Wrenfield Building Society is a regional mutual with 34 branches across the South West, employing 1,150 people and serving 310,000 members through branches, telephone, mobile app and an intermediary network. As a mutual it is owned by its members rather than by shareholders. The author is Head of Member Experience. Organisational detail is illustrative and anonymised.
Table of Contents
Task 1: Report on the principles of managing the customer experience
AC 1.1 Analyse the factors which influence the relationship organisations build with customers
The nature of the product and the purchase cycle. Analysing the most fundamental factor, relationship depth follows from how often and how consequentially a customer transacts. A mortgage is taken once or twice in a lifetime and carries the largest financial commitment most people make, which produces a relationship characterised by long intervals and high stakes. A savings account produces frequent low-stakes contact. The same organisation therefore holds two entirely different relationships with the same member.
Trust and the regulatory context. Analysing a factor specific to financial services, the relationship rests on trust in a way that retail transactions do not, because the customer is handing over money against a future promise. Regulation reinforces this, and the requirement to deliver good outcomes rather than merely to avoid mis-selling has moved the standard from compliance to consequence.
Ownership structure and organisational purpose. Analysing a factor distinctive to Wrenfield, members are owners rather than customers in the ordinary sense, which changes the expectation. A member who receives poor service experiences it as an organisation failing its owners, and the mutual’s own marketing invites that reading.
Channel and the balance between digital and human contact. Analysing this factor, channel choice shapes relationship character. App-based service is efficient and low-intimacy; a branch conversation is expensive and forms the memory the member describes to others. Wrenfield’s difficulty is that the members who value branches most are the least profitable to serve through them.
Employee capability and attitude. Analysing the decisive internal factor, in a service business the relationship is delivered by individuals. Evidence links how people are managed to the discretionary effort they give (Barends, Rousseau and Janssen, 2023), and discretionary effort is what a member perceives as good service.
Life stage and the emotional weight of the transaction. Analysing a factor often absent from customer relationship models, a member arranging a mortgage is buying a home, and a member closing an account after a bereavement is grieving. The transaction is identical in system terms and entirely different in experience.
Reputation, tenure and inherited perception. Analysing this factor, relationships are shaped before contact begins by what the customer already believes. Wrenfield’s average membership tenure exceeds fourteen years, which means most relationships carry accumulated history that a single interaction cannot easily overturn in either direction.
Competitor and market context. Analysing the external dimension, expectation is set by the best experience a person has anywhere rather than by sector norms, so Wrenfield is judged against retail apps rather than against other building societies.
AC 1.2 Assess the key features of a customer focused culture
Purpose that names the customer. Assessing the first feature, a customer focused culture rests on a shared understanding of who the organisation exists for. Wrenfield’s mutual status gives it an advantage other financial institutions must manufacture, and the advantage is squandered where the stated purpose is not visible in operational decisions.
Leadership behaviour rather than leadership statements. Assessing what actually signals priority, employees read what leaders spend time on and what they tolerate. Northouse (2025) identifies visible role modelling as central to influence, and a director who listens to member calls monthly communicates more than any values poster.
Decision authority at the point of contact. Assessing a feature that distinguishes genuine customer focus from its imitation, staff must be able to resolve matters without escalation. A branch colleague who must refer a straightforward fee waiver to a manager cannot deliver a good experience however willing they are.
Recruitment and development aligned to service. Assessing this feature, culture is substantially a selection question, since attitudes to customers are harder to train than product knowledge.
Measurement and reward that reflect the customer. Assessing a common contradiction, an organisation stating that the member comes first while measuring branch staff exclusively on product sales has told its people which claim is real. Mullins (2022) observes that behaviour follows measurement rather than declaration.
Psychological safety and the willingness to report failure. Assessing an underrated feature, staff must be able to report that something went wrong for a customer without personal consequence, and the evidence links safety to whether problems are voiced at all (Capezio et al., 2023). An organisation that punishes bad news learns about its failures from complaints rather than from colleagues.
Cross-functional ownership of the experience. Assessing the structural feature, the experience crosses departments while accountability usually sits within them, so a culture is customer focused only when functions accept responsibility for outcomes they do not wholly control.
