We conduct market research to understand the needs of our customers so we can develop better products and services.

Since March 2007, in our UK retail bank, we've run monthly customer service panels with our retail customers. At each panel we tested three propositions with them to get customers' feedback on the products we were hoping to develop.

This research was complemented with 50,000 short interviews with retail and commercial customers and more than 3,000 half-hour interviews to gain even greater insight into consumer views. Our research helped us understand the relationship customers want with their bank and we have used this to develop segmented offers and to prioritise investment activity for the next three years.

Barclays Wealth's approach

A core business belief of Barclays Wealth is that we will only achieve our strategic goals by being demonstrably client-centric. We recognise the need to improve client service and, to that end, have changed the way we do things – including high-level structural changes, modifications to individual business processes, and improving the overall quality of our employees.

We have also:

• Introduced substantially enhanced client reporting, designed around the principles of clarity, simplicity, flexibility and timeliness
• Proactively reached out to clients, where a product experience has not lived up to their (or our) expectation.

We use a variety of alternative methods of measuring qualitative outcomes to supplement the internal controls and governance processes in place. Depending upon need, these methods involve either the regular use of external assessment or opinion to validate our internal view, or ad hoc exercises to obtain external views on business proposals. Examples of both are as follows:

All Barclays Wealth businesses are required to conduct half-yearly client surveys

Each of our structured products designed for the mass market are scrutinised by an independent external consultancy which scores them on value, transparency and potential returns. If our proposed products do not score highly enough, they are not launched.

We use client focus groups to test significant new marketing proposals

Where we develop literature for new product types, we subject it to user groups to comment on whether they believe the literature to be clear and useful – this currently involves colleagues and their relatives.

We recently conducted a survey of 6,000 retail structured-product clients to obtain their feedback on our product range, product literature and service levels and an indication of what motivates their investment decisions. The 800 responses received have provided a rich source of information, which has been used to drive our product development.