Resolving Managing Customer Complaints by the 1000 James Walker Aled Davies: Hi everyone, my name is Aled Davies, founder of MediatorAcademy.com, home of the passionate mediator. You know what we do on here, we interview the very best mediators and thought leaders from around the world. This is the place for us to learn about new opportunities in our field as well as how to overcome the challenges and dilemmas of life as a mediator. So that we can learn and grow not just our thinking, and our skills, but also our business. Now an interview today which is a little bit different because today's guest is the founder and CEO of Resolver limited. An assisted complaints handling service designed to help consumers handle and resolve complaints against the top 1500 service providers. Resolver helps businesses understand, engage and resolve with their consumers in a neutral environment, and to help better understand customer's emotions and feedback. He's back here on Mediator Academy to tell me how much progress he's made since we last spoke. It's a real pleasure to welcome back James Walker onto Mediator Academy. James welcome. James Walker: Thank you very much. What a long introduction as well, blimey. I'm lost for words. We'll try and keep it simple, which is try and help resolve complaints. James, before you get started, for those people watching who didn't see the first interview, just tell us a little bit about Resolver. What is it? What are you trying to achieve? And how is it helping resolve consumer disputes and complaints? James: Cool, no problem. So probably to try and recap I think we had half an hour last time. I'll try and do it in 30 seconds this time. Fairly simple. So we thought that there was something wrong with the world of the internet which was actually there was nothing that proactively assisted consumers, and businesses therefore, to try and resolve problems. You know a problem resolved is a customer I've saved. So if you go and look at what's out there you can go and have forums, which may not have the best advice. You can go and find the email addresses of the people to write to at the top, but you're not giving the company a fair chance to try and resolve it. You can go and look at feedback sites. Again, it doesn't solve your problem. It allows you to have a little bit of a rant, potentially, or you can go on to social media. They help you get engaged, but they don't help you solve the problem.
So we thought why don't we take something that actually takes the principles of mediation or dispute resolution and apply it to complaining. The logic is a complaint unresolved becomes a dispute. A dispute becomes a bigger problem so solve it before it gets there. So what we've done is actually we've gone from you said 2,000 we're up at 3,000. Later this month we'll be up at 4,000 companies in the system and what we go and do is we go and take a market sector. We'll take every company in a market sector. We'll work out what we believe is their escalation processes. Once we've built it, we then try and ask the companies to give us their rights escalation processes but we thought we've got to start somewhere. We also go and research what all the rights and all the problems that consumers could encounter in that sector. What it means is that you, as a member of the public, can go on choose a company, choose the service, your issue, your issue type and find out what your rights are. Now actually this is about being fair and reasonable. We never say "this is how much compensation you should get". It's all about actually understanding how you should deal with something, how your issue will be resolved. So it's about trying to focus on helping you to solve rather than trying to help create conflict. Next bit is it helps you write your emails which it changes the language on, based on your emotion, or you can phone and it will record your phone call for you. Either way, once you start it creates a case file. Into that case file now goes all the emails that you send out. All the emails that come back from the company. All your phone calls, any supporting documents, notes and reminders. Cool. We also remind you what to do. So we remind you if you get a new communication. We remind you if the company hasn't responded to you. Well, actually we'll go and do that automatically, so automatically we nudge the business if they haven't responded. Very politely. We'll then allow you to escalate your case after a period of time, if you don't feel that it's been addressed. Then if you can't resolve it what will happen is that your case goes off, if there is one, to an ombudsman. If not, you've just got a good package of information to be able to go and work out what you want to do as your next step. Back when we last spoke, we were probably doing 200 cases through a month. Well we've now got, and that would have been traffic on about 500 businesses a month. We haven't done any time on marketing. We haven't done any budget on marketing. This month, five months later we should exceed 120,000 visits to the site. We're converting at about an 8% to 10% conversion ratio at the moment, of people putting through cases. Okay. So that's about 1,200 cases a month? James: Yeah.
Wow. James: A bit more than that. Yeah about 12,000. Yeah. That's 12,000. Sorry yeah, indeed. Gee, that's incredible. James: Yeah, and our growth will continue. We're being linked through to by The Mirror, parts of the CAB, AdviceUK, Money Advice Service, the energy and telecoms ombudsmen, MoneySavingExpert, the financial ombudsman is about to link through and a couple of charities as well. Between natural search and being linked to by other sites we've managed to, sort of, create that growth. So we haven't spent anything on marketing and we haven't spent any time on marketing so far. So one could assume that a lot of people out there with complaints and frustrations feel like they've got somewhere to go now, and are finding your system really useful and helpful. James: Yeah, we've got some great feedback. I mean in one respect we're as good as the companies are. So if the company is really bad at customer service, well, we can't make miracles happen. But what we do find is that we've got more friends than we've got enemies. is probably the nice way to put it and that we have a lot of people coming away, getting issues resolved. If you look at our Facebook page, what we actually try and do is, rather than sit there and go,"who are the really bad companies?" is that we're trying to give feedback on where the companies are doing a great job. So I know in the last week we've had feedback from customers on Europcar, onvodafone, on BA, on easyjet. I'm trying to think who else. That's all gone up on there to say basically, "well done" to those companies "your customers are completely happy and have fed back to us to say 'thank you very much.'" So as far as we're concerned that's creating a win win win. Brilliant. Real incentive to get the customer service right. James: Yeah. How cooperative are you finding companies to give their escalation processes over then? James: Depends on how mature they are, to be honest, in their attitude. So we have some that in the nicest sense I put them in the list I call "Shits". Excuse the language but it's what they are, that struggle with the whole concept. We then have the middle ground and then at the other end we have what we call our "Lovers" who go, "Actually you know what? You help us protect our brand, you pick up customers that otherwise we may have lost and you get them re-engaged."