Assessing the features collectively. They are interdependent, and the weakest determines the outcome. Empowered staff in an organisation that measures only sales will use their authority to sell.
AC 1.3 Examine the benefits and challenges of managing the customer experience
Benefits. Retention is the principal return, and in a business where acquiring a mortgage customer costs several hundred pounds while retaining one costs almost nothing, the arithmetic favours experience investment strongly. Examining the evidence honestly, the frequently quoted multiples comparing acquisition and retention costs vary widely by sector and should be calculated internally rather than borrowed.
Advocacy follows retention, and in a mutual without a large marketing budget, member recommendation is a material acquisition channel. Cost reduction is a benefit organisations underestimate: a substantial proportion of contact volume is generated by earlier failures, so improving the experience reduces the work. Regulatory standing improves, since consistent good outcomes reduce complaint volumes and the supervisory attention that follows them. Employee retention improves, because staff who can serve members well stay longer than those who cannot.
Challenges. Attribution is the first difficulty: experience improvements produce returns over years and through channels that are hard to isolate, which makes the investment case harder to defend than a product launch. Consistency across channels is a second, since a member who is recognised in branch and treated as a stranger by the contact centre experiences one organisation behaving as two.
Examining a challenge specific to Wrenfield, the cost of the channel members most value. Branch service is expensive per transaction and disproportionately used by long-tenured, low-balance members, which sets member preference directly against commercial logic.
Legacy systems constrain what is achievable, and no amount of cultural work overcomes a system that cannot show a colleague the member’s recent contact history. Managing expectation is a further challenge, since raising service standards raises the baseline against which future performance is judged.
Examining the balance, the benefits are real and slow, the challenges are immediate and visible, which is why experience programmes are vulnerable at budget-setting even where nobody disputes their value.
AC 1.4 Examine the impact of organisational and legal frameworks on the management of the customer experience
Financial services regulation. Examining the dominant external framework, conduct regulation now requires firms to deliver good outcomes for retail customers across products, price and value, understanding and support. Examining the practical effect, this converts customer experience from a commercial preference into a regulatory obligation, and Wrenfield must evidence outcomes rather than assert intentions.
Complaint handling requirements. Examining a specific framework, regulated firms operate within prescribed complaint handling rules covering acknowledgement, timescales, final response and referral rights to the Financial Ombudsman Service. This removes discretion over how complaints are handled and imposes a defined standard.
Consumer protection law. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 governs services supplied with reasonable care and skill and provides remedies where they are not. Examining the impact, it sets a floor beneath which experience cannot fall without legal consequence.
Data protection. Examining this framework, personalisation depends on customer data, and the UK General Data Protection Regulation together with the Data Protection Act 2018 determines what may be collected, retained and used. Examining the tension this creates, the experience improvements members most value frequently require the data handling they are most cautious about.
Equality law. The Equality Act 2010 requires reasonable adjustments for disabled customers, which affects branch access, communication formats and digital accessibility. Examining a related expectation, regulators additionally expect firms to identify and support customers in vulnerable circumstances, which extends beyond the statutory duty.
Organisational frameworks. Examining the internal dimension, the scheme of delegated authority determines what frontline staff may resolve; complaint handling procedure determines routing; product terms determine what can be offered; and the mutual’s governance structure gives members a formal voice through the annual general meeting that customers of a shareholder-owned bank do not have.
Examining the combined effect. Regulation sets a floor that is rising, and internal frameworks determine how far above it the organisation operates. Whittington et al. (2023) note that regulatory frameworks increasingly shape competitive conduct rather than merely constraining it, which describes financial services precisely.
Task 2: Report on the customer journey
AC 2.1 Analyse the customer journey within the context of an organisation
The journey as a concept. A customer journey describes the complete sequence of interactions a customer has with an organisation, across channels and over time, from first awareness through to renewal or exit. Analysing why the concept is useful, organisations manage by function while customers experience a sequence, and the journey view exposes the difference.
Wrenfield’s mortgage journey. Analysing the principal journey in detail, it comprises: awareness through comparison sites, intermediaries or existing membership; research and affordability estimation; application, whether direct or through a broker; underwriting and valuation; offer; completion; and then a servicing relationship lasting decades, punctuated by product transfer decisions every two to five years.
