout the firm sows the seed of change; but you need to be regularly assessing agent competence in these areas to know what risks are on the horizon.

Traditionally, contact centres rely on their Quality Assurance function for insight into these problematic areas. Yet, in terms of evaluation coverage, it’s a reality that a tremendous amount of conversations won’t be in scope. To compound matters, a lot of QA evaluation will be lagging indicators. Meaning that, in the instances of where something has gone wrong, consumer detriment has likely already occurred.

An essential component of Consumer Duty requires firms to have greater foresight into the potential risks their customers face. Without technology, it’s difficult to see how a more robust approach can be applied. There are so many valuables data points within the contact centre that firms can utilise to improve customer outcomes and agent performance: calls, chat transcripts, complaint volume and drivers, customer feedback etc. However, these QA findings will also require a scalable way to create a feedback loop for firms to train their front-line agents appropriately and embed any required process or behavioural changes.

Finally, as we look towards operating in post-Consumer Duty implementation environment, here are some points of good practice we have taken away from conversations with your industry peers:

• If you can, have a regular huddle that brings all areas of the business together. Sit and listen to calls; listen to customers. Make all business areas aware of the great feedback you are receiving and where areas of improvement are required. ‘Buy in’ and individual accountability are key.

• Contact centres leaders have a critical role in creating a Consumer Duty culture. Link everything to good customer outcomes. Ensure your agents understand what this means in the context of their role, conduct, behaviour and day-to-day interactions.

• If you have an agent of the month initiative, champion demonstrable examples of great customer outcomes. Celebrate it in your culture to bring it to life. Our customers use our technology to champion exceptional agent competence against Consumer Duty – a great data point which we’re sure would please the regulator!

• Use insight to drive performance and minimise your risk of facilitating customer harm within the the front-line. Be smart and proactive with your QA data. Collecting the data is all well and good but if there is no scalable feedback loop to get the learnings back to your agents and continually embed them within your processes, you’re not going to see effective change or error reduction unless you’re modifying behaviours. A key area where  AI can really play a central role in your contact centre operation.

[1] Elephants Don’t Forget, ‘How to successfully approach Training & Competency (T&C) under Consumer’, webinar poll, 24 May 2023. 246 professionals polled.

[1] https://www.fca.org.uk/news/speeches/cultural-evolution-how-culture-must-change-meet-expectations