#Protecting customers experiencing vulnerability
Suncorp's Office of the Customer Advocate is here to be the voice for our customers and to provide an objective assessment of the fairness and integrity of our customer processes, decisions, and practices. Find out more about Suncorp's Office of the Customer Advocate and how to contact the team.
The Group Office of the Customer Advocate (OCA) works with experts and people with lived experience to advise on designing and distributing financial products and services.
Suncorp Group has made a number of enhancements to protect customers from financial abuse and the weaponisation of financial products. These enhancements include:
- Implementing a system improvement to ensure customers who have an indicator of family and domestic violence or elder abuse are referred to a specialised customer care team when they contact Suncorp.
- Introducing clear expectations on best practice (called Customer by Design) for developing products, processes, services and systems to understand downstream impacts and minimise unintended consequences for our customers.
- Working with Uniting Local Area Coordination (LAC), an NDIS support service, to develop a suite of ‘Accessibility Awareness and Understanding’ training which was completed by our customer-facing Insurance team members. This supports our teams to understand accessibility, disability and inclusion and give them confidence and tools to support customers in an inclusive way.
- Suncorp Group was among the first Australian businesses pledging to promote respect and to protect against financial abuse.
#Improving the customer experience
Suncorp is committed to acting on feedback and insights from our customers to enhance their experience and address areas for improvement. We acknowledge an increase in complaints volumes and challenging customer satisfaction trends during the year and have established a significant program to improve the customer claims experience and strengthen alignment to regulator and community expectations.
Suncorp has continued to improve its claims and complaints handling functions in light of ASIC Report 768, industry reviews conducted by the Insurance Council of Australia, the Code Governance Committee and evidence provided during the Australian Government’s Parliamentary Flood Inquiry. Suncorp has optimised its program of work to support effective delivery and oversight of these improvement initiatives.
Activities to uplift the customer experience include:
- conducting an end-to-end review of customer correspondence, claims processes and core obligations to identify customer pain points and address feedback from the industry reports
- a focus on workforce models and resourcing to support faster fulfilment
- redesigned visual guides to help our customers better understand their cover, exclusions and obligations
- implementing a capability program to support our customer-facing teams with a model to deliver consistently great customer experiences
- ongoing development and delivery of Vicarious Trauma Training to support our claims handling team members.
