How we helped

Kent Reliance is a building society with 150 years of experience. They seek to build strong relationships with their customers by providing long-term value, top-flight customer service and rewarding loyalty.

In 2013 they experienced a rise in customer complaints, which resulted in the departure of many loyal customers. We assisted our client by conducting extensive research and launching a real-time customer feedback strategy, which shaped an innovative multi-channel customer experience, placing the customer at the heart of the solution.

We created a ‘listening framework’ for Kent Reliance that allowed them to get real-time feedback from transactions with branch and contact centre. The programme also measured performance at different hierarchical levels, different locations and across different products.

We set up a series of alerts and responses were reported in real-time. This enabled Kent Reliance to respond to customer dissatisfaction promptly, before it developed into complainants.

We also helped our client to produce detailed journey maps, into which they entered customer sentiment scores, which were measured at various touch points from the complaints team. These maps were used to explore key journeys with operational managers, highlight key issues for customers and identify how they could be improved.

The Results

The success of our strategy was extraordinary. Complaints reduced by 51% in the first 6 months. Within 3 years, customer satisfaction rose to 85.8%, sales trebled and Net Promoter Score went from -14 to + 39.

After analysing customer feedback, we assisted Kent Reliance in providing their call team members with training and simple guides for handling customer calls. The call team were able to deliver a far better service which made them more confident, which in turn led to more satisfied customers.

A key part of the success of the Kent Reliance feedback programme was ensuring that all employees took part. CEO, Andy Golding was passionate about delivering great customer service and his sponsorship of and enthusiasm for the project fed down through the whole organisation, which he

Kent Reliance’s achievements have led to industry recognition, they won the ‘Most Effective Customer Experience’ award at the Financial Services Forum Marketing Effectiveness Awards in 2015. They also won the ‘Best Savings Account Provider for Customer Service’ in the Which Satisfaction survey in 2014.