Embedding Vulnerability Consideration across Your Business: A Fireside Chat with Karen Stewart, Senior Vulnerable Customer Consultant at Standard Life Customer Engagement Examples of Excellence

We are all potentially vulnerable at some stage in our lives be it a life event like redundancy or a bereavement through to our own health. Consumer duty is all about delivering good outcomes for all customers and vulnerability is mentioned more that 100 times in the final paper so from a regulatory aspect, it’s critical.  We have never been driven by regulation alone and we have a market leading strategy and societal responsibility behind our approach.Customer facing colleagues are key when it comes to supporting customers in vulnerable circumstances however we recognise the need to really embed vulnerability consideration into everything we do and into our product, proposition and communication deign.  If we don’t embed consideration at this earlier stage, our customer facing colleagues will always be met with customers struggling to engage with our products and services.Our approach to embedding vulnerability consideration is key to helping us achieve good customer outcomes and our approach has been to embed a framework supported by principles and standards as well as a three pronged approach to training which has allowed us to bring vulnerability to life for our colleagues and to help close the empathy gap for colleagues fortunate enough to have not been impacted by vulnerability or an accessibility challenge.