“I ended up feeling like a robot whose only mission was to make a sale”
Last month, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published its guidance for firms on the fair treatment of vulnerable customers. The regulator believes businesses could and should do more to ensure vulnerable customers are receiving positive outcomes.
Findings from the FCA’s Financial Lives survey found that over 24m people (just less than half of UK adults) presented one or more characteristics related to vulnerability. This could be - but not limited to - a person experiencing physical and/or mental health issues, recent life events such as bereavement, a lack of financial resilience and capability, addictions such as gambling, or difficulties with decision-making and mental capacity.
The guidance is separated into four parts:
Understanding the needs of vulnerable customers
Skills and capability of staff
Taking practical action
Monitoring and evaluation.
Though limited to just a few lines, I was pleased to see an acknowledgment under ‘skills and capability of staff’ regarding the mental wellbeing of frontline staff:
‘Firms should offer practical and emotional support to frontline staff dealing with vulnerable consumers.’
We know attrition rates within contact centres are already stubbornly high (26% employee turnover annually - the average rate for the UK is 15%), and the trend shows no sign of stopping. With the ratio of vulnerable to non-vulnerable customers increasing, frontline staff will find themselves handling these types of interactions more frequently, and the subsequent emotional toll is something businesses cannot afford to neglect.
The document goes on to add:
‘Frontline staff may come across challenging situations and firms should offer practical and emotional support to staff where appropriate. This may take the form of offering self-help information, time out following difficult or challenging phone calls or time for staff to share experiences either in face to face meetings or via online forums. Large firms may offer an employee assistance service. By supporting and improving staff members’ mental and emotional resilience, firms can help their frontline staff engage with vulnerable consumers more sensitively.’
Again, whilst pleased to see the acknowledgement, reducing the mental wellbeing of these workers to a total of 9 lines in a document that is 109 pages long doesn’t feel adequate in emphasising the importance of supporting workers who are already susceptible to stress, burnout, and varying degrees of vicarious trauma. As firms go about ensuring a safe space for customers to declare and discuss their vulnerability, employees must unequivocally be afforded the same opportunity.
Reading the guidance, I was reminded of a friend who spent 4 months working for an insurance firm where he was tasked with selling additional policies to existing customers:
“I ended up on a call to an elderly woman who had a car accident which meant she was unable to leave her house.”
“I was supposed to be offering her contents insurance which we quickly established she didn’t need. The next thing I know and without warning - the customer started crying. After giving her time to collect herself, she revealed I was the first person she had spoken to in just over two weeks.”
“We talked for a further five to ten minutes about how being alone made her feel, and I could tell that having someone to talk to was lifting her mood. During that time, my floor manager passed by and overheard some of our conversation.”
“At the end of my shift, she pulled me into her office to ask why I spent so long ‘chatting’ with the customer. I explained the situation and how it felt inappropriate to end the call whilst the customer was in that state. She told me I had targets to meet and that once I had established the customer was not going to buy, her being upset was not my issue to take on.”
“Though I wanted to protest, I hadn’t been in the job long and was not experiencing these calls regularly, so I let it go.”
“A few weeks later my grandmother passed away. I took a few days from work, but was back on the phone within the week. During a routine call soon after to once again sell contents insurance, I was told by the lady on the other end of the phone that the customer I was calling for had passed away the day before. The woman I was speaking to, it turned out, was the customer’s granddaughter. She began to get emotional. I began to get emotional. Then remembering my manager’s instructions, I stopped myself, told the lady I was sorry for her loss, and ended the call. I then asked my manager if I could take five minutes to compose myself. ‘If you must’, she replied”.
“Now I know by my manager’s standards that ending the call was the right thing to do, however I felt completely awful about it. I knew the grief that woman was feeling because I was feeling it too for my own grandmother”.
“I knew I had a job to do and didn’t want to be governed by my emotions so I asked my manager for advice on dealing with these types of calls. ‘Just remember you’re there to do a job and anything outside of that regarding the customer’s personal life is not your business, even if they want to tell you’”.
“The irony is that after following her advice, I actually ended up making less sales. I think I was so afraid of becoming emotionally involved during a call that I just came across as cold.”
“I left a few months later for a couple of reasons, but largely because I ended up feeling like a robot whose only mission was to make a sale.”
Looking at things from a black and white perspective I can understand why my friend’s manager did not want agents engaging in personal conversations. On the surface, it eats into valuable time that could otherwise be spent selling. Perhaps many of you reading this may even conclude my friend just simply wasn’t cut out for the job. But I would argue that acknowledging and expressing emotion only makes communication that much richer, honest and more fruitful, and had my friend been given the space to do so, he would not only have performed better, but may even have stayed in the position for longer.
While contact centres are often thought of as an inconvenient expense by many businesses, I believe this to be a huge oversight. Each direct interaction between business and consumer is an opportunity to invigorate the relationship. Perhaps after a warm exchange with a sales agent during a moment of grief, the lady whose grandmother had passed away might have brought her business to the firm when she next needed her own insurance policy.
If businesses want to do right by their vulnerable customers, they must first do right by the frontline workers charged with that responsibility and ensure they have continual access to the emotional support needed.
For anyone interested in learning how AI and conversational analytics can be an invaluable tool in tracking the emotional wellbeing of both customers and employees, as well as a tool to identify vulnerability and help eliminate non-compliance, please do not hesitate to contact me: hello@sentientmachines.tech
Written by Gary Wood