Case Study: Close Brothers achieves complaint management excellence — 21% fewer FOS referrals and £75k SaaS savings with Aptean Respond (Aptean)

Close Brothers Heads to the Cloud for Complaint Management Excellence

Close Brothers, a UK merchant banking group in financial services, needed to modernize how six of its businesses handled customer complaints. Using an outdated version of Aptean Respond and manual spreadsheet-based QA led to inconsistent data, slow logging, and an unwieldy set of over 1,000 root-cause codes that made analysis and standardization difficult.

The firm upgraded to Aptean Respond 8.0 (SaaS), implemented the Quality Accelerator, integrated APIs, and rolled out tailored training to 547 users. The cloud move saved £75,000 and enabled real-time contextual QA, smarter workflows for vulnerable customers, and greater automation—reducing complaint logging time by 30 seconds, cutting RCA codes to about 60 per business, and lowering monthly Financial Ombudsman referrals by 21%, while enabling ongoing continuous improvement.

Close Brothers

Keeleigh Field

Retail Business Manager