Stakeholder Report

Operational leadership briefing — what we found, what it means, and what to do about it.

The Situation

Member Services handles approximately 6,800 tasks per month across 80 distinct task types, supported by teams working across Highway, SSG, and multiple manual processes. Alongside this, the Compliance team manages around 250 regulated complaints per month, classified into 52 sub-categories and tracked through Aptean Respond with a 6-category root cause framework.

These three datasets — tasks, complaints, and root causes — have historically been managed separately. This analysis connects them for the first time, revealing where the system itself generates the demand that creates the most work, the most complaints, and the most member friction.

An estimated 38% of all contact is failure demand — members chasing things the system should have done right first time. This is not a people problem. It is a process design problem, and it is solvable.

Key Findings

Five patterns emerged consistently across the data:

01

Manual letters are the single biggest waste

Across cancellation, address changes, reinstatements, and document re-issue, manual letter writing and checking consumes thousands of hours per month. The letters exist digitally — the manual step adds no value.

02

Duplicate processes across Highway and SSG

Most high-volume tasks have separate processes for Highway and SSG. Same outcome, different steps, different SLAs, different agent capability. This creates inconsistency and training overhead.

03

Hand-offs to Finance create the longest delays

Cancellation, reinstatement, and DD tasks all require a hand-off to Finance Operations. Each hand-off adds a queue. Each queue generates chasers. The member doesn't see two teams — they see one slow process.

04

Complaint categories map directly to process failures

The top 4 complaint sub-categories — "Delay: Processing a request", "Failure: Follow agreed request", "Premium: Collected wrong amount", "Delay: Answering call" — are all symptoms of the same underlying process issues, not individual errors.

05

Callbacks are failure demand in disguise

610 callbacks per month is the second-highest volume task. Many exist because the first contact couldn't resolve the issue — different team, different system, insufficient access. Reducing callbacks means fixing the first contact.

Recommendations

Seven task redesigns have been developed as blueprints. Together, they address the highest-volume, highest-complaint-linkage tasks in Member Services. The recommendations are ordered by impact.

#	Task	Volume/mo	Core Change	Priority
1	Cancellation (end-to-end)	1,100	Single automated process, auto-letters, Finance notified post-completion	Critical
2	Change of Address	700	Remove manual letter-checking, instant digital confirmation	Critical
3	Callbacks	610	Scheduled callbacks with context, single process	High
4	Reinstatement	325	Rules-based auto-approval, merge two variants	High
5	Re-issue Documents	275	Digital-first delivery, post as exception	High
6	Complaint Handling	250	Single view, auto-routing, real-time root cause capture	Critical
7	New DD Instruction	240	Eliminate manual keying, bank validation at source	High

Combined impact

These 7 redesigns affect approximately 3,500 tasks per month — over half of all Member Services volume. They directly address the process failures behind 4 of the top 5 complaint sub-categories, and they are projected to reduce failure demand by 1,200+ contacts per month.

Implementation Approach

The redesigns are independent — they can be implemented in sequence without creating dependencies. The recommended approach is to start with the highest-volume task (Cancellation) as a proof of concept, then roll out the pattern across the remaining six.

Wave 1

Quick wins (0–3 months)

Re-issue Documents (digital-first delivery), New DD Instruction (bank validation). These are self-contained automation tasks with minimal system dependencies. Immediate volume reduction.

Wave 2

Process consolidation (3–6 months)

Cancellation (single process), Reinstatement (merge variants), Change of Address (remove manual checks). These require Highway/SSG process alignment and Finance hand-off redesign.

Wave 3

Systemic improvements (6–12 months)

Callback scheduling (infrastructure change), Complaint handling (single view across Respond + SSG). These need deeper system integration but build on Wave 1 and 2 patterns.

Each wave produces measurable results before the next wave starts. This means the business case builds with evidence, not assumptions. If Wave 1 delivers the projected volume reduction, it validates the approach and funds the investment in Waves 2 and 3.

Measuring Success

Each redesign has measurable outcomes. These are the metrics to track:

Metric	Current (est.)	Target	How Measured
Failure demand %	38%	< 20%	Monthly demand sampling — value vs failure classification
Regulated complaints / month	250	< 150	Aptean Respond — total count
Top 4 complaint sub-categories	72/month	< 30/month	Respond — sub-category filtering
Cancellation processing time	5 days	Same day	Task queue time in Highway/SSG
Document re-issue time	5 days	Instant (digital)	Task completion timestamps
Callback first-contact resolution	Unknown	> 80%	Post-callback tracking
Manual letters generated	~3,000/month	< 500/month	Print queue volumes

The goal is not to reduce headcount. The goal is to redirect capacity from failure demand to value demand — so the same team can serve members better, resolve issues faster, and spend their expertise on cases that genuinely need it rather than on manual processes that a system should handle.

Next Steps

Validate these findings with real demand data. Confirm task volumes with team leads. Prioritise Wave 1 candidates and assign owners. Schedule a working session to walk through the cancellation blueprint in detail — this is the proof of concept that sets the pattern for everything that follows.