How do you support customer facing teams regularly handling contacts with customers in vulnerable circumstances?
- 11 March 2024
Every conversation about vulnerability has two participants. In our efforts to get consumers better outcomes, are we forgetting the contact centre staff member?
Last week the FCA (7th March 2025) encouraged vulnerable customers to disclose their needs to firms and explained that those who do open up typically have better experiences with 74% of vulnerable customers who opened up reporting that staff asked the right questions to understand their situations and almost 60% reporting that the firm appeared to 'care' and took action to provide the support they need.
I agree with the FCA - opening up about a vulnerable circumstance does seem to be leading to better outcomes and therefore it is important that consumers feel confident and well supported about opening up.
However, I am increasingly seeing the flip side of consumers opening up with contact centre teams becoming overwhelmed by the tidal waves of contacts they are handling (vulnerability is not going away) and the very challenging nature of some of those disclosures.
These are circumstances you wouldn't want anyone to experience in their lifetimes nor your agents to hear about in call after call
I presented recently at a The UK Contact Centre Forum event in Bristol on this very topic, identifying the impact on teams and how to move forward to achieve better outcomes.
I am really concerned that Senior Leadership Teams (SLT) are not aware of the impact this is having on their customer facing teams.
Clients are reporting increases in burnout and sickness levels, higher attrition as a direct result of the volume and scale of contacts vulnerable customer teams are handling as the teams are feeling abandoned (at worst) or ignored (at best) and definitely unsupported. This is all costing firms money with the average cost to hire estimated at £6,000 per person!
SLT's are rightly concerned and asking what is behind the attrition and absenteeism and when told. However the standard response appears to be hat these teams have 'had vulnerable customer training, what else do they need?' This tends to stem from a position of seeing vulnerable customer training as a once and done exercise.
When you consider that with high staff turnover and the reality that lots of staff were not actually working for the firm when the last training session was done, you can quickly appreciate that training needs to be run regularly to ensure current teams are briefed. In addition vulnerability is dynamic and changing and customers situations are also evolving as are the reasonable adjustments firms are able to offer as they develop process or service improvements. The world just doesn’t stand still!!
Another common objection is that there just isn't time to do more training / coaching / support.
So if your team is struggling and needs help, I have answers to the above questions that will balance the scales a little and make sure that firms put as much thought and care into the wellbeing and support for their teams as they do for customers.
There is much work to be done.
If you need help
- building a business case
- getting your SLT to understand the scale and scope of impact on your organisation
- to reduce attrition
- to reduce burnout
- to better support your teams
please get in touch.
Let's make sure our teams are hashtag#supported and hashtag#valued properly
Image: Gemini Imagen
