Delivering a high-quality service is often about getting the basics right — consistently. On one level, it’s about giving you a clear, accurate and prompt service. On another, it’s about making sure that we really understand which aspects of what we do are of real value to you. We’ll use this knowledge to decide where to invest, whether it’s in training people, developing technology or speeding up processes.
As well as keeping track of the time we take to respond to you, we also monitor our accuracy rate. And to help improve this, we have dedicated training staff to develop our employees’ skills and knowledge.
It’s often important that we can respond quickly — for example you might want to change your investment fund before the stockmarket moves too much. Or where there’s a bereavement, dependants are entitled to receive plan proceeds as soon as possible. And at the end of a tax year, there may be financial implications if we don’t meet certain deadlines.
With this in mind, we set ourselves service standards for each type of product and transaction. And we constantly track our performance against these. We also monitor feedback from customers and advisers to gauge whether our turnaround times are meeting your needs.
How are we doing?
- We set ourselves turnaround standards for the different services we provide to customers. In 2006, we met these in 74% of cases. That’s not good enough, so we want to see an improving trend year on year.
- Last year, we noticed a big increase in the number of complaints made about the time customers were waiting for us to set up new plans for certain contracts. We were able to use customer feedback to identify where the problem lay, then train and reassign people to clear the backlog and get our service back to normal standards. Being able to spot trends, rather than just dealing with complaints individually, helps us deal quickly with any underlying problems.
- We regularly check and sample the documents we send out to measure their accuracy. During 2006, 93% of documents issued were fully accurate. Again, this needs to improve.
- We won a number of financial services industry awards for the quality of our service (including four stars in the 2006 Financial Adviser Service Awards).
- Also in 2006, the Institute of Customer Services named Maureen Johnstone in our Group Pensions team its Customer Service Trainer of the Year.
What we’ll do differently in 2007
- We’re investing heavily in our Pipeline initiative, which includes a major, high-profile recruitment drive to make sure we have the right number and the right type of people to deliver a high-quality service.
- This new training approach allows our new staff to develop a detailed understanding of our customers and our products before they start working with your plan, or dealing direct with you. In addition, structured training allows them to develop their knowledge over the long term.
- We want every single AEGON employee, not just those in customer-facing roles, to receive specific customer training. This will start in 2007 and will help improve our service for years to come.
- We’re also taking the development of our managers very seriously. Every manager and team leader in AEGON is taking part in a development programme at Henley Management College. This helps make sure we have truly customer-focused people in place at all levels within our organisation.
- Our Process Excellence project will identify and fix the points in our processes where things tend to get stuck. This should help reduce the time you have to wait for things to be done, and increase your confidence that everything will be done correctly, first time.
