Does your bank or credit union struggle to manage consumer complaints?
While your institution is legally required to track, manage, and report complaints, fulfilling this mandate is often easier said than done. There’s so much data to manage and very few good systems that handle it all. Most institutions end up using spreadsheets and email to track complaints, but is that really the best way?
ABC Bank doesn’t think so. Since 2022, they’ve been using Kadince complaint management software to efficiently track, manage, and report complaints. Jane Doe, the bank’s Sr. Manager of Customer Advocacy, even said, “I will never go back to spreadsheets again.”
Let’s take a look at how ABC Bank improved its process and how your institution can, too.
ABC Bank and Jane Doe are fake names. While the names may be fake, everything in the article reflects the real bank’s experience and has been reviewed and approved.
ABC Bank needed a better way to manage complaints
ABC Bank isn’t your traditional brick-and-mortar bank. In fact, ABC started as a financial technology company that became an online bank with a National Charter from the OCC in 2015. ABC Bank strives to be a one-stop shop for its customers’ checking, savings, credit card, debit card, and everything else, and it intentionally tries to help those who are unable to get financial help elsewhere. “Everybody needs a second chance,” Jane said. “We strive for financial inclusion, and we don’t want to serve only those who are ‘qualified’ for a traditional bank. We want to help those who are normally unable to get the help they need. Our goal is to help everyone get financially better in their personal lives.”
Despite being a non-traditional bank, ABC is still subject to various compliance regulations and standards, including the Community Reinvestment Act, ECOA, and UDAAP.
And like most banks, ABC has struggled to track and manage customer complaints while remaining compliant. Luckily for Jane and her team, they found Kadince complaint management software.
“Before we found Kadince,” Jane said, “we were tracking complaints manually in an Excel sheet. I know a lot of other institutions still do that to this day, but we were tired of it. We struggled with reporting, the approval process, and finding the history of each complaint. It was difficult to keep up with the audit, and I never quite trusted the data because anyone could go into the Excel sheet and make changes. I knew we needed something different.”
“I had tried some other case management systems in the past, but I hadn’t found one that was bank-specific. We needed a system that catered to our needs, was simple, easy to customize, and accessible for our employees. Kadince was a good fit for us.”
Kadince is complaint management software built specifically for financial institutions and makes it easy to track, manage, and report complaints that come from various sources. With Kadince, all your complaints are tracked in one place, rather than spread across various spreadsheets and email threads. Like so many other customers, Jane loves that Kadince makes it easy to find trends, move complaints through a customized workflow, go through a compliance exam, and build reports.
Finding complaint trends has never been easier
Complaint trends are complaints that pop up again and again. Maybe there’s a problem with one employee at a specific branch. Maybe your website has a recurring glitch. Maybe there’s a flaw in one of your banking products. It’s up to you to find these complaint trends and take steps to fix them. This will prevent similar complaints from happening in the future and will show customers that you truly care about their experience.
“We used to struggle with trend analysis,” Jane said. “When complaints are coming in from several different sources, it’s hard to get a full picture and truly see what customers are talking about. With Kadince, we can quickly see if several customers are experiencing the same problem, and then we can take steps to fix it. Logging all complaints in Kadince—regardless of where they originated—helps us do that.”
Workflows for the win
Finding, responding to, analyzing, and reporting complaints can be a long, tedious process. But if you’re repeating the same process over and over again for each complaint, why not automate it and save hundreds of hours a year?
That’s what Jane has done for ABC Bank. “Before Kadince, we used another ticketing system that was really made for emails. We would receive the intake from our employees. We’d open a ticket that routed to our little view box, and we would work off of that ticket. Essentially, we would take the ticket, review it, and research the account. We just had to hope that ticket included all the fields we needed for our report, which was done in Excel. So we’d have a bunch of people working on an Excel sheet at the same time, which was really challenging.”
“The only sort of workflow we had was using our Excel sheet as a tracker with various tabs for stages, due dates, etc. We couldn’t see a full view of our complaints. The only audit process we had was looking at Google history for every single document. I look back at our process now and think yikes!”
Finally, Jane and her team said “enough.” They needed a simpler process, and when they realized Kadince software would help them automate tasks, keep all complaints in one place, and view a detailed history of each complaint, they were hooked.
