After coming through the 2025 tax year end and having handled approaching 35,000 calls and 350,000 touch points with 95% customer satisfaction, Aberdeen Adviser is rightfully pleased with its performance.
It is easy to point to the preparation and strategy we implemented starting in October 2024 as being the integral element during this period. As vital as it was, it is worth stepping back a couple of years to when we implemented our technology upgrade – the biggest of my career – and how that has impacted on our improved customer experience.
Our investment in internal and external education focusing on our telephony teams, as well as development on platform infrastructure, has allowed us to get to the position where we are able to come through a busy period, like the TYE, with really strong satisfaction measures.
Putting up the scaffolding
One of the simplest ways in which to prevent customers needing support is to ensure that platform infrastructure is efficient and user friendly. We threw our weight behind developing our platforms to become more dynamic and easier to use.
We care about clients and customers, and are grateful for the trust they continue to show in us
As tends to happen when facing change, customer support can become strained, and we’re well aware that some of our adviser users felt that at times. We always sought to make sure that training on the platforms was up to date to support the needs of clients, especially those managing at scale, during a time of upheaval and change. We care about clients and customers, and are grateful for the trust they continue to show in us.
Picking up the phones
Going through such a momentous shift requires a solid telephony team. We put a strong focus on our Client Engagement Hub to run a model based on support and ownership. We wanted to make sure that we dealt with the calls properly. This was achieved by measuring the Hub’s performance based on sentiment scores, quality metrics and hold/wait times as opposed to average handling time. This meant that priority was on the quality of experience rather than the speed of the outcome.
Noel Butwell: More must be done to unlock advisers’ capacity
Since the tech upgrade, we have handled over 650,000 calls and had our second highest number of calls in our history during the 2025 tax year end – plenty of learning opportunities there. But throughout the process, we were keen to make sure that those working in on the Client Engagement Hub picking up the phone were able to support 100% of the calls efficiently and knowledgably.
In pursuit of this, we put our customer service advisers through a new and improved training model. The recruits are given four weeks of classroom-based training, two weeks of receiving side-by-side mentoring with an experienced staff member before multiple weeks in a graduation bay that allows us give our new colleagues support to deliver early. We’re noticing a big improvement in customer experience and feedback has been mostly positive too.
Still learning and improving
When we set out on our technology upgrade, we knew there would be a period of upheaval. Ultimately, tech needs to be kept up to speed so that our services can remain dynamic, improve more easily and provide maximum efficiency.
It would be frankly daft not to ensure that customer support systems are in a good place
Preempting such a period, it would be frankly daft not to ensure that customer support systems are in a good place. That a client can pick up the phone from one of our support staff and be confident that they will listen to their query and deal with it substantively. By placing a fundamental focus on supporting caller knowledge, educating both internally and externally has led to our support calls on platform functionality reduce.
It takes time to really feel the benefit among our colleagues and to our customers, but our performance over recent months is key and a rewarding example of our investment coming to fruition.
Noel Butwell is CEO of Aberdeen Adviser