Where the journey succeeds. Analysing performance across the stages, Wrenfield scores well at application and completion, where dedicated case handlers give members a named contact.
Where the journey fails. Analysing the weak points, two stand out. The underwriting stage produces most dissatisfaction, because it is where the member waits without information and where requests for further documentation arrive piecemeal. The product transfer point is the second, since a member reaching the end of a fixed rate receives a letter and is otherwise expected to act alone, which is the moment competitors are most active.
Moments of truth and emotional intensity. Analysing which interactions carry disproportionate weight, they are not evenly distributed. The mortgage offer and the completion date are emotionally intense; a monthly statement is not. Effort spent improving low-intensity touchpoints produces little perceived improvement.
Channel transitions as failure points. Analysing where journeys break, the transitions between channels cause more dissatisfaction than any single channel. A member who applies online, telephones with a question and then visits a branch expects each to know what preceded it.
The journey after the transaction. Analysing a stage organisations neglect, the mortgage servicing relationship lasts twenty-five years and receives a fraction of the design attention given to acquisition, despite being where retention is determined.
AC 2.2 Examine the role and responsibilities of stakeholders supporting the customer journey
Frontline colleagues. Examining the primary group, branch, contact centre and case-handling staff deliver the journey directly. Their responsibility extends beyond their own interaction to what they set up for the next one, and a promise made in branch becomes an obligation on the contact centre.
Team leaders and branch managers. Examining their role, they resolve escalations, coach performance and control local decisions. They are also the point at which organisational pressure meets member need, and how they balance the two determines what their teams do.
Underwriting and operations. Examining a group with no member contact and enormous influence, underwriters determine the waiting period that generates most dissatisfaction in the mortgage journey. Their responsibility to the experience is real and invisible to them, which is the central problem.
Technology and digital teams. Examining their role, they own the app, website and the systems colleagues use. Their responsibilities include the system limitation described earlier, since a colleague who cannot see contact history is constrained by a decision taken in another department.
Marketing and communications. Examining their contribution, they set the expectation the rest of the organisation must meet, and expectation set too high converts adequate service into disappointment.
Intermediaries and brokers. Examining an external stakeholder, a substantial share of Wrenfield’s mortgage business arrives through brokers who own the member relationship at the outset. Their conduct forms the member’s first impression of Wrenfield, and the society’s control over it is contractual rather than managerial.
Third-party suppliers. Examining this group, valuers, conveyancing panels and the card processor all touch the journey, and a delay by a panel valuer is experienced by the member as a Wrenfield delay.
Compliance and risk. Examining a stakeholder often positioned as an obstacle, they determine what may be said and offered. Engaging them at design stage rather than at approval shortens delivery substantially.
Members themselves. Examining a stakeholder easily overlooked, members supply information, make decisions and shape the journey through their own responsiveness, and journey design must accommodate members who do not behave as designed.
Examining accountability across the group. No single stakeholder owns the journey, which is precisely why journeys fail at the joins. Buchanan and Huczynski (2023) note that functional structures optimise within boundaries and neglect what crosses them, and the answer is a named journey owner with authority spanning the functions involved.
Task 3: Report on managing the customer experience
AC 3.1 Evaluate approaches to leading the delivery of the customer experience
Setting and communicating a service standard. Defining what good looks like in concrete terms rather than aspirational ones. Evaluating this approach, its strength is that it makes performance assessable and gives colleagues something to aim at. Its weakness is that standards expressed as targets, such as call answer times, drive behaviour towards the measure rather than the outcome, and a call answered in twenty seconds and handled badly has met the standard.
Empowerment with defined limits. Giving frontline colleagues authority to resolve matters up to a stated value. Evaluating this approach, it improves resolution speed, reduces cost and raises colleague engagement. Its risks are inconsistency between colleagues and the need for judgement that requires training. Evaluating the balance, the cost of occasional over-generous resolution is consistently lower than the cost of escalation.
Leading through team leaders. Evaluating where delivery is actually determined, the branch manager and team leader population shapes daily behaviour more than any central programme. Evidence links immediate management quality to discretionary effort and retention (Barends, Rousseau and Janssen, 2023), and most managers reach the role without preparation for it (Chartered Management Institute, 2023), which makes this population the highest-return investment available.
