Ant Marketing has been working with a leading catalogue company since 2002. The campaign involves selling creditor insurance to the company's catalogue customers and has been operating in accordance with the FSA guidelines since Jan 2005.

The Challenges & Solutions

The Challenge

To ensure full compliance with FSA regulation concerning the selling of insurance by phone

• Train and test agents and management on FSA and DPA
• Establish an independent audit function
• Listen to an agreed percentage of calls per agent and mark them against the quality criteria set by FSA
• Have a visible and detailed procedure to deal with cases of poor call quality
• Organise call levelling sessions between the management, clients and quality department
• Keep detailed records of training and coaching per agent for FSA audit
• Conduct refresher training every six months
• Provide for an external FSA consultant to audit agent files and quality procedures every six months
• Arrange independent assessment of call quality by clients every week (clients listen to a random selection of calls made by agents at Ant Marketing)
• Track and monitor cancellation statistics on every agent to highlight potential problems
• Maintain a complaints log to highlight potential issues with specific agents or procedures

• Ant Marketing has retained the account for more than five years.
• When the contract with the client expired in 2007, Ant Marketing pitched for the account and won it back on the basis of its quality of work and competitive pricing platform.
• The client has been successfully audited as a part of the thematic PPI audit by FSA, which also involved a detailed audit of the functions outsourced to Ant Marketing.
• The account has grown from one product to now offering a portfolio of products.
• The size of account has increased from 18 FTEs to 40 FTEs.