Last year, I spoke to Darren Rushworth, President of NICE International, about the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) new Consumer Duty regulations and how they were designed to protect consumers, particularly vulnerable ones, and drive better outcomes across the financial services sector. That article also focused on how technology could play a significant role in helping financial service organisations in the UK by providing customer service agents with real-time guidance, particularly when dealing with vulnerable customers.

Nine months after that article was published, NICE has just released a new research report that presents a new challenge within the same sphere. Their new research finds that while 17% of customers in the UK self-identify as vulnerable, as many as 67% of customers could potentially be classified as vulnerable when assessed against the FCA’s criteria.

Here are some of the other key findings of the report:

• While 39% of the survey’s respondents believe that vulnerability is solely dependent on age and only applies to those aged 65 and over, 38% of respondents in all other age groups reported that if their rent or mortgage payments went up by £50 per month, they would struggle to meet their obligations.
• Meanwhile, only 14% of over 65s felt heavily burdened by their current level of bills and credit payments. Moreover, this group was also the least likely group to have changed their behaviour due to financial pressure in the past year.
• Finally, 71% of consumers correctly identified poor mental health as a driver of vulnerability, but despite that, 38% would not be comfortable sharing details of poor mental health with a customer service advisor. This number rises to 47% for those customers who reported in the survey that they were currently experiencing poor mental health.

These findings are eye-opening and highlight some of the challenges that customer service agents face when trying to be aware of and offer support to vulnerable customers.

However, they also raise questions, like why people resist identifying as being vulnerable even when they are and how businesses should respond.

Dr Simon Moore, a Chartered Business Psychologist and CEO at Innovation Bubble, is not surprised by these findings. He says that “many people’s sense of self, self-importance and societal standing or contribution comes from their comparison with others and their need for social acceptance and/or fear of social exclusion.” He explains that means that they will often project an air of self-confidence to ensure that they feel that they are not different or being left behind. To not do so would risk damaging their social inclusion or connections with others.

He adds that he believes that our current economic situation is also definitely having an impact on people, more broadly, as people are more and more aware that they need to be mindful of their finances, saying, “We get told all the time that prices are going up and you need to be careful. Check things, compare things, cut things – and for busy people, this becomes quite stressful as it is another plate to juggle in an already hectic landscape. As a result, many probably experience cognitive overload.” According to Moore, this leads to a “disabling of considered decision making as we lack the mental energy and capacity to cope with all the challenges that face us at one time. This is where our ego kicks in as it is easier to think that we can probably manage okay than to think that we are vulnerable and at risk, which indicates we are failing! No human likes to think they are failing.”

This goes a long way to explain why many consumers don’t self-identify as vulnerable even when they might be.

But how should businesses respond?

Moore suggests that organisations need to think broadly about the vulnerabilities that their customers may face and how they can “subtly support customer confidence by enabling them to research and find out things easily” all along their customer journey.

However, when they do need to contact customer service for support, Richard Bassett, VP of Digital and Analytics at NICE, suggests that “Artificial intelligence (AI) delivers a solution. Harnessing the power of your customer service data, AI can help to accurately detect signs of vulnerability during every interaction – be that stress, financial woes, or even a breakup.”

However, he goes on to say that technology is only part of the solution, and one of the most efficient and scalable ways to address this challenge within the contact centre is to align this technology with an organisation’s Quality Assurance (QA) process. This will allow them to better understand the number of calls coming in, how many are from customers who may be vulnerable and what sort of vulnerabilities they might have. That knowledge can then be used to target and train the right teams to be better equipped to deal with their customers, allowing them to be more empathetic, use more active listening, ask the right questions, etc.

The key point, for me, in all of this is how do we make the service and experiences we offer to our customers more empathetic?

While the need for more empathetic service is not new, technology is rapidly advancing such that it can play an increasingly important role in helping us make our service and experience more empathetic to our customers’ needs and requirements.

That’s a good thing and is long overdue.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Credit: Photo by Alex Ivashenko on Unsplash