Recognition and storytelling. Evaluating this approach, sharing specific instances of colleagues serving members well communicates the standard more effectively than a policy document, and it costs almost nothing. Its limitation is that recognition without authority produces frustration.
Service recovery capability. Evaluating an approach particular to services, failures cannot be prevented entirely and cannot be reworked before the customer notices, so the manner and speed of recovery becomes a determinant of experience in its own right. Research consistently finds a well-recovered failure can leave a customer more positive than no failure at all, which justifies deliberate investment in recovery rather than treating it as damage limitation.
Visible senior leadership. Evaluating this approach, directors taking calls or working in branch periodically signals priority credibly and gathers information on report supplies. Its weakness is that it is easily performed and quickly detected as performance.
Evaluative conclusion. No single approach suffices. Standards without empowerment produce compliance, empowerment without capability produces inconsistency, and both fail where team leaders are not equipped. The leadership task is sequencing these rather than choosing between them.
AC 3.2 Examine good practice in managing customer complaints
Making complaining easy. Examining the first element of good practice, most dissatisfied customers do not complain, they simply leave. A complaint is therefore information the organisation would otherwise pay to obtain, and barriers to complaining protect the organisation from knowledge rather than from cost.
Acknowledging promptly and setting expectations. Examining what reduces escalation, an acknowledgement that states what will happen and by when substantially reduces follow-up contact, and regulated firms operate to prescribed timescales in any case.
Resolving at first contact where possible. Examining the strongest predictor of satisfaction after a complaint, it is whether the person first contacted could resolve it. This returns directly to empowerment.
Investigating the substance rather than the presentation. Examining a common failure, complaints are frequently answered on the point the customer made rather than the problem they experienced, and a customer complaining about a fee may actually be complaining about not having been told about it.
Responding with reasoning, and conceding where wrong. Examining what customers report valuing, an explanation of what happened and an acknowledgement where the organisation was at fault matters more than the remedy in many cases. Defensive responses generate escalation to the Ombudsman more reliably than adverse decisions do.
Recording and analysing root cause. Examining the element most often neglected, individual complaints are resolved and the pattern is never examined. Wrenfield’s analysis found a third of mortgage complaints originated at the underwriting information stage identified earlier, which no individual resolution would have revealed.
Closing the loop with the customer and with the organisation. Examining good practice at the end of the process, the customer should be told what changed as a result, and the finding should reach the function that caused it.
Learning from Ombudsman referrals. Examining an external check, referral outcomes indicate where the firm’s own decisions diverge from an independent view, and a firm frequently overturned has a systematic problem rather than unlucky cases.
AC 3.3 Analyse the use of technology in managing the customer experience
Customer relationship management systems. A single record of the member’s history accessible across channels. Analysing its value at Wrenfield, this addresses the channel transition failure identified earlier and is the technology investment with the clearest link to the journey weaknesses. Analysing the constraint, legacy core banking systems make a genuinely unified view expensive to achieve.
Self-service and digital channels. App and online servicing. Analysing the benefit, self-service suits routine transactions, is available at any hour and costs a fraction of assisted contact. Analysing the risk in a mutual with an older membership, digital-first design excludes members who cannot or will not use it, which for an organisation owned by those members is a governance question as well as a service one.
Automation and artificial intelligence. Chatbots, automated triage and increasingly capable conversational systems. Analysing the current position honestly, these handle routine enquiry adequately and fail on complexity and emotion, which in financial services is where the interactions that matter sit. Analysing a further constraint, most managers reach their roles without preparation for evaluating such systems (Chartered Management Institute, 2023), which makes uncritical adoption the principal risk.
Analytics and personalisation. Using data to anticipate need, such as identifying members approaching the end of a fixed rate. Analysing the opportunity, this addresses the product transfer weakness directly. Analysing the limit, personalisation requires data handling that engages the frameworks examined earlier, and members react badly to being contacted in ways that feel surveilled rather than served.
Colleague-facing technology. Analysing an underweighted category, the systems colleagues use determine what they can do for a member. Investment in member-facing technology while colleagues work across four unconnected systems improves the shop window and not the service.
