Following the takeover by Royal London in 2001, the Edinburgh-based firm began adopting a more nuanced approach to how it used the respective strengths of its people and its technology.
“The company was still of the older thinking that automating everything that could be automated would almost necessarily make it better, but in 2005 or so, once the teething problems associated with the takeover had been ironed out, this approach was shelved,” said Isobel Langton, group customer services director at Royal London.
Dealing with clients
Instead of this techno-centric view came the implementation of the idea that not only should technology be used in those areas where it worked best, but that people should also be used in the same way, with their role particularly boosted in adding value to the day-to-day business of dealing with clients.
“The key to this, and to differentiating our business proposition from that of our competitors at the time, was to entrust client-facing employees – especially those in the new business area – with a lot more personal responsibility for how they dealt with clients,” said Ms Langton.
“In a sense, to make them feel more like project managers for each of the individual businesses with which they dealt.”
In practical terms, she added, part of this process involved assigning specific advisers to specific clients, for which they would be responsible on an ongoing basis, and giving them leeway to manage these relationships as they saw best, within the realms of good company practice and issues of compliance.
“For example, if an IFA wants their business adviser to give them a regular update on new market developments as and when they happen, then that’s what they’ll do. And if they want them to do this just on a quarterly or half-yearly basis, or if they only want to hear of new tax regulations or whatever it may be, then our adviser will accommodate those wishes.”
The re-focusing on building up the responsibility of the client-contact staff at Scottish Life proved timely in the run-up to the Retail Distribution Review (RDR), and its aftermath, and with the concomitant changes to the pensions system.
“Although the implementation of the RDR was extremely well-flagged, of course, we found that taking a proactive approach to the IFAs with which we deal was enormously welcomed by them, particularly in the case of the smaller ones that did not have the in-house manpower to look at how it would affect their business from every angle. So we made sure that we called them and updated them as and when required.”
Again, much of this implied a change at the very top of management in the way that performance parameters were set by Scottish Life’s senior management teams, principally by looking at how the company’s business priorities came across to its customers.
“Previously there would be empirical targets such as, for example, monitoring the response time on dealing with a client query by measuring how long it took to send out a response – any response – even if this was just an automatically generated standard response letter, but this was not the sort of value-added service that we wanted to promulgate.”
