In every landscape, customer expectations are evolving. Today’s consumers expect more than just fast efficient and convenient service. They also want companies to demonstrate a high degree of empathy and compassion. For some customers, empathy isn’t just a request; it’s a requirement.
Regulatory bodies worldwide expect companies to follow specific rules and guidelines when dealing with vulnerable customers. If a customer is classified as “vulnerable”, businesses need to ensure they’re doing everything possible to support and protect them during a conversation.
To ensure your company complies with the latest standards, you need to ensure your agents are prepared to address the unique needs of vulnerable customers. Not only is this critical for compliance, but it’s essential for protecting your brand’s reputation, and reducing customer churn. Here’s what you need to do to ensure agents are ready to support vulnerable customers.
Step 1: Implement a Strategy for Identifying Vulnerable Customers
The first step in preparing your agents for vulnerable customer interactions, is identifying what “vulnerability” looks like in your region and industry. There are various guidelines produced by regulatory bodies to help with this. For instance, the Financial Conduct Authority, as outlined in its “Consumer Duty”, defines vulnerable customers as anyone with a significant difficulty or risk of vulnerability. This can include people with mental or physical impairments, elderly consumers, those with chronic illnesses, and people who suffer from financial distress.
The challenge for companies, is in figuring out how to immediately determine whether a customer has any “signs of vulnerability”. Simply asking customers outright can be upsetting. However, you can use AI tools to detect potential vulnerability symptoms. For instance, a sentiment analysis solution can examine a customer’s tone of voice or language, to search for signs of distress.
Step 2: Implement Training Initiatives
Once you’ve determined how to identify vulnerable customers, the next step is ensuring agents have the right training to support these consumers. Start by ensuring your agents know how to use all the tools and resources that will help them support your customers, such as contact center software, analysis tools, and even AI assistants.
Consider creating documents and policies that agents can use during calls to help them navigate complex situations. For instance, you could have a scripting guides teams can follow if they’re presented with any jarring questions.
Additionally, make sure you’re providing plenty of soft skill training, focused on the development of empathy. Run simulations in your contact center to help agents build emotional intelligence, improve their communication skills, and practice active listening.
Step 3: Implement the Right Technology
The right technology is crucial for supporting any customer, including vulnerable clients. First, ensure you have an omnichannel contact center solution in place. Different customers have different preferences, and some may feel more comfortable talking over text, email, or a messaging app.
Next, ensure you have speech analytics technology in place, to analyze customer sentiment across all communication channels. Sentiment analysis solutions will help your agents to detect instantly when a customer’s mood shifts, helping them to take proactive measures to rectify the situation.
Alongside your sentiment analysis and omnichannel contact center tools, it’s also worth exploring:
- Case management tools: Intelligent case management tools, like the Puzzel Case Management platform can help to identify the priority level of each interaction, and detect customer sentiment, boosting your chances of routing customers to the right agent.
- Routing software: Intelligent routing software will help to ensure you direct customers to an agent best-equipped to handle their unique case. These solutions, combined with an intelligent staffing strategy, will also ensure customers aren’t left on hold for too long.
- Chatbots: Intelligent chatbots can help to streamline conversations, by pre-processing customer queries before they’re handed over to an agent. They can also ensure your business can offer 24/7 service.
Step 4: Deliver In-the-Moment Support to Staff
Providing an excellent customer experience starts with supporting and empowering your agents. Implementing the right technology is a good first step, but it also makes sense to have other tools in place that can assist your agents throughout conversations.
For instance, an AI agent assistance bot can analyze sentiment and keywords spoken in a conversation in real-time, offering next-best action guidance and suggestions to agents. The right solutions can also surface information from your business database instantly, ensuring agents don’t have to waste too much time searching for critical data.
Implementing call center technology that allows supervisors, managers, and other members of staff to support an agent during a difficult call can be useful too. Contact center solutions with a whisper mode, or an integration with a collaboration platform like Microsoft Teams can ensure multiple people can work together on delivering an excellent experience.
Step 5: Monitor, Adapt, and Evolve
Finally, when preparing your agents for vulnerable customer interactions, it’s important to ensure you can learn from every discussion. Implementing interaction recording tools into your contact center software will help to give you deeper insights into the best practices your agents should follow when supporting customers with different vulnerabilities.
Leveraging quality assurance and real-time monitoring tools will ensure supervisors and managers can keep track of the progress of conversations in real-time, and ensure ongoing agent compliance. It’s also worth exploring the benefits of survey solutions, so you can collect deeper feedback from your customers about their experiences.
Automated surveys can give you a behind-the-scenes look at your customers, helping you to build more comprehensive consumer profiles, and training initiatives.
Prepare Your Team for Vulnerable Customer Interactions
Vulnerable customers are everywhere in today’s landscape, and they deserve the highest quality of care your contact center can provide. Ensuring you prepare your agents for vulnerable customer interactions with the steps above will help you to stay compliant with the latest regulatory guidelines, and elevate your brand’s reputation with your target audience.
“Empathy is the new currency in a contact centre. By implementing training programs and embracing new technology, contact centres are not just preparing agents to meet expecations—but to transform every customer interaction into moments that could change lives.” Scott Maryan – Director of Customer Adoption, Puzzel
