Navigating Vulnerabilities: The importance of human-centered service design to support better outcomes

Whilst doom-scrolling on a grey, cold November evening I was shocked to stumble upon a Threads link detailing a user’s experience with a well-known media provider, who, once notified of the user’s mother-in-law passing, sent a one-size-fits-all cancellation email.

Imagine this, a close family member has died, you’re grieving, and rather than the supportive “no worries we’ll cancel everything and make this terrible time less stressful” message, you receive a one-size-fits-all reactivation email using language that is designed to make you miss the service, with one last hope of persuading you to stay. Yeah – Ouch!  

Now, to be clear, there are comments from employees of the company saying that the correct process wasn’t followed.  But really, the customer care agent probably hasn’t even realised the distress they’ve caused doing it wrong and maybe, in their opinion were just trying help get to the end point as quickly as possible – cancelling the service.

What’s even more worrying, is the nearly 700 comments – many of which include similar experiences from substantial organisations who did not provide the expected level of customer care when asked to support with a vulnerable experience we all unfortunately will experience– bereavement.

It seems like a simple thing to resolve, and if you’re a small business that can truly provide 1 to 1 personalised customer experiences, then it probably is. However, this isn’t the case for 99% of the organisations you are likely engaging with.

Think of all the nuances and considerations:

1. Make it easy to contact you, across different channels depending on preferences
2. Every single one of your customer-facing agents needs to know, and be aware of, the alternative journey a customer should experience based on vulnerability indicators (and their cumulative effect), to dynamically and effectively help your customer as quickly as possible whilst expressing empath.

• Your online and offline journeys need to be set up to ensure that information is provided quickly and then all communications (across all departments and sub-brands) are stopped, including removing any chance of inclusion within re-activation campaigns
• For some sectors, you’ll need to make sure you get the correct fraud checks in place, without causing extra distress

….and many more I haven’t included here.

That sounds like a pretty impossible ask to deliver on, right?

Wrong.

It’s time to look to human-centred service design to support all customer outcomes – especially when they need help. This human-centred service design should then support the cultural, operational, and technological change needed to drive good outcomes.

So, what does this mean? Well, when talking about your customers,  make sure you’re considering them as who they are – a human.

Here are my top 3(ish) pointers to get you started:

1. Customer segmentation: Yes, personalisation is important. What’s even more important? Applying vulnerability lenses over the top of your segmentation that are easy and simple to ingest. A 30-year old who has lost a parent will have far different expectations, life experiences and support requirements to a 75-year old who has lost their partner, so the impact of this vulnerability indicator will be different to their overall vulnerability requirements (if any).
2. Ongoing training which is easy to access: Repeated, concise training and processes that empowers employees on exactly what to do in all situations is really important, and this shouldn’t just be  limited to customer facing employees. When you create a customer first culture your customers will feel the difference. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Just look at the recent investigation into Ask for Angela in Manchester and no surprise – those with repeated training (interactive and passive) had great reactions….and those with a one-off training session had no idea what to do. CACI trained 103 bank staff members as part of our vulnerability programme with Handeslsbanken on customer centred design and engaged across all tiers of banks management, departments, teams and  projects. This was just to kick off their customer-centric ethos.
3. Once you have joined up systems – place customers (especially vulnerable customers) at the heart: You’ve resolved identities, you’ve trained up the business, you’ve created customer journeys – now it is time to actually make sure that the customer is at the heart of your systems based on how they’ll interact with you as a brand.  If a customer has been flagged as vulnerable (e.g. for bereavement) and they contacted the contact centre to inform them, this should be reflected in all versions viewed of that customer record. This means if they go into a branch the following week, the data the branch staff can see flags that they’re vulnerable so they can tailor their communication and are more sensitive and empathic. If there are separate customer care and billing/collections team – make sure billing/collections can see that the customer is vulnerable and consider different communications when chasing payments.

Feeling stumped?

CACI can run vulnerability audits on your systems and journeys to help you get an independent eye into your process and where you can make the biggest impact. Get in touch today and I’ll walk you through next steps.

And remember…. vulnerability indicators include challenging life events such as bereavement (temporary vulnerability) as well as life-long indicators such as accessibility. The FCA outlines four drives of vulnerability which is a pretty good benchmark for all sectors:

• Health, for example physical, sensory or cognitive impairments or illness
• Life events, for example bereavement, relationship breakdown or job loss
• Resilience, or the ability to cope with new or difficult financial or emotional situations
• Capability, or differences in understanding or confidence when making financial decisions

If you are interested in learning more around service-design then read: Applying the lens of vulnerability to design – part 2 or contact us.