One way of dealing with the challenges of identifying vulnerable customers, particularly when some may not wish to share their circumstances with their financial services provider, is to ensure products and services are inclusive by design. “We have tried to remove the need for disclosure,” said Tim

“We have tried to remove the need for disclosure… with universal design, you use the most extreme users to pressure test any product or service and what you create is a set of conditions that are better for all”.

 

Tim Hawley, Head of Customer Vulnerability and Complaints Insight, Capital One

Hawley, Head of Customer Vulnerability and Complaints Insight at Capital One. He cited research showing up to 90 per cent of financial services customers have suffered from vulnerability at some point but only four per cent will choose to declare that to their provider. “The key point about universal design is you use the most extreme users to pressure test any product or service and what you create is a set of conditions that are better for all.”

“We found that if you took 68 per cent of vulnerable conditions, there was a lot of commonalities and a lot of common harms,” he explained. “For example, with cognitive impairment, it does not matter to us whether you have been in a coma, or have Alzheimer’s or learning difficulties, the common component is that you may struggle to retain information. If we come up with inclusion principles to cover those harms and bake them into our products and service, then customers can get a natural layer of protection even if they do not tell us.”

He added: “Of course, if they do tell us then we can deliver more targeted help but it’s about closing that gap between the 90 per cent and the four per cent.”

Supporting frontline staff

Closing that gap remains largely the role of frontline staff, and it’s a job made harder by the new working practices imposed by the pandemic. “We’re finding new ways to support and coach staff now that they’re working from home,” said Vicki Heslop, Head of CX at Covéa Insurance. “Customers need our people to listen, to empathize and be able to put themselves in their shoes, no matter what’s going on around them.” She said staff engagement, training and support was essential,

“Staff engagement goes hand in hand with customer engagement”

 

Vicki Heslop, Head of CX, Covéa Insurance

particularly as agents handle greater numbers of complex calls from increasing numbers of vulnerable customers. “Staff engagement goes hand in hand with customer engagement,” said Heslop. “Our mantra is “happy staff equals happy customers” and you can definitely see it in your results.”

She added that supporting vulnerable customers isn’t just a job for frontline agents. “Everybody across the organization has to have the connectivity to the end customer so that it’s central to everything we do and it becomes part of the DNA,” said Heslop.

“Sentiment analysis and NLP technologies can read thousands of emails and pinpoint the one where a customer may have hit a new vulnerability”

 

Andy Katzen, Industry Principal, Pegasystems

Lori Pon, Director, Claims Transformation and Claim Service Center at AAA – The Auto Club Group, echoed this, particularly during the make-or-break claims process. “We are very focused on empathy, rapport and listening, making sure our agents have a smile in their voice and treat every call like it’s the first call of the day,” she said. “This needs great tools for staff and lots of coaching and support.”

Neal Keene of Smart Communications summed up the three key technology tools required so frontline staff have the data they need to support and guide the customer in accordance with their unique needs and preferences. “One, we need to help agents collect data and put it in a place where it can be accessed across the organization,” he said. “Two, it’s about decisioning, and how we determine what the plan of action should be. And three, engagement platforms and creating smarter conversations. These technologies, if you join them up, will have a direct impact on the customer experience.”

Andy Katzen of Pegasystems also highlighted the benefit of AI and machine learning techniques to sift through vast reams of unstructured data, such as emails or chatbot exchanges, to identify potentially vulnerable customers. “Sentiment analysis and NLP technologies can read thousands and thousands of emails and pinpoint the one where a customer may have hit a new vulnerability,” he said

“There’s no one size-fits-all solution”

 

Tim Hawley, Head of Customer Vulnerability and Complaints Insight, Capital One

Our panelists agreed there’s no human versus digital divide when it comes to identifying and supporting vulnerable customers. “There’s no one size-fits-all solution,” said Tim Hawley of Capital One. “Some people with mental health issues, for example, might find it easier to use digital self-serve channels because they may have anxiety about using the phone while for others, they need that reassurance of speaking to a human. It’s about preference and choice.”

“The power of choice is very impactful”

 

Lori Pon, Director, Claims Transformation and Claim Service Center, AAA

Lori Pon of AAA agreed. “The power of choice is very impactful,” she said.

Achieving this level of personalization, so customers can interact via their preferred channel at their preferred time, comes down to data. And this, said Vicki Heslop of Covéa Insurance, remains a challenge in an industry where legacy systems continue to hamper data collection, sharing and analytics. “There’s just so much data,” she said. “We’ve come a long way but we’re on a journey and there’s still a lot more to be done.”

Everyone was clear that the pandemic has pushed vulnerable customers to the top of the agenda, both at corporate and regulatory level and with organizations increasingly prepared to collaborate to deliver better outcomes for all.

“We will see more cross collaboration to identify these customers, support them and, perhaps more importantly, stop them becoming vulnerable in the first place.”

 

Andy Katzen, Industry Principal, Pegasystems

“I think everyone agrees that we are never going back to the way we did business before,” said Andy Katzen of Pegasystems. “I think we will see more cross collaboration to identify these customers and support them and, perhaps more importantly, stop them becoming vulnerable in the first place.”