Rationalising customer communications

Brief:

• Review annuity quotation letters to work out what changes were needed to be made to meet new regulations.

Background:

• The FCA required changes to be made to the annuity quotation comparison as part of the Retirement Outcomes Review. This meant that the covering letters for the annuity quotation pack needed to be reviewed.

 

Method:

• Obtain copies of existing letters. As there were multiple product variants there were around 30 of these.
• Review these letters to establish what changes needed to be made.

Issue analysis:

• As a result of this review it became clear that the structure of the letters was not consistent across product types, common messages were worded differently, and some letters were long and confusing.
• We analysed the letters to identify common messages and identify which messages were not included in all versions.
• This was reviewed with the Technical team to ensure that the “additional” messages were product specific.
• We then produced a summary of the findings.

Recommendations:

• Our recommendation was that the letters should be reviewed and rewritten to improve clarity, and one template (with variable text to allow for product differences) should be produced.  This would improve the customer experience, ensure consistent messaging across product types and result in a cost saving by reducing the time and effort required to maintain these communications.
• Although it would mean less re-work to deliver this change as part of the Retirement Outcomes Review project, the scale of that project and demand on resource meant that doing so may have meant that we would not meet the regulatory deadline.  As a result it was recommended that this improvement is delivered outside of the Retirement Outcomes Review project and we identified an opportunity to do so as part of another project.

Result:

• This recommendation was agreed by Compliance, Product and Technical teams, and the analysis and recommendations were fed in to the other project for delivery.
• We then drafted and managed the sign off process for the required additions to the existing letters, keeping changes minimal in order to support the project timescales.