80% faster letters, stronger compliance: rebuilding complaints handling in UK motor finance
80% faster letters, stronger compliance: rebuilding complaints handling in UK motor finance
Industry
A leading UK-based motor finance provider partnered with Huntswood to transform its complaints and service quality (SQ) operations. With regulatory scrutiny on the motor finance sector intensifying and customer expectations rising, the client needed a way to bring down complaint volumes, speed up resolution, and strengthen compliance, without compromising on quality or consistency. Huntswood combined process diagnostics with intelligent automation by Rubraik to deliver a solution that reshaped how complaints were triaged, drafted and resolved.
The Results:
>80%
Reduction in cost per interaction
(from ~$18 to ~$3.50)
<30
Days from engagement start to full live operations
~$4M
In annual savings
~94%
QA scores consistently maintained every month
The Challenge
The client’s complaints function was under sustained pressure from a mix of operational and structural issues:- High and repetitive complaint volumes: a steady stream of complaints driven by recurring root causes and customer journeys that weren't clearly signposted, making it harder to resolve issues at the first point of contact
- Fragmented knowledge and disjointed resources: information needed to handle a case was spread across multiple systems and sources, leading to inconsistent decision-making and longer-than-necessary handling times
- Time-intensive manual letter drafting: advisors were spending around 45 minutes per case drafting compliance letters by hand, a bottleneck that slowed down resolution and left room for human error
- Slow, error-prone compliance checks: DPA (Data Protection Act) and DPO (Data Protection Officer) validation and triage relied on manual review, increasing both processing time and the risk of oversight
Together, these pain points were driving up cost-to-serve, extending resolution timelines, and putting consistent regulatory compliance at risk.
The Solution
We began with a structured process diagnostic to map the end-to-end complaints journey and pinpoint exactly where delays and inconsistencies were occurring. This diagnostic surfaced letter-writing as the highest-impact opportunity, which was then prioritized for automation via Huntswood’s Continuous Innovation Board (CIB), a governance mechanism used to identify, test and roll out improvement initiatives in a structured way with Rubraik Analyze and Automate underpinning.
The resulting solution combined AI-driven automation with human oversight, built around four core components:
- AI-powered triage and classification: Huntswood deployed Rubraik Analyze that automatically reads and interprets advisor notes to categorize each complaint by type and timeline, removing manual sorting and ensuring cases are routed correctly from the outset
- Rules-driven automation: Rubraik Automate applies more than 50 business rules covering legal and financial requirements, embedding compliance directly into the process rather than relying on individual advisor judgement
- Dynamic letter assembly: draws on a modular content library to auto-generate structured, compliant letters with the correct tone, clauses and formatting for each case type
- Human-in-the-loop review: every automatically generated letter is produced as an editable document, requiring final advisor review and sign-off before it goes out, keeping accountability and quality control firmly with the team
This approach meant Rubraik Automate handled the repetitive, time-consuming groundwork, while advisors retained control over final decisions and customer-facing communication.
The Impact
The transformation delivered measurable gains across speed, cost and quality:
- 80% faster compliance letter drafting, cutting a 45-minute manual task down dramatically and significantly reducing overall case handling times
- Cost optimization alongside a stronger customer experience: faster, more consistent resolutions without adding headcount or compromising on compliance
- Reduced training time and improved operational efficiency, as standardized, rules-driven processes made it easier to onboard advisors and maintain consistency across the team
By pairing intelligent automation with human oversight, the client was able to build a complaints process that is faster, more consistent and more resilient to regulatory scrutiny, a model that continues to evolve through our continuous improvement framework.
