Your Customer Charter

Our Learning and Assessment promise

To deliver relevant learning content, programmes and qualifications in accessible, engaging and modern formats, and offer the right level of support. Our learning offerings provide the right tools at the right time at all stages of a professional’s career journey, supporting their development, aspirations and confidence to underpin great practice to serve their clients and customers well. Standards, Skills, Success.

Our service promise

In line with our values you can expect us to:

• Make it easy for you to contact us for help, keeping you informed and engaged
• Communicate and engage with you proactively, being open, honest and transparent, recognising confidentiality
• Understand and respond you your personal circumstances, being polite, supportive and professional, treating everyone consistently and fairly
• Focus on the continued upskilling and empowerment of our people to serve your needs
• Help you to self-serve where appropriate
• Develop a culture of agility and innovation to future-proof the way we serve you
• Continuously assess the needs and priorities of all of our customers and members
• Continuously review and improve our end-to-end customer journeys
• Continuously review and improve our approach to complaint handling

 

What is the Customer Charter?

The Customer Charter is our promise to you as members and customers, setting out what you should expect from our membership, learning and assessment products and services, and the way we deliver them to you. It explains the standards we strive for and how we will listen and put things right if, on occasion, we need to do better.

Who is it for?

Members and customers, both individuals and businesses.

Our purpose

We are a professional body dedicated to building public trust in the insurance and financial planning profession. Our strapline Standards. Professionalism. Trust. embodies our commitment to driving confidence in the power of professional standards: competence, integrity and care for the customer.
We deliver that commitment through relevant learning, insightful leadership and an engaged membership.

Our values

We build and develop our teams to deliver our purpose using the following three values:

• We seek excellence – we continuously seek to evolve our offerings based on your feedback and comparing with competing and alternative offerings.
• We are visionary – we take a holistic, long-term view on behalf of the whole profession and recognising our role within society, developing standards and building public trust.
• We are an open community – we seek input and collaboration from all relevant stakeholders, convening expertise, initiative and learning to support a united profession.

Our culture

In line with our purpose and vision we expect to build the following three principles into everything we do:

• Relevant – we aim to deliver learning and membership offerings that enable individuals and businesses to deliver expert, and ethically-driven products, service and advice through topical, effective learning and guidance that represents current good practice.
• Modern – we seek to support the profession in responding to the public’s changing needs, recognising the evolving nature of work and digital expectations with increasingly innovative, technologically advanced solutions.
• Diverse – we seek to help develop and represent an inclusive profession, beginning with our own colleague diversity and providing leadership and guidance to enable an increasingly inclusive profession.

What we measure and how we deliver against our Customer Charter

Delivering customer value and improving customer experience for our members, learners and businesses is at the heart of everything we do. We set targets and measure performance against a number key metrics, and publish an independent customer service score measured by the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) satisfaction index (UKCSI) survey.

In addition to the measures we take ensure our own performance to our customers, we also measure the Public Trust index and Chartered Perception.  

• Net Promoter Score is used across our members and we undertake to publish these data within our annual report, and use it to identify high level trends and opportunities to resolve issues for detractors and convert passive customers into promoters.
• Customer Satisfaction is measured across our training, assignment, exams feedback and customer service interactions.
• Customer Effort Score and Engagement Scores are measured across our member joining, engagement and renewal processes to ensure we become ever easier to deal with and add value to membership.  They are also measured across our learning customer enrolment and our corporate buying and servicing processes.
• Complaints are measured to ensure speed and adequacy of response, and we actively use insights from complaints to drive improvements in our offerings, processes and services.
• Customer service commitments:  When you contact us, whether by email, phone or webchat, we seek to meet the following targets:
• We will aim to answer 80% of calls within 20 seconds on average.
• We will aim to respond to emails within one UK business day.  
• We will aim to answer web chats within two minutes.
• Our correspondence will be written in plain English and will be easy to understand.

Feedback and complaints

We welcome all feedback, and wherever possible will work to ensure that feedback drives improvement. 

Read our full complaints policy, including escalation process. Complaint levels and trends are reviewed monthly by the Risk and Compliance Manager along with all relevant department heads to ensure that both tactical and strategic opportunities are addressed.

Our approach to vulnerable customers

The UK regulator FCA defines a vulnerable customer as: “someone who, due to their personal circumstances, is especially susceptible to detriment, particularly when a firm is not acting with appropriate levels of care.”

It is important that we are able to meet the needs of all of our customers and that our colleagues, partners and representatives are adequately trained, informed and empowered to consider alternative options where the usual process does not meet customer needs.  And to publish this as a commitment we expect to evolve in line with customer expectations.

We recognise that anyone can be a vulnerable customer, and that their needs may change and not always explicit.

What we do: We seek to proactively identify and accommodate customers who are vulnerable. This includes customers in the following categories which broadly cover vulnerability due to:

• Channels and accessibility e.g. hearing, sight, language barriers, physical disability and comprehension (such as mental capacity, low financial awareness, age related issues, familiarity with products and services including digital literacy)
• Circumstances e.g. bereavement, illness, facing a source of potential social disadvantage etc
• Customers whose financial resilience is low. Often this may be temporary, such as redundancy

Examples of accommodating vulnerable customers include:

• Training our colleagues to identify, support and accommodate vulnerable customers
• Ensuring products and services are clear and transparent
• Providing our colleagues with access to and information about vulnerability through Charities and good causes that support vulnerable categories (e.g. dementia, disability).
• Publishing good practice guides to our members on meeting the needs of vulnerable customers.
• Establishing the Financial Vulnerability Taskforce to support and develop our financial vulnerability charter. 
• Access arrangements to our products and services: including offering Reasonable Adjustments for products and services (such as learning and assessment) and applying Special Consideration for unexpected circumstances during assessment
• Providing a number of financial support schemes for both members and customers
• Learning and developing good practice through an Accessibility working group and linking to accessibility and inclusion initiatives throughout the profession and beyond.