7 Pointers For Managing Vulnerable Clients In The Contact Center

In today’s environment, providing outstanding customer service is crucial, regardless of the business you work in. But providing a wonderful experience involves more than just promptly answering questions and directing clients to the appropriate channels.

Organizations need to have a plan in place for dealing with their more “vulnerable” customers in the current environment, when rising unemployment rates and economic instability are forcing customers into problematic situations. Growing your business depends on your agents’ ability to show compassion and empathy as well as adhere to the best practices for managing sensitive clients.

These are our best suggestions for dealing with susceptible clients in 2024

Understand How to Spot Susceptible Clients

Given that vulnerability is a term that is always changing, identifying vulnerable clients can be challenging. The FCA, for example, modified its definition of a vulnerable customer recently. The vulnerable definition today includes, in addition to well-known demographics like the elderly and those with specific medical issues, those who lack financial resilience, those who are addicted, and many others.

Organizations need to have a plan in place for dealing with their more “vulnerable” customers in the current environment, when rising unemployment rates and economic instability are forcing customers into problematic situations. Growing your business depends on your agents’ ability to show compassion and empathy as well as adhere to the best practices for managing sensitive clients.

These are our best suggestions for dealing with susceptible clients in 2024

Understand How to Spot Susceptible Clients

Given that vulnerability is a term that is always changing, identifying vulnerable clients can be challenging. The FCA, for example, modified its definition of a vulnerable customer recently. The vulnerable definition today includes, in addition to well-known demographics like the elderly and those with specific medical issues, those who lack financial resilience, those who are addicted, and many others.

An intelligent interactive voice response journey can be one method of identifying susceptible consumers before they get in contact with a contact center worker. Artificial intelligence (AI) solutions have the ability to identify keywords in a request and evaluate customer sentiment to identify whether consumers would be considered “vulnerable” and how best to handle their referral to contact center agents.

Enhance Your Approach to Agent Training

Employee training on a regular basis is essential in contact centers. It’s how you guarantee that the people of your team can maintain high levels of productivity and make the most out of the newest tools. However, agents require a particular kind of training that focuses on enhancing emotional intelligence and empathy while interacting with vulnerable clients. Teach your representatives how to:

• Use active listening strategies, such as asking the same question again to make sure the customer understood it.
• Modify their wording: In order to lower the possibility of misconceptions, train agents to speak in an easy-to-understand manner without being condescending.
• Establish your goals for the call: Give vulnerable clients advance notice of the nature of the call or contact and the details you will require from them.

Adopt Case Management Tools Driven by AI

It can take more than one conversation to allay the worries of a sensitive customer. It’s simple to make sure you’re following up with customers on time and providing a consistent experience with case management tools.

In addition, the system makes use of ChatGPT (generative AI) technology to identify the language and tone of client messages. This makes it easier to assign a low, medium, or high priority to each interaction so that the appropriate team member receives it. Additionally, the AI technologies in the solution can save agents time and effort by sending prewritten responses and suggested automated responses.

Use Sentiment Analysis Funds

Maintaining insights on client vulnerability can be challenging in today’s digital environment, when social media, chatbots, and other such platforms are used for numerous customer interactions. By providing agents and supervisors with a clear understanding of a customer’s emotional state at the onset of a conversation and during it, sentiment analysis aids in resolving this issue.

Even more, preemptive measures to prevent a susceptible consumer from suffering can be taken by agents with the use of intelligent sentiment analysis technologies, which can help them spot “negative sentiment” early on.

Use Savvy Chatbots

Companies must make sure that no consumer faces an obstacle to getting help, as mandated by regulations pertaining to handling vulnerable customers, such as the FCA’s “Consumer Duty” policy. Regretfully, accomplishing this with a small team of human workers can be challenging.

With the help of intelligent bots that are outfitted with natural language comprehension technology, you may provide round-the-clock customer service and support. They benefit businesses in other ways as well. For example, a sophisticated chatbot can pre-process client inquiries, choose which agent to assign them to, and provide contextual information to your customer support representatives.

Keep An Eye On Compliance And Quality Assurance

You need a thorough approach for keeping an eye on every interaction if you want to make sure you’re complying with the most recent industry standards and criteria for helping vulnerable clients. You can use quality assurance technologies to find discussions that need to be attended to based on text analytics, customer feedback, and performance statistics.

These tools can assist you in identifying possible issues that susceptible clients may encounter when interacting with your customer support representatives and in identifying areas that require development. Simultaneously, by guaranteeing that agents are abiding by policies and procedures for managing vulnerable clients, the appropriate monitoring technologies can assist you in making sure you’re meeting compliance standards.

Get Client Input

Nothing is more powerful than the voice of the consumer themselves, even though data-driven quality assurance and reporting solutions can provide you with insightful information about the interactions your teams are having with vulnerable clients. Developing surveys that vulnerable customers can use to provide feedback on provides you a more comprehensive understanding of the issues that need to be addressed.

With the correct surveying solutions, you can maximize team performance and rapidly identify trends and opportunities in your customer service strategy.

Provide Agents with Appropriate Technology

Lastly, we’ve previously covered a few ways technology may support agents in helping them deal with clients who are at risk. But there are a lot of additional ways that using the appropriate technology might provide your company a competitive advantage.

In order to improve compliance, AI-driven solutions can even assist agents in grouping their “vulnerable customers” into a distinct subgroup and preventing them from getting potentially upsetting automated marketing messages or sales pitches.