Vulnerable Customers

Vulnerable Customers are defined by the FCA as customers who, for any one of a wide variety of reasons, are “someone who, due to
their personal circumstances, is especially susceptible to harm, particularly when a [Financial Services] firm is not acting with appropriate levels of care”. Consumers might be vulnerable due to “poor health, such as cognitive impairment, life events such as new caring responsibilities, low resilience to cope with financial or emotional shocks, or low capability, such as poor literacy or numeracy skills“. Financial Services businesses have an obligation to ensure customers classed as vulnerable receive appropriate support and are treated fairly.

A consumer finance business which regularly worked with Kind Consultancy for their specialist talent needs reached out to us for support. The firm was experiencing a substantial increase in the number of Vulnerable Customers and associated complaint cases. The scale of the increase and the need for specialist skills was beyond their existing Complaints and Customer Contact resource.

We worked closely with the client with a collaborative approach, designing a customised resourcing plan to address the skill gap.  Kind Consultancy would supply a full team of 14 people to focus exclusively on the vulnerable customer cases.  We immediately contacted the contractors on the Kind Agile Solutions bench who we knew were available for a new project and had significant Vulnerable Customer expertise.

Because we had made sure to build up a pool of specialist Vulnerable Customer talent within Kind Agile Solutions, we were able to have a full team on site and working on cases within 10 working days from the initial contact. The client has repeatedly renewed the contracts of the team, with VC case numbers remaining high due to increasing vulnerability in the customer base, and our KAS team continue to be the core of the response strategy.