Hats off to the Money Advice Trust and the Collaboration Network for running a fantastic event last week.
Apart from getting to see people I hadn’t seen in AGES, I also got to finally meet some people for the first time in the flesh that I’d only ever met online.
Over the last few weeks a lot of us have been sharing our thoughts about the FCA’s review into customers in vulnerable circumstances, and finding our own way through what it means, what it means for our businesses and what we need to do. The one thing the event reminded me of is the value of people getting together and discussing issues of the day with other people grappling with the same challenges. Online just isn’t quite the same.
What we discovered is that for many of us in the industry we’re at different stages of our maturity model around vulnerability – and there’s a need for us to get the basics right before we head off into the outcomes sunset without a clear view in sight. As a starting point:
We need to ensure we create the space for our customers to feel comfortable to tell us what’s happening in whatever they want to.
We need to ensure we have insight from our customer interactions, actions, inactions and reaction, to identify customers who could be silently struggling and “open the door” for us to proactively look to prevent harm.
We need to know who our customers are. Armed with that knowledge we can then – and only then – have a good understanding of likely harms, and be able to design our products, training, processes, policies and communications to stop those harms caused by our own hands.
And then we need to repeat these. Often.
