Earlier this month, I had the honor of accepting the Citi Distinguished Alumni Award for Sustainability, Environmental, Social and Governance. The award, which is now proudly displayed in my office, says, “For her invaluable work enabling businesses to prioritize the ‘S’ in ESG — further strengthening the relationships financial companies have with their customers and using their voices to provide better services.”
I am grateful to Citi for modeling the importance of “doing good,” executing with an ethical and moral compass, and listening to customers’ voices as input for strategy and delivery.
Author Idowu Koyenikan says, “There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goals.”
When we integrate our strong values and passion into our ongoing business practices, we deliver business results in ways we can all be proud of. As leaders in the financial industry, it is our combined responsibility to improve the financial ecosystem for all stakeholders — creating innovative ways to maximize our positive social impact, lead with transparency, govern fairly and responsibly, and build solutions to systemic problems affecting our communities.
How PositivityTech® solves systemic problems
By unpacking the value from customer complaints, PositivityTech makes it possible for global institutions to predict and prevent systemic problems that affect their businesses and communities. By analyzing these complaint narratives, companies can reveal customer friction points before they escalate. For a business to actualize these capabilities, it must get as close as possible to its customers and deploy the tools required to listen, understand, act on, and measure the issues within their complaints. Data and analytics are core. See how PositivityTech taps into customer complaint data to solve systemic problems:
- PositivityTech Bias Index: Uncovering discrimination
Institutions still have a long way to go in weeding out bias. With PositivityTech’s AI-powered Bias Index, organizations identify prejudice within customer complaints, making it possible for them to respond directly to systemic discrimination and to repair their products and practices. This is one example of a customer complaint with a high Bias Index:
- PositivityTech’s Early Warning Triggers: Pinpointing growing issues
Today, credit bureau inaccuracies continue to drive the largest volume of complaints like the one featured above. After all, peoples’ lives are directly impacted by the accuracy of their credit reports. Additionally, today’s fastest growing complaints relate to fraud and scams. In the last three years, complaints about fraud and scams have more than tripled — and in the next three years, these complaints will be a larger percentage of the total number of complaints. With PositivityTech’s early warning triggers, organizations can pinpoint growing issues while their volume is still small and address concerns that greatly impact customers’ lives.
- Data governance = social governance
PositivityTech exists to provide value from customers’ voices, and that means that every customer’s voice must be evaluated. When our team first built PositivityTech — and began ingesting customer complaints from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), we made the critical decision to never delete complaints. All customer voices, as part of a rich and untapped data asset, are crucial to identifying business risks and opportunities. At PositivityTech, purpose and social governance guide data governance.
DBS Singapore describes data governance as “upholding customer’s trust and enabling innovation.” This is data governance = social governance at work — and it is key to putting customers first, preventing risks, and delivering profitable business results.
PositivityTech includes over 11 years of customer complaint data submitted to the CFPB. Every three years, the volume of complaints doubles. In 2025, there will be close to eight million complaints submitted to the CFPB.
A customer-first strategy is a business-first strategy
Today, companies across the world speak about creating customer-first brands. That begins with elevating customer voices — each and every one — and unpacking their value. Each customer complaint journey begins with a conversation. Using PositivityTech’s methodologies and segmentation, financial institutions identify and raise issues before conversations progress to complaints.
During this season of gratitude, may each one of us do our part to elevate the voices of the people around us, embrace feedback, and lead with an ethical compass. Thank you for your continued support. Together, let’s use our customer narrative data to uncover each nuance, risk, and opportunity. I’d love to show you how. Please reach out to me at marcia.tal@positivitytech.com.