The challenge
Hampshire Trust Bank (HTB) is a specialist lender known for providing award-winning products and services across development, bridging and wholesale finance, specialist mortgages and savings, with impressive 4.6-star ratings on review platforms.
All financial institutions must meet regulations to identify and address customer complaints within specific timeframes and also provide appropriate support to vulnerable customers. HTB’s complaint identification process was manual and reliant on simple keyword searches. It was dependent on specific team members and limited to weekly reviews of the relevant mailboxes. HTB wanted to find a way of managing this which totally negated the risk of missing any potential complaints and took less staff time to manage.
Focus: Where it matters
With vast experience in Liberty Create, our low-code solution, HTB approached Netcall about implementing an AI-powered sentiment analysis application. This would enhance their customer service operations by quickly and efficiently identifying and addressing emails showing customer dissatisfaction, which might lead to formal complaints, and it would also help to prioritise urgent customer issues, enabling them to react quickly to resolve the issue.
“Our AI-powered sentiment analysis solution rapidly processes vast amounts of email data. Its efficiency allows our team to focus on resolving customer enquiries and issues rather than sorting priorities. The streamlined process ensures swifter responses and better customer outcomes, upholding our reputation for exceptional customer service.”
Ed Eames
Head of Customer Savings Operations, Hampshire Trust Bank
The solution
The HTB Development Team implemented a Liberty Create application that incorporates AI-powered sentiment analysis. The solution consolidates emails from numerous mailboxes into a single interface and automatically analyses incoming emails using AI sentiment analysis to categorise them as negative, neutral or positive.
Priority queues are built, with emails arranged by sentiment score, highlighting the most urgent cases. This allows team members to classify issues, document root causes and add notes.
The HTB Development Team built the front-end interface in Liberty Create and worked with Netcall to integrate it with the AI sentiment analysis capability. They involved the Customer Savings Operations Team to refine the solution based on the existing processes that the team follows and their aims for streamlining the workflows.
A significant advantage of the sentiment analysis implementation is the level of control HTB has. When there’s a new keyword they want to search for, they can add that themselves – without delaying by waiting for Netcall or the Development Team.
This configurable backend allows the team to make immediate adjustments, like adjusting sentiment thresholds of updating classification options, when they notice potential for improvements. They can also respond very quickly to any regulatory changes or emerging customer trends.
In the first few weeks, the team identified that subject lines containing “complaint” weren’t being properly flagged. They were able to make a change themselves straight away and monitor it to check they’d now captured everything they wanted to. This ability to rapidly iterate without waiting for development cycles has been crucial to the system’s success.
The sentiment analysis system has enhanced HTB’s reporting processes from manual, time-consuming tasks to automated, comprehensive documentation. On the first day of every month, it automatically generates a report, consolidating all email interactions from the previous month. It comprehensively documents who handled each case and what actions were taken. There is no longer any risk of a person being absent or forgetting to generate critical reports on a specific day.
The ad-hoc reporting capabilities provide flexibility to analyse specific time periods or categories as needed, which is helpful when quick responses are required for audits or management enquiries.
This robust reporting capability satisfies regulatory requirements but also provides valuable insights from a single source of truth that help HTB continuously improve their customer service operations.
“Liberty Create has enabled my development team to work with remarkable agility. The ability to rapidly create and refine applications to meet ever-evolving business needs has significantly enhanced our efficiency, allowing us to deliver a wealth of new features to end users and customers with speed. With the integration of AI, we’ve been able to advance our processes while ensuring exceptional customer service, our Sentiment Analysis application launch is a prime example of this.”
Trina Burnett
Development Lead, Hampshire Trust Bank
The result
Reduced manual processes
automated processes increased efficiency and team capacity and manual report production
Better prioritisation
Customer Service Teams focus on the most urgent cases first
Faster responses
identifies negative sentiments early, allowing for quicker intervention
Reduced escalations
in many cases, addressing customer concerns early, prevents them becoming formal complaints
Vulnerable customers
helps identify customers who may need additional assistance enabling increased support
Monitors multiple mailboxes
monitors all relevant mailboxes instead of just one primary inbox
Reduced manual effort
time is saved in running reports and prioritising cases
Audit trail
provides a clear audit trail of how each case was handled
Regulatory adherence
ensures complaints are identified and addressed within timeframes, minimising risk of missed deadlines
Complete documentation
comprehensive records for regulatory audits
Verified by Hampshire Trust Bank – May 2025
Inspiring future enhancements
The success of the initial implementation quickly inspired plans for expanding sentiment analysis capabilities further across other channels and departments. HTB are planning to add functionality to raise formal complaints directly from the sentiment analysis interface by integrating with the Complaints System. They are looking at voice call analysis, converting phone calls to text for sentiment analysis, and expanding to other customer communication channels.
Leveraging technology to enhance customer service
HTB’s implementation of AI-powered sentiment analysis demonstrates how financial institutions can leverage technology to enhance customer service, improve operational efficiency and ensure regulatory compliance. By automatically identifying and prioritising customer communications based on sentiment, HTB can respond more quickly to potential issues, support vulnerable customers more effectively and maintain their reputation for exceptional service.