Customer information

Summary of performance

Fair treatment in all of our dealings with you

It's a fundamental requirement that we always treat you fairly.

This includes making sure our products perform as we've led you to expect, and that you have all the information you need throughout your time with us.

We also make sure we act in the spirit of the Financial Services Authority's (FSA's) guidance on treating customers fairly.

How we're doing

In the Customer Impact survey, 84% of our customers agreed or strongly agreed that we treat them fairly, up from 78% last year.

  • We're pleased to see an overall improvement in our scores from 2006, but we'd like to continue to improve on the number of people agreeing with this statement.

Complaints

  • In 2007, the number of complaints received about our service, excluding mortgage endowments, fell significantly to 453. We believe this is due to:
    • the improved investment performance of our funds
    • faster, more effective handling of telephone enquiries
    • fine-tuning of processes to speed up service delivery
  • Of these complaints about our service, 14 customers asked the FOS to review our decision. In two of these cases, the FOS agreed that we hadn't dealt fairly with the complaint. In 2006, 13 customers took their case to the FOS, who agreed that we'd dealt fairly with all those it ruled on that year.

Mortgage endowments

We know that mortgage endowment policies have been the main source of concern for customers. This is because lower than expected investment returns over the life of their policy mean the endowment sum may not be high enough to repay their interest-only mortgage loan.

  • In 2007, we received 1,046 new complaints about endowments which qualified for review.
  • We reached decisions on 1,219 endowment complaints in 2007 (some of which we received in 2006).
    • In 238 cases, we didn't find any evidence that customers' endowments had been mis-sold.
    • In 174 cases, the customer hadn't suffered financial loss because their endowment was worth more than they would have repaid under a traditional capital and interest loan.
    • We paid compensation to the remaining 807 people.
  • The FOS returned decisions on 250 complaints referred by our customers. They upheld our decision in 168 cases or 67%. This is an improvement on 52% of cases upheld last year but we still need to do better.

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The right products and services for you

Since we no longer sell new products, the challenge for Guardian is to deliver a good service to our existing customers.

We know it's important to help you understand what level of return you might realistically expect on your investment. The Customer Impact survey identified this as the biggest factor influencing how customers score products. We can't control how markets perform, but we do offer a wide range of investment funds to suit different attitudes towards risk. And we keep you informed about how your product is performing.

How we're doing

In the Customer Impact survey, 72% of customers ranked our products ‘good', ‘very good' or ‘excellent', up from 66% last year.

  • We're pleased to see an improvement in these scores. For the reasons given in the previous section, we know that mortgage planholders are less likely to score us highly on this. We also know that investment returns are very important, so recent stock market turbulence will have affected customers' views.
  • 20% of Guardian customers responding to the Customer Impact survey rated our investment returns ‘poor'. A further 19% described them as ‘fair'. Both these figures represent a small improvement on last year.

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High-quality service

Guardian isn't looking to attract new customers. So we can concentrate on meeting the needs of our long-standing customers.

It's important to get the basics right. We set ourselves service standards for handling enquiries, collecting contributions and premiums, and paying claims. As well as keeping track of the time we take to respond to you, we also monitor our accuracy rate.

If we could sum up our service ambition in a sentence, it would be this: you always know where you are with us. We want to make sure that we deliver a clear, accurate and prompt service and that we tell you when and how we'll do things, so you're never in the dark about what happens next.

How we're doing

  • In 2007, we met our turnaround standards for the services we provide in 99% of cases, up from 98% on last year.
  • We also maintained our high standards of quality control, with 98% of documents issued being fully accurate. This is well above the industry average.
  • Claims handling is an important aspect of our service – in the Customer Impact survey, 94% of our customers considered the speed of our claims and payment handling to be ‘excellent', ‘very good' or ‘good', up from 89% last year.

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Ease of doing business with us

We want to make it easy for you to do business with us in whatever way suits you best. That might be by sending us a letter or email, or picking up the phone to call us.

How we're doing

The Customer Impact survey showed that 87% of our customers agreed or strongly agreed that we're easy to do business with, up from 81% last year.
  • Of customers who have recently made a claim, 93% found the ease of doing business with us ‘excellent', ‘very good' or ‘good'. For general enquiries, this was 74% - both these figures represent strong improvements on last year when we scored 81% and 57% respectively. We hope to continue this positive trend.

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Clear and meaningful communication

It's vitally important that you receive clear, relevant and prompt information from us, throughout the life of your plan. This includes how we keep you informed on your plan's performance and the way we communicate with you when it matures.

Our aim is to use a helpful layout, everyday language (not jargon) and a straightforward, open style of writing to make our documents easy to read and understand. We can't always make complex issues seem simple but we can make them clear.

How we're doing

In the 2007 Customer Impact survey, 82% of our customers considered our written communications to be ‘good', ‘very good' or ‘excellent', up from 77% last year.

  • We're really pleased with the overall improvement in our scores. We recently completed a detailed review of all our communications with customers. In particular, we identified the times when you need a lot of information about your policy, for example, because you have to make a decision which will affect your financial situation. This is when it's most important to make sure the communications we send are clear and precise, with the right level of detail.

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In our full report, we've included more specific details of what we've been doing and will do over the next year to improve our performance in all these key areas.

Next, we share our highlights for 2007.