We're finding first time users, around 40% of our customers, were trying to go to either a forum or some other social brand-damaging activity, because they've given up on direct engagement with the company. So actually what we've done is we've put them back in the process and helped them resolve it. So for companies what we're doing is the stuff that they can't touch, we can pick up and help them get back, to try and resolve. Fantastic. Who pays for the service? James: So far no one, that's why we're so poor and I live in a cardboard box. But the logic is that we want to build up the volume. We probably want to double our volume which at the rate we're going should be somewhere around April, May. Then what we're going to start doing is we're going to start putting together the data. So for example I can tell you which is the worst supermarket, but I also know why it's the worst supermarket. I know which is the worst coffee shop and they've got 550% more complaints than their two next competitors, and their biggest issue is customer service about rudeness of staff and about poor quality coffee. I know how quickly they respond to communications. I know how quickly they answer the phone. I know how many feedback points they have to do to get customers' issues resolved. I know how long it takes British Gas to answer a phone at different times of the day. So what we start doing is, we can start benchmarking how companies are doing against everyone in their market sector. Then we'll start selling that data back to them. If you want to do mystery shopper surveys, we already know what your consumers are thinking about you before you even go out and try and work out how to do it. Big data. James: Big data. Oodles of data. Oodles of data. Well I mean it's fantastic to hear that you're really cracking on and having some real success, and astounding, really astounding that back in August you were doing 200-500 visits a month, now you're up to 120,000 it's just mind boggling. So congratulations on that. I'm curious about the EU directive on ADR and ODR regulations that will be landing on the shores in July. Thoughts on that? What are the implications you think for consumers, for companies and for you? James: Okay. I'm a little bit of a cynic on this one. Which I apologise for rather than being probably the positive person that I should be. Because I think the directive itself is awesome. I
think it's a great idea, but you know what? Because it's not compulsory the people that are rogues and scoundrels will carry on being rogues and scoundrels. The people who are really good will join it and you know what? They were already good anyway. So actually you've made no impact to the market. You don't move anything by having a non-compulsory scheme. As an example, I can tell you that the most complained about market sector is retailers. Yet the one that's worst at dealing with customer complaints are restaurants because they really don't care. So they're not suddenly going to care about customer service. It's not going to make this massive shift. The problem as well, is that the point at which a company wanted to get effectively an ODR and ADR provider to come along to try and help is probably the point that they've semi-lost that customer. So the longer a complaint goes on, the harder it is to turn a customer around. So you're going to end up, potentially, picking up the cases to be dealt with which are the hardest to resolve. Unless those businesses can see a great propensity to get that consumer to repurchase from them, why would you bother doing it? As part of that, to me is, it's going to be down to efficiency, which is going to be down to cost. Or how much time can you give a case? Actually a large proportion of that time is going to be trying to understand what the issue is. Now we're not in the ADR scheme and we're not delivering an ODR service. But in my view what i know from cases going through to the ombudsman is that cases that come through us are 35% to 40% quicker to deal with. So I look at this and I go, "Well actually if anyone wants to deliver ODR and ADR services efficiently, the cases that we will create are the bits that's going to give them the efficiency advantage, to give the better cost. Which have therefore got more propensity for businesses to take up the service." Just in my head. Cause the problem is that it's got to have a value and reward for a business to do it unless it's compulsory. Where's the value and the reward? It's got to be in customer retention. Okay. It's a hard one to retain a customer that's annoyed. Therefore it's got to be done as efficiently as possible which means that you need as much information, as quickly as possible, to try and resolve it. The more time you spend on it, the more expensive it is, the less interest businesses will have in it. So what's the big fear of making it compulsory then? Why haven't they gone there? James: It's the classic British government's way of introducing everything, isn't it? First of all it's, "Would you mind awfully, doing it?" Then it would be. "It would be great if you did do it." Then it's. "No really you should do it." Then it's like. "Well actually we expect you to do it." Then it's. "Punish you if you're not doing it."
It's the best way to get through a policy without actually having to have a fight about it, is to do it in an incremental stage. So maybe in ten years' time everyone will have to be part of the scheme. As everything starts with legislation it seems to have to go through the small little steps before it actually makes the quantum leap to add the value it's meant to do. next? That's very interesting. Okay, so tell me, what next for Resolver? Where are you heading James: Blimey. So our aim is to hit 450,000 visits to the site by April and to be at 750,000 a month by August and these are uniques. Our second aim is then to start building out some services. So for example, for TrustMark we are building out for 25,000 builders a system or a platform that will allow consumers to raise complaints, businesses to respond back to them, to give the business guidance on best practice templates to use. Then basically provide the platform that then will help mediate the disputes if it can't be done. Anyone can come in and use the platform to do the meditation, but the logic is that actually from the business and the consumer's perspective is that they start in Resolver and then hopefully they end in Resolver as well. A guide through the entire journey. So you don't go out on trying to work out how to acquire a customer who wants mediation at the stage where they don't know what their choices are. You actually make sure they're guided directly through to the right solution at the right time. Wow. Big dreams. Big goals. James: You've got to have big goals otherwise the balls won't go in.... James look. I know you're against the clock here. So I just thought I'd say a huge thank you James: A pleasure.... for giving your time. Sharing your expertise and really wishing you the very best of luck. Hopefully we can touch base at some other time and you can talk about your 750,000 uniques. James: Cool. Awesome, love to. All right. Thanks a lot James. James: No worries. Take care. Cheers.