Analysing technology overall. Technology extends reach, reduces unit cost and enables consistency. It does not create a relationship, and Mullins (2022) observes that systems shape what is possible rather than what is delivered. Its appropriate role at Wrenfield is to remove routine contact so that human attention is available for the interactions that carry emotional weight.
Task 4: Report on monitoring and measuring the customer experience
AC 4.1 Evaluate methods used to monitor and measure the customer experience
Transactional satisfaction surveys. Short surveys immediately following an interaction. Evaluating this method, its strength is specificity, since responses attach to a known interaction and colleague, allowing targeted action. Its weaknesses are low and declining response rates, survey fatigue, and a bias towards the strongly satisfied and strongly dissatisfied.
Relationship measurement and advocacy scores. Periodic measurement of overall sentiment and likelihood to recommend. Evaluating this method, it captures the accumulated relationship rather than a single event and benchmarks externally. Evaluating its limitations, a single number conceals which of several journeys produced it, and the metric is widely gamed by staff asking for favourable scores.
Complaint and contact analysis. Volume, theme, root cause and resolution time. Evaluating this method, it is free, continuous and describes actual failure rather than perception. Its weakness is that it captures only those who complained, and falling complaint volumes may indicate improvement or resignation.
Operational performance measures. Call answer times, application processing times, first contact resolution and digital completion rates. Evaluating these, they are objective and available in real time, and they measure the organisation’s activity rather than the member’s experience of it.
Customer effort measurement. Asking how easy the organisation made it to achieve the outcome. Evaluating this method, effort correlates strongly with loyalty in service settings, often more strongly than satisfaction does, and it produces more actionable findings because high effort points to a specific obstacle.
Mystery shopping and call listening. Evaluating this method, it observes what actually happens rather than what is reported, and sample sizes are small and it generates defensiveness where used punitively.
Colleague feedback. Evaluating a source frequently omitted, frontline staff know where the journey fails and are rarely asked systematically. This requires the psychological safety discussed earlier to produce honest answers.
Behavioural and commercial outcomes. Retention, product transfer rates, balance growth and referral. Evaluating this category, these are the outcomes experience is meant to produce, and they lag by months and respond to price and competitor activity as much as to service.
Evaluative conclusion. Each method has a blind spot the others cover, and the requirement common to all of them is that measurement leads to a decision. Maylor and Turner (2022) note that measurement systems shape the behaviour they observe, which is an argument for a balanced set and against elevating any single score into a target.
AC 4.2 Recommend approaches to improve the customer experience in the context of an organisation
Recommendation one: appoint a journey owner for the mortgage journey. With authority spanning underwriting, operations, digital and branch. The analysis identified that failures occur at the joins between functions, and no functional manager currently owns the whole. This is the recommendation on which the others depend.
Recommendation two: fix the underwriting information gap. Proactive status updates at defined points and a single consolidated documentation request rather than piecemeal demands. This addresses the largest identified source of dissatisfaction and roughly a third of mortgage complaints, and it requires process change rather than capital.
Recommendation three: redesign the product transfer moment. Contact members approaching the end of a fixed rate with a personalised comparison and a named contact rather than a standard letter. This addresses the retention point at which competitors are most active and where the commercial return is most direct.
Recommendation four: extend colleague authority and equip team leaders. Raise the resolution limit for frontline colleagues and invest in the team leader population, since the evaluation identified this group as determining delivery and most reach the role untrained.
Recommendation five: give colleagues a unified member view. Prioritise colleague-facing systems over member-facing ones, because the channel transition failures identified in the journey analysis originate in colleagues being unable to see what has already happened.
Recommendation six: introduce effort measurement alongside satisfaction. Effort correlates more strongly with loyalty and produces findings that identify a specific obstacle rather than a general sentiment.
Recommendation seven: protect assisted channels for members who need them. Given the mutual’s ownership structure and membership profile, digital efficiency should fund human availability for complex and emotionally weighted interactions rather than replace it. Recommending this explicitly matters because the commercial logic points the other way and will prevail by default unless a decision is taken.
References
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Consumer Rights Act 2015, c. 15. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15 (Accessed: 26 August 2026).
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