LBG has taken a leading role in the industry with this deployment, and when they made a public commitment to reduce complaints and improve the customer experience by making customer service a priority at every level of the Group, they enlisted Equiniti’s help to deliver the technology that would underpin this drive for service excellence. This led to the implementation of a comprehensive, enterprise-grade customer complaints system that sits across its entire organisation, making LBG the first and only financial services organisation in the UK to empower all 70,000 of its frontline staff to deal with complaints.

This approach, coupled with significant investments in process improvements and staff training, including the creation of an innovative, specialist team of complaints handlers, means that LBG is resolving 90 percent of customer complaints at the first point of contact.

This industry-leading performance improvement has seen its 'complaints per 1,000 accounts' metric fall from 2.1 to 1.0. By working with Equiniti, LBG was able to replace multiple legacy complaints-handling systems that were being used across 30 different LBG brands,including numerous internal databases, spreadsheets, and third-party applications that demanded high levels of support and administration.

Equiniti now provides LBG with Europe's largest single software platform for managing and resolving customer complaints, which means that staff now have the insight and holistic customer view they need to deliver a consistently superior service. The ability to use a single complaints-handling system across the entire Group has clearly given LBG much greater insight into its customers, and this complements the other service improvements being made across the organisation.

The management information being provided by the Equiniti system is also contributing to LBG's broader customer service goals by enabling the bank to perform a root cause analysis of exactly what is causing its customers to complain, so that it can address these issues quickly and efficiently, in order to make changes that make a real difference to the bottom line.

By being able to see expressions of dissatisfaction across its entire business, LBG now understands why customers are complaining by channel, by business, and by brand, and can therefore quickly pinpoint and resolve the problem.

Thanks to the project, LBG now uses the Equiniti platform to automatically pull complex financial data, business rules and customer information from many different systems in order to present 70,000 LBG employees, across multiple roles and multiple brands, with a wide variety of business-critical data in a single view.

Yet, despite the fact that a project of this size and scale had never before been attempted in retail banking, Equiniti's system was able to seamlessly integrate with LBG's Strategic Retail Banking Platform.

Big change implementation plans like these are normally fraught with problems. When putting in frontline changes to IT systems in high-street banks and call centres, it's easy to see the potential for disaster, but Equiniti’s solution went in with very little noise, which proves that it works, it's intuitive, and it delivers what it promises.

The integration with LBG’s systems was completely painless, and the insight they are able to obtain from Equiniti is even better than LBG expected, and is continually helping them to reduce costs, improve systems, and serve customers more efficiently. Banks can view complaints handling purely from a regulatory standpoint and it goes without saying that the easiest route is to match the lowest level of expectation.

This ambitious project to implement Europe's largest complaints system has been honoured at one of the most auspicious events in the financial services calendar.

The FSTech Awards recognise excellence and innovation in the field of information technology within the UK and EMEA financial services sector, and the Equiniti Charter/LBG entry was praised as the ‘clear standout in its category’.