Reducing customer complaints through multichannel communication

Itaú's card purchase dispute journey handled over 500,000 requests per month and accounted for 16% of the bank's complaints filed with BACEN, Brazil's Central Bank.

An analysis of complaints, reasons for contacting customer support, and customer feedback revealed a recurring problem: after filing a dispute, many customers struggled to understand its status or what would happen next. This created uncertainty, repeat support contacts, and additional complaints.

The challenge was to move from process-driven communication to a clearer customer experience, anticipating questions, providing guidance, and reducing effort throughout the journey.

Drawing on customer complaints, feedback, and journey analysis, I developed a multichannel communication strategy to make the dispute process easier to understand.

I created a unified messaging framework for email and WhatsApp, structured around four customer needs: provide context, inform, guide, and assist.

The work included rewriting communications in plain language, conducting readability tests, and collaborating across teams to ensure consistency, regulatory compliance, and implementation feasibility.

Redesigning the dispute journey's communication flow made messages easier to understand and contributed to reducing customer complaints.

• →−22% in complaints filed with Brazil's Central Bank in the month following implementation of the new communication flow.
• →+34.5% improvement in message readability across the revised communications.
• →All revised messages reached a more accessible reading level, making them easier for more people to understand with less effort.

The communication initiative was part of a broader, cross-functional effort to improve the purchase dispute journey. This larger project also achieved improvements in customer complaints, effort, and satisfaction metrics, as shown in the image below.