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In Focus Consumer Credit


Left-right: Sarah Watts; Scott Carter; Simon Bayley; Stuart Sykes >>


and a lot could not complete the change and closed. The best have


remained and they continue to improve.


How do you ensure your policies evolve to recognise and manage changes in vulnerable customer circumstances? SC: In the ‘olden days’, I feel that we would have been more likely to have that open conversation about ‘what is the problem, tell me about it’. There now seems to be a genuine fear


coming from staff, that if they ask too much or if they are seen to be probing too hard, rather than just writing down ‘vulnerable’ and going no further, then that is where we have hit a slight imbalance because allowing debts to fester is not good for anyone, particularly not those who are in financial difficulty. It is almost a question of how do we use


everything that we have learnt and all the technology that we have to free up the staff to regain that confidence to use and act with human empathy again.


SS: In some of the bad organisations, you lose some of the commerciality of understanding that they will need extra staff to pass cases on to. I have always worked with businesses


which have Customer Care Units, at our expense because they are not on the telephone making 100 calls each day, they are people who sit in the background, who have been on the training courses and have probably sat with the debt advisors in order to understand what is going on, that is their sole purpose. And if the case goes through to them it is


given a permanent marker so that if anyone else picks that call up, it goes to them


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There now seems to be a genuine fear coming from staff, that if they ask too much or if they are seen to be probing too hard, rather than just writing down ‘vulnerable’ and going no further, then that is where we have hit a slight imbalance because allowing debts to fester is not good for anyone, particularly not those who are in financial difficulty


immediately and the focus is on a personal touch and personal interaction. Because it is an expense, what you will


find with the organisations that are a bit more churn-driven, they will not put it in. They will stick the customer on the


power-dialer and they will not leave the notes correctly because it is just there and it is not the nature of the business. It is what these organisations need to get


to: when I worked at MyJar, we had a team in Estonia and none of them were trained in vulnerability, so that was removed from them and we had four people who went to all the training and did huge amounts of work. But even then after a point I would say


to them that they should refer a case to an external adviser because they have all this information, but you are qualified to deal with that case, so we move it on. But again, commercially you lose money when you pass that case on.


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SC: The commerciality comes in when you ask the question: how many telephone calls did we make for the sake of £9? It is so short-sighted. The bit that is missing is that each of


those people apologises to the customer, but none of them breaks the cycle and can see on the system that this is a vulnerable case, but there is almost an organisational fear to do that.


MN: From an educational point of view, as a provider, although vulnerability is on the agenda in the mortgage and financial- advice areas, this industry does not seem as up to speed as the wider industry, including debt collection. There is a currently something of a


boom in the mortgage industry for equity- release and later-life products aimed at older borrowers, and yet there is still a lack of education, so it is very interesting to hear people dealing with customers in financial difficulty asking if they are doing too much. If you think about lending to someone in


their 70’s or 80’s, then there is vulnerability right there: are they going to remember what they signed, are they going to understand what they have ended up with? And this is lending until death, possibly even to replace other debts that they have built up.


PM:We can blame the consumers or we could blame the lenders, or we could also say that it is our responsibility to react to circumstances in a proper way. We have a responsibility to educate and


influence consumer behaviour, which will take a long time, but what we can do in the short term is change how we respond to customer needs by helping them to find the best outcome. CCR


January 2020


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