At Davies, we focus on helping our clients assist their customers more effectively. This includes support for customers dealing with bereavement and navigating the bereavement process. We recently conducted a round table discussion where we were joined by representatives from across the customer management industry. We discussed how best to support these customers with this task.
Easing the Customer Journey
The first topic was how to ease the customer journey. We established a consensus that there needs to be a balance between maintaining safeguards and making this journey as friction-free as possible for the customer. Research indicates that around 25% of people dealing with an estate need to talk to 10 or more organisations. In the whole, this is a significant task at a time of difficulty.
Challenges in Bereavement Contact Handling
Many suggestions reflect standard best practice in contact handling. Ease of access and notified progress are examples. Bereavement introduces additional challenges, both emotional and process related. Chief among these, through a process-lens, is that many of the people you are dealing with may not already be a customer. This makes it a new experience that may have to be learned. Combined with the volume of organisations and the checks that need to be completed, this can become a daunting task.
Role of Technology in Alleviating Strain
There was consensus in the group that technology can be used to alleviate some of this strain. The standard self-service technologies are always an option. However, the bigger opportunity may lie in back-office support systems. These allow organisations to gather additional information without direct customer involvement, easing the overall journey for the customer. Further, private industry can learn from the government, who have deployed proactive notification services to simultaneously notify multiple departments and avoid the need for customers to continually repeat their story. If an equivalent were to be available to private companies, the journey could be moved to a more proactive process. This would significantly reduce customer effort, reduce contact volume, and help organisations deal with dormant accounts.
Human vs Automated Contact
There tends to be an assumption that bereavement contacts need to be handled by a human, to ensure empathy. But reflection within the group suggested this was not the case. People (and cultures) process grief differently and so may wish to deal with someone’s affairs in a range of ways. Some will choose automated solutions to avoid the conversation entirely and reduce their own emotional burden. As always, customer choice is key. But when customers do want to talk to a person, that person is core to the customer experience.
Specialised Agents and Staff Support
Key themes emerged around the provision of specialised agents to handle this contact and ensuring that they have time to do so. Most of our participants did not set handling time targets for these calls. It was also recognised that as well as making sure that staff are trained to handle these conversations, organisations also need to take care of both general and specialised staff. It’s important to ensure that they have effective support, in terms of emotional resilience and management skills; but also, the process that underpins the journey needs to be robust enough to deliver the right outcome for the customer. This is the key to getting it right for these vulnerable customers.
Handling the Person, Not Just the Process
Further discussion focussed on the handling of the person, as opposed to the process. There was recognition that this is a core aspect of the overall experience, a view supported by the Davies-sourced data and by Andy Langford, our guest speaker from the bereavement charity Cruse. Again, customer service basics apply here; avoid unnecessary jargon and look to mirror the customer, but the bereavement element adds complexity as customers in this position generally exhibit amplified emotions, both positive and negative. Get this part of the customer experience wrong, and it likely goes very wrong, but get it right and you create a lasting impression.
Current Gaps in Industry Performance
Our analysis of available data however, suggests that a lot of businesses are currently getting it wrong, there are poor scores on public review sites and plenty of complaints to the Ombudsman which reference bereavement. Contact us to find out more about how we help clients meet obligations under Consumer Duty with their vulnerable customers and how you can ease this journey for your customers at this difficult time.
Upcoming Round-Table Events
Davies are running a series of round-table events, so sign up for the opportunity to discuss the most challenging issues in the industry with experienced peers and specialist speakers.