Now every complaint ABC Bank receives goes into Kadince. Jane created different submission forms depending on the type of complaint received. Employees can easily access these forms, complete all the necessary information, and submit them for review. Complaints are routed to the proper reviewer based on preset criteria, so Jane always knows that the right person is seeing the right complaint and has everything they need to make a decision. Kadince even sends automatic reminder emails when a task is overdue or when a new task is assigned. “I love not having to remind people to review complaints,” Jane said.
As for the audit trail, Jane couldn’t be happier. Instead of checking Google history and never being quite sure who had approved what, Kadince tracks all approvals, changes, and comments inside the system. Now Jane knows exactly who approved what and when, how long a complaint took to be resolved, and where a specific complaint is in the approval process.
“The Kadince workflow works really well,” Jane said, “and it’s probably the best workflow I’ve ever experienced compared to other systems I've used. I like that you can easily edit the workflow and see the audit trail. That’s something examiners check for, and it’s super easy for us because Kadince makes it automatic. We really don’t get many questions from examiners now, because everything is already there, which is really nice.”
Compliance exams made easy
Speaking of compliance exams, Jane used to experience long, difficult exams that required tons of follow-up, lots of emailing, and a vague sense of dread. Raise your hand if this sounds familiar…
But with Kadince, Jane’s compliance exam is smooth and pain-free. “We used to keep all complaint data in spreadsheets with attachments stored separately in a Google Drive,” Jane said. “This was difficult for us and difficult for examiners. Now we give examiners a limited Kadince login, which has been really nice. We can restrict certain views or features, so examiners only see the information we want them to see. They can then pull their own reports or access the pre-built reports we give them. And since we’ve included all relevant links, screenshots, voice recordings, and documents with the complaint, examiners can access everything right there inside the software. Kadince is so helpful for compliance exams, and it makes both mine and the examiners’ jobs much easier.”
Reporting is no longer manual
One of Jane’s biggest selling points when deciding to purchase Kadince software was the robust, customizable reporting tool.
Kadince users can build reports based on any data point tracked in the system. Users can rearrange columns, pull in new data points, filter out data points, group things together, and so much more. And once a report is built, users can display this data in various ways, including dynamic widgets that can be shared with anyone and can even be put on your public-facing website, where they update in real time!
“I was so sick of manually building reports and trying to share them with my team in a way that everyone could understand and see the data,” Jane said. “Kadince reports are so easy to build, edit, and share. It’s no longer a manual process, and these reports have been so helpful in giving us an idea of the full scope of our data.”
Now that employees and board members can visually see ABC Bank’s complaint process and all the data, it’s easier for Jane to showcase what they’re doing, how they’re handling complaints, and how the bank has improved.
Employees love Kadince, too
Getting employees to adopt new software can be like herding cats. Chances are, not everyone will be on board, they’ll forget to use it, they won’t understand what it’s for, and they’ll have a million questions.
Having experienced this in the past, Jane was prepared for some pushback when she presented the bank’s new complaint process to the team. But Kadince tends to speak for itself, and pretty soon, employees were on board and were excited to give the new process a go. It helped that every employee submitting complaints had experienced part of the pain Jane had been going through. The process was manual, confusing, and prone to error. They knew Kadince had to be better than that.
While there were major benefits right off the bat, it did take some time to dial in the forms and get everything set up exactly how Jane and her team wanted it. “The forms were super easy to update,” Jane said, “but I had to make sure I was communicating changes to employees so they always knew the best practices. Now we’re at a point where we’ve found our groove and our forms rarely need to be updated.”
New hires are trained quickly, and Jane hosts quarterly and annual training for all employees to refresh their knowledge of the bank’s complaint process.
According to Jane, “We haven’t had any negative feedback from employees as we’ve onboarded Kadince. They love it, I love it. Kadince is a win all around.”
See how Kadince can help you manage complaints
As you can see, Jane is extremely happy with her Kadince usage. “I've seen very, very complicated systems in the past when it comes to case management where they're literally expecting us to code an actual query to create the form,” Jane said. “But when we were implementing Kadince, we didn’t have any of that. Kadince is by far the easiest case management software I’ve ever implemented.”
“In my ten years of working with complaints, it has always been a struggle. But since we found Kadince, it’s no longer such a struggle. I’m so glad we found it.”
Want to learn how Kadince can help your financial institution collect, review, resolve, and report customer complaints like ABC Bank? Schedule a demo today.
None of Kadince, Inc., its affiliates, or its respective employees, directors, officers, and agents (collectively, “Kadince”) are responsible or liable for any content or information incorporated herein. Read full disclosure.
