Throughout my career, I’ve felt privileged to help multiple lines of business profit from the hidden value in their data. While companies approach many types of data as strategic assets, they consistently overlook customer complaint data. Together with my team, I am leveraging my deep experience with customer listening and shedding light on the hidden value of customer complaints.

This week, Tal Solutions announced the launch of the PositivityTech intelligent platform, a new platform that uncovers and enables the strategic growth opportunities hidden in customer complaints. In this interview, I share the pain point that the PositivityTech platform solves and how financial institutions can approach their customer data in strategic ways, particularly to create new revenue.

What problem does the PositivityTech platform solve?

Today, many businesses approach their customer complaints in a very transactional manner. They focus on satisfying customers’ immediate needs and meeting the requirements set by regulatory bodies. But most companies do not approach complaints as strategic assets. As a result, they miss systemic patterns that manifest in complaints. They miss issues that lead to negative headlines or regulatory risks. They miss opportunities to improve and strengthen their businesses, especially as they seek much-needed revenue growth.

We believe that customer complaints can be a critical part of a business’s success, and that negative input can have a positive impact. With PositivityTech’s predictive platform, which combines human insights with advanced technology, companies can foresee future complaints and their causes, quickly and proactively address customer feedback, protect their business, and improve performance.

How has your background led you to this new venture?

I have always been passionate about voice of customer data. There is a wealth of information that can be unpacked from customers’ feedback, word choice, and tone of voice. To really know how its business is doing, a company needs to get as close as possible to its customers and become open to hearing – and understanding – its customers’ complaints.

My background is in consumer banking, and I spent my career immersed in the intersection of customer data and advanced analytic disciplines. As Citigroup’s former EVP of Decision Management, I built and ran a global function bringing advanced analytic capabilities and processes to 30 markets. Before that, I implemented customer segmentations, product offerings, marketing campaigns, action-oriented analyses, and risk management policies and tools, all supported by operational innovations. I also audited businesses, met with regulators on a regular basis, and saw the underlying issues that franchises face. Over the course of my career, I have seen the challenges that companies can experience when they are not listening to their customers, and have worked diligently to advance these capabilities.

Now that companies have better access to very large and unstructured data sets of their own customers’ voices, they have the opportunity to hone in on customer complaint data in new ways. With advanced technology to reveal unexpected opportunities, companies can take actions to proactively strengthen their businesses and keep them ahead of the competition. I look forward to helping companies use their data to reframe their customer complaints as strategic and predictive insights, which can continually reveal opportunities for action and growth.

How can your approach to customer complaints proactively strengthen your business?

Strengthening your business often entails preparing for what’s ahead and understanding industry and market trends. When a company can identify and understand the specific problems described in its customer complaints as compared to its competitors’, it can predict future risks and reveal unexpected opportunities that keep it ahead of its competition. Complaints are everyone’s challenge, and strategic growth is everyone’s opportunity.

What can financial institutions do to make better use of their customer data?

Start approaching complaints as strategic intelligence, instead of individual issues that need to be resolved. Consider where complaints may highlight risks and how their language can be used to predict future issues, too.

Identify the severity of complaints, based on a customer’s word choice, tone of voice, or duplicate complaints. Flagging higher-risk customers will help you prioritize where action will matter the most. Understand the environmental risks that come from unresolved complaints – including public relations risks, lawsuits, and enforcement actions. Know that when complaints aren’t resolved, customers do not stop complaining. They may continue to complain to your institution – or they may approach other sources that are beyond your control.

How do you interact with your customer complaints today? I’d love to hear your techniques and help you unpack those complaints in valuable new ways that increase your bottom line. Please feel free to get in touch.

As I speak with financial services executives throughout the industry, I listen to their challenges and explore their hidden opportunities for growth. While most are committed to listening more closely to their customers, they continue to share a similar approach to how they manage their customer complaints. Financial institutions work hard to resolve their customers’ complaints within a prescribed amount of time, based on either business or regulatory requirements. However, they rarely view complaints systemically or holistically as assets.

I believe that financial institutions are missing out on a massive business opportunity. Complaints are a hidden source of value. When seen as a strategic asset, complaints can become a critical part of a business’ success as any complaint can be unpacked for value. Intimate access to complaint data can proactively identify issues before they create a headline or regulatory risks, and even predict and prevent future problems. Prevention is a direct outcome of using your customer complaint data to surface business opportunities for growth.

How do I know this? Over the past 12 months, my team has developed and applied an integrated toolset of advanced technologies, analytic methods, and human intelligence to study Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) data, treating it as such an asset. We took a deeper look at issues concerning the entire financial sector. One such issue is data breaches, and specifically the Equifax breach. Among our findings, we see that:

1. Signs of the Equifax breach were evident at least 6 months before the media covered it.
2. Once the media brought attention to the breach, consumers began to adopt and integrate the media’s language into their direct dialogue with multiple institutions.
3. Consumers submitted duplicate complaints, providing deeper insights into the severity of issues and mistrust in our institutions, and impacting businesses in a widespread manner.
4. There is an ongoing halo effect from this data breach impacting all financial institutions, even 12 months after the Equifax breach.
5. Consequences vary by institution and can be predicted far enough in advance to reduce their severity.
6. By combining proprietary financial institution data with publicly-sourced data, specific actions can be customized and implemented.

I found it surprising, then, that a recent article in American Banker challenged the validity of the CFPB’s data, claiming that it presents an inaccurate number of complaints because it frames inquiries as complaints, too. The article’s author wrote:

“When the CFPB fails to contextualize and present fair, accurate data that appropriately frames the number of complaints compared with the volume of contacts, or to separate mere inquiries and complaints about other industries, inaccuracies multiply and the debt collection industry ends up facing unfair reputational harm.” 

My team’s analysis has revealed that just the opposite is true. The CFPB is a valid source of data that needs to be taken seriously. When people turn to the CFPB with a complaint or an inquiry, they have an issue that hasn’t yet been resolved. Your customer’s voice is your most valuable asset and this data holds hidden opportunities.

All data sources are messy. That does not negate their potential business value. Cleaning and structuring the data are always necessary first steps to analyzing what your customers are telling you, extracting insights, and turning those insights into predictive indicators, broad-based strategies, and drivers for improved performance. Defining the contextual framework for the application of the CFPB data and building statistical rigor and robust predictive tools through its use is key to unlocking its value.

At Tal Solutions, we believe that negative input can have a positive impact. We’re focused on turning customer complaints into a source of business value. I’d be happy to share more about what we are learning from our conversations with executives and customers, how we’re finding value in complaints, and how our findings can directly benefit your work. Please feel free to reach out.

Customers have always complained. And always will.

Their voices have never been louder. Complaints about products and services are more public, with far-reaching consequences. And the cost of ignoring them in the financial services industry continues to increase.

How much do you really know—through facts, data and analysis—about your customers’ complaints?

In the video below, I share actual customer complaints (raised to the CFPB) within an analytic framework for complaint detection and prediction.

Apply this robust and multi-dimensional framework to analyze what your customers are telling you. You’ll uncover new opportunities from using science, listening to consumers’ voices and always being human!