Reaching out to customers in our first week
22 February 2021
Lyndy Geddes, Director of Technical Operations
The BBRS has been up and running for a week and we have been in touch with every customer. Unlike other new entities, we already had a stock of registered cases to start working on. These are cases which logged their interest with us while we were getting ready to launch, including some which participated in our Live Pilot last year.
We’ve been in touch with all of our Live Pilot customers, who number a little under 50, to continue resolving their complaints. These will be our immediate priority as they have been very patiently waiting for us to finalise our Scheme Rules and policies.
To protect those customers’ confidentiality, our first task is to ask them to complete a privacy statement and a Customer Agreement so that we can continue looking at their complaint. They will then be able to track their cases by logging on to a secure area via our website.
Of the remaining 450 or so registered customers, we’ve already heard back from nearly 100 of them confirming they are still keen for us to consider their complaint. We will keep in touch with each of them over the coming months to let them know when we estimate we will be able to start work on their case. Anyone who has not yet responded to our emails, and who wants to use our live service, should reply when they can.
I am excited as we begin to see our flexible and responsive approach to resolving disputes between customers and their banks start to take shape. Our flexibility also presents perhaps our greatest challenge because there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ rule in our approach: we have a wide spectrum of complaint topics, and various means available to resolve them. Once we start to work on a case, a customer champion will be assigned to each customer aiming to build a trusting relationship with that customer and work with them to agree the best way forward for them. We know that not every conversation will be easy, and that many have suffered terribly. We will always strive to be transparent and empathetic in our dealings with every customer.
So, it has been a busy week, but we achieved our key aims for the first five days. We now have been in touch with over 500 registered customers and though we can only start work in earnest on a minority of the total cases registered, we are beginning that work right now. We expect ramp up our pace during the coming months so that no registered customer will have to wait too many more months before we can start work on their case.
In the meantime, anyone with any question about our service is encouraged to get in touch. Take a look at our eligibility criteria. And we encourage all of those with a potential case to register that case with us – don’t self-exclude! We are a free and independent service and we are here to listen and to try to help in whatever way we can.