How a major Irish bank transformed its complaints team through coaching
A 15-point NPS uplift. 70 people coached monthly. Seven years and counting.
The Challenge
The complaints department of a major Irish retail bank needed to change how its team interacted with customers. Complaints calls are high-stakes: a customer who feels unheard doesn't just stay unhappy — they erode trust. And trust was central to the bank's strategic ambition of becoming Ireland's most trusted financial institution.
The team started at around 20 people. The bank invited us in for a one-month trial to see whether coaching could shift the quality of those conversations.
What Changed
In the first month, we adapted the standard Call Framework Loop to suit the specific demands of complaints handling. The core principle: on every call, find out what matters to the customer and make a commitment — even if that commitment is simply a callback after investigation.
We ran intensive learning teams — group coaching sessions, one per week for six weeks — focused entirely on real recorded calls. No one-to-one coaching during this period. The goal was to build a shared understanding across the team of what a good complaints conversation looks and feels like.
The bank saw visible change in conversation quality and asked us to stay for three more months at a sustainable intensity.
How It Works
This is not call scoring. We don't tell an adviser to move from a 4 to a 5. Instead, we work with each person to find something in their reality — using the GROW model — where they can see a gap, something they could do differently, and where they're willing to try.
The coaching goes deeper than typical contact centre feedback. It covers not just the call, but the person's context: where they're working, how they see their role, how they feel about their job in the moment of making the call. Some participants have said it feels more like counselling than coaching — but it isn't counselling. It's about understanding the person deeply enough that the takeaways stick and translate into more effective conversations.
The programme is led by Gillian Jennings, who brings deep expertise in finance and customer service coaching. Her understanding of the banking environment — compliance pressures, regulatory obligations, the emotional weight of complaints — is central to why the coaching resonates with the team.
When COVID hit in 2020, all delivery moved from on-site to remote via Microsoft Teams. The technology we'd built for session preparation and capture became essential. After each session, handwritten capture notes are pulled apart by the system so each person receives their personal commitment by email immediately — and it's copied into their learner log. Knowing that commitment will be revisited at the next session gives it real weight.
The Results
The proof point
When the bank paused coaching for three months to implement a new complaints management system, NPS dropped. When coaching restarted, performance recovered. This isn't correlation — it's causation, demonstrated twice over.
The team has grown from 20 to 70, now dispersed nationally. Team leaders often don't meet their staff face-to-face more than once or twice a year. The monthly learning team has become the key team cohesion mechanism — a recurrent, real conversation around a recorded call that keeps the team connected and improving.
Today, the complaints team leads the way in the bank in how to interact with customers and how to listen. They are the expert group. The entire programme — 70 people receiving monthly learning teams, most receiving monthly one-to-ones, fully trackable — is delivered for just over €9,000 per month.
"We have used FirstLineCoach.com to really make a big difference in how we handle complaints. After an initial trial phase we stopped using the FLC system for 6 months to re-organise and during this period we could clearly see how performance deteriorated without the tool. We have since re-introduced it and the results speak for themselves."
Head of Complaints, Irish Retail Bank
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We work with contact centres, complaints teams, and BPOs across Ireland and the UK. If you're looking for coaching that changes conversations — not just scores — let's talk.
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