Our usual approach is essentially to ‘audit’ the work your organisation has done, across the key areas that we know actually drive operational performance.  This will uncover weaknesses, whether in tactical approach, overall strategy or execution, and will result in a detailed report with specific recommendations for improvement if your retention work is to be properly aligned with the acquisition strategy, commercial targets and BAU activity. 

The purpose of this is to set you on your feet with an action plan, to deliver better commercial performance and better structure your retention activities.  We identify ‘quick fixes’ where you can create immediate impact, as well as longer-term benefits such as appropriate improvements in your capability and strategic planning.  We are known for ‘cutting to the chase’ on delivering practical action plans that people understand and that will work, rather than powerpoint documents and grandiose academic plans.

The ‘Audit Areas’ we typically cover are shown below.  Most organisations are already comfortable with some of these areas, and ask us to focus our efforts on those areas they suspect to be weaknesses.

Audit Areas

·         Assessing linkage between acquisition strategy and subsequent retention/persistency problems

·         Assessing relationship with third parties, and impact on attrition

·         Analytical robustness: validating your attrition data, segmentation, attrition propensity, and evaluation of commercial impact of attrition

·         Assessing product design and pricing, and linkage with attrition

·         Carrying out depth qualitative interviews with customers, to pinpoint attitudes to your service, contact strategy and maturity management

·         Assessing customer contact strategy around acquisition, first policy, post-sale, and maturity

·         Assessing processes to highlight and act upon attrition alerts/policy cancellations

·         Assessing behavioural competency of telephone-based retention departments

What we deliver

We produce detailed assessments, together with specific recommendations and a prioritised series of actions for your team to follow.  The usual arrangement is for us to focus our clients in the right direction, and to leave once a clear action plan has been produced and an effective handover achieved.  Unless our clients specifically ask us to remain in a project management capacity, we normally leave our clients to implement the improvements to their analytical activity, to build the contact strategy elements, to adjust the product set, and so on. 

Exceptions to this are the telephony work that we do.  We find that almost all organisations have a reactive telephony retention unit, but very few are properly recruited, trained and managed.  We therefore tend to remain in contact with our clients as they implement our training and campaign ideas.  On inbound activity, for one client we created an immediate increase in conversion rate from 25% to 42%, and a continuous improvement over subsequent 24 months to 68%.  For another client we doubled retention rates of inbound bond retention from 17% to 34%.  And for a third client, on inbound collection calls, we increased the £ collected by between 50% and 150%, with lower levels of customer complaints. 

As with all of our work, we are happy to refer new clients to our past clients, subject to our past clients’ agreement.