The measurement of customer experience has rapidly become mainstream and most organisations now collect feedback from their customers, patients or citizens to understand their experience. The NHS Friends & Family Test, for example, collects over one million data points every month, and most larger organisations collect tens of thousands of customer experience reports across contact centres, digital channels, branches and email.
What about the experience of the vulnerable?
To clarify what we mean we first need to define the terms and understand to whom it might apply.
A vulnerable person is an individual who, due to their personal circumstances, is especially susceptible to detriment, particularly when an organisation is not acting with appropriate levels of care.
Detriment is the negative outcomes an individual may experience compared to the average person, and can include:
- Not getting access to a product, drug, treatment, service or opportunity
- Unfair decisions or judgements
- Missing out on the best prices and offers
- Mis-selling of products, contracts or services
- Not getting appropriate care or treatment
- Longer waiting times
- Unnecessary distress
- Poor service
Groups of ‘at risk’ individuals include:
- Legally protected groups based on age, sex, race, sexual orientation, disability
- Discriminated groups such as migrants; Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities; rough sleepers and homeless people; and sex workers
- Geographic location which may include urban, rural, people living in deprived areas or poor housing
- Digital skills: Those without essential digital skills
- Capability: Those with low literacy, language, low health knowledge, learning impairment
- Life events that may include individuals living with caring responsibilities, bereavement, relationship breakdown
- At risk of harm: Those suffering violence, abuse, neglect or exploitation
- Financial Resilience: People with erratic income, financial strain, unemployed, low income
- Health: Patients with permanent or temporary pre-existing physical or mental illness
Planning to cause detriment to those in these groups is clearly something no organisation sets out to do, but as the saying goes - you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Most organisation don’t yet measure vulnerable customer experience in a systematic manner, but the increased emphasis on equality and change in technology now make it possible. Increasing focus from the Financial Conduct Authority and other regulatory bodies is however bringing this issue to the fore across financial services, healthcare, local government and telecoms.
How do we measure the vulnerable experience?
The team at Logan Tod & Co is using text analytics on comments left in customer, patient, citizen feedback responses to understand the experience of those that say things that indicate they may be vulnerable.
We are using a mixture of tools to scan for terms that relate to vulnerabilities, and then create segments we can analyse separately. We make everything anonymous to ensure there are no privacy concerns. AI is involved of course as well as traditional analytics, good visualisation and a healthy dose of human expertise.
The types of phrase we pick out are like these:
“I’m going to lose my home...”
“I’ve just come out of hospital...”
“My partner is with the angels now...”
“I have to ask a friend to use their computer...”
“I’ve lost my job and I’m panicking...”
“My Dad is 94 and has dementia...”
“I’m 80 and…”
“I’ve got lymphoma…”
These phrases are then put into a classification framework which gets used to create segments we can analyse, and more importantly our clients can act upon.
What have we found?
Here are two examples of what we have found using our approach, both of which show why it is so important to measure vulnerable consumer experience.
At Logan Tod & Co we believe it is time to step up our understanding of vulnerable customer experience (vCX). The tools data, tools and skills exist, and the costs are low, so all that remains is for leaders to ask for the insight.
How are your vulnerable customer or patients experiencing your organisation?
If you don’t know we would love to help you take your existing CX, call centre or customer service feedback data and process it to let you know how the experience vulnerable people have.
