Delivering an exceptional customer experience is essential in today’s world, no matter which industry you serve. However, there’s more to delivering a great experience than simply responding to queries quickly, or serving customers on the right channels.
In today’s world, where high unemployment levels and economic uncertainty is pushing customers into difficult positions, organizations need a strategy for handling their more “vulnerable” consumers. Ensuring your agents know how to demonstrate empathy and compassion, and follow the right beset practices for vulnerable client management, is critical to business growth.
In fact, according to Gartner, businesses that demonstrate empathy significantly outperform their competitors in terms of profit and sales.
Here are our top tips for handling vulnerable customers in 2024.
“Today’s economic landscape places unique pressures on consumers, making it more crucial than ever to approach each interaction with empathy and understanding. Investing in training programs and new technologies can help ensure contact centres and their agents are equipped to identify, prioritise, and support vulnerable customers” Says Jo Sverre Lindem - Chief Customer Officer, Puzzel
1. Know How to Identify Vulnerable Customers
Identifying vulnerable customers can be tricky, as the definition of vulnerability is constantly evolving. For instance, the FCA recently updated its definition of a vulnerable customer. Alongside commonly known groups, like the elderly and those with certain health conditions, the vulnerable definition now also applies to people with low financial resilience, addictions, and more.
One way to identify vulnerable customers before they reach a contact center agent, is with an intelligent interactive voice response journey. AI-driven solutions can analyze customer sentiment, and pinpoint keywords in a request to determine which customers may be defined as “vulnerable”, and how they should be routed to agents in the contact center.
2. Upgrade your Agent Training Strategy
Regularly training employees is crucial in the contact center. It’s how you ensure your team members can make the most of the latest tools, and preserve high levels of productivity. However, when dealing with vulnerable customers, agents need a specific type of training, focused on developing empathy and emotional intelligence. Show your agents how to:
- Practice active listening techniques: Such as repeating the question back to your customer to ensure they’ve heard it correctly.
- Adapt their language: Teach agents to use simple, straightforward (but not patronizing) language, to reduce the risk of misunderstandings.
- Set expectations for the call: Offer vulnerable customers insights into what the call or interaction will entail, and what information you’ll need from them.
3. Embrace AI-Powered Case Management Tools
Addressing the concerns of a vulnerable customer may take more than a single interaction. Case management solutions make it easy to ensure you’re following up with a customer at the right times, and delivering a consistent experience. Solutions like Puzzel’s Case Management offering improves customer experiences by allowing them to track the status of requests, reducing stress.
At the same time, the solution leverages ChatGPT (generative AI) technology, to detect the tone and language in customer messages. This helps to identify each interaction as low, medium, or high priority, so it can be routed to the right team member. Plus, the solution’s AI tools can deliver recommended automated responses and drafted answers to agents, to save them time and effort.
4. Invest in Sentiment Analysis
In today’s digital landscape, where many customer interactions occur through social media, chatbots, and similar channels, it can be difficult to maintain insights into customer vulnerability. Sentiment analysis helps to address this problem, by giving agents and supervisors a clear view of how a customer is feeling when they initiate a conversation, and how their emotions change.
Intelligent sentiment analysis tools can even assist agents in identifying instances of “negative sentiment” early, so they can take proactive steps to protect a vulnerable customer from distress. For instance, Puzzel’s “Agent Assist” tool can track sentiment analysis throughout a conversation, and provide agents with immediate, personalized recommendations on how to proceed with a call.