Published: June 30, 2009
Confirmit chosen by Friends Provident to help maintain compliance with the FSA's Treating Customers Fairly initiative
New York, NY and Oslo, Norway - 30 June, 2009: Confirmit, the on-demand, multi-mode platform for customer feedback, employee feedback and market research has been selected by Friends Provident, the UK-listed life and pensions company, to support its compliance with the Treating Customers Fairly initiative of the Financial Services Authority (FSA).
January 2009 saw the FSA assess its members' ability to deliver the six Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) outcomes. Treating customers fairly is central to the delivery of the FSA's retail regulatory agenda as well as being a key part of its move to more principles-based regulation.
Pauline Willcock, Business Architect, Friends Provident, explains: "In July 2008 we started to research suppliers of the software that we needed to build the surveys and do the reporting for TCF. Confirmit was selected for its track record and ability to provide Friends Provident with a high level of support and move quickly to meet our deadlines. The Confirmit team was well aligned with Friends Provident's thinking and objectives.
"By December we went live with our first TCF surveys - and they were across all of our different channels: online, IVR, phone and paper. Our team is now achieving a good rate of response - on one process alone over 1100 items of customer feedback have been generated in less than 3 months. Initially the focus was entirely on achieving the TCF outcomes but, as our TCF initiatives are so successful, we can now expand the user base so that the senior customer service managers can see all the results, including the verbatim comments from customers, and can start to take action as necessary."
Brian Dingsdale, Senior Programme Director at Friends Provident added: "The scalability of the Confirmit platform in terms of size and language was very important to Friends Provident, particularly our international businesses.
"Confirmit has now expanded beyond TCF and has become a valuable business tool for Friends Provident enabling our market research team to build future surveys using the platform," said Brian Dingsdale.
Customer feedback generated from the Confirmit surveys helps Friends Provident to successfully measure three of the TCF outcomes:
Outcome 3 - Consumers are provided with clear information and are kept appropriately informed before, during and after the point of sale.
Outcome 5 - Consumers are provided with products that perform as firms have led them to expect, and the associated service is of an acceptable standard and as they have been led to expect.
Outcome 6 - Consumers do not face unreasonable post-sale barriers imposed by firms to change product, switch provider, submit a claim or make a complaint.
Gary Schwartz, SVP Marketing, Confirmit, commented: "We are delighted to have worked so closely with Friends Provident in support of its TCF initiative. The ability within the software to handle multichannel customer feedback is a vital part of ensuring that Friends Provident achieves excellent survey response rates. It is good to see that Confirmit has expanded beyond TCF and has become a valuable business tool for Friends Provident."
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About Friends Provident:
Friends Provident Group plc is a UK-listed life and pensions company, originally founded in 1832 to alleviate the hardship of Quaker families facing misfortune. Friends Provident's strategy today is to operate in markets where it can deploy its award-winning strengths in technology and service to gain competitive advantage. Since its demutualisation in 2001, the company has developed strong offerings in pensions and protection to complement its historic With Profits business, and now prioritises international growth. Friends Provident is fully committed to the principles of the FSA initiative 'Treating Customers Fairly'.
Friends Provident distributes its products through intermediaries in the UK and around the world. Its key business lines in the UK are protection and corporate pensions. Friends Provident International develops competitive savings, investment and pensions products for a broad and diverse range of markets including Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Germany.
Friends Provident wholly owns the Luxembourg-based company Lombard, a leading pan-European life assurance company which specialises in the use of life assurance as a wealth management solution for high net-worth investors, and Sesame, a leading UK supplier of intermediary support services to financial advisers providing services to over 7,500 financial advisers across the UK offering life assurance, mortgages and savings arrangements.
About Confirmit
Confirmit is the world's leading SaaS software vendor for Customer Feedback, Employee Feedback, and Market Research applications. The company has more than 200 employees and offices in Oslo (headquarters), Guildford, London, Moscow, New York, San Francisco, and Yaroslavl. Confirmit's software is also distributed through partner resellers in Barcelona, Kuwait City, Madrid, Milan, Santiago, Sydney, and Tokyo.
Confirmit targets Global 5000 companies and Market Research agencies worldwide with a wide range of software products for feedback / data collection, panel management, data processing, analysis, and reporting. Customers include British Airways, Countrywide Financial, Credit Suisse, Dow Chemical, Experian, GlaxoSmithKline, Halifax Bank of Scotland, Intrawest, Ipsos, Nielsen, The NPD Group, Safeco Insurance, Statoil Hydro, Symantec, and Virgin Media.
Visit www.confirmit.com for further information.
Press Contacts
Confirmit: Gary Schwartz, SVP Marketing: +44 (0)7957 142 122
Confirmit: Pat Molloy, Chief Strategy Officer: +44 (0)1483 300 100
EMEA PR Contacts, Indigo River: Andrea Burton +44 (0)1985 850320 / Melanie Oxford +44 (0)7515 632065
US PR Contacts, Hart Boillot: Perrin McCormick / Andrea Doeringer +1 781 893 0053
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