What can Support Hub and businesses do to help vulnerable customers?

Having worked with a close-knit group of organisations in launching Support Hub, what have you learned from your peers that will help you in your role at Nationwide Building Society?

The best part about launching Support Hub was the collaboration with peers, experts by experience, and experts by profession. Nationwide has a long history of working with external organisations, like charities, to make sure we’re working with relevant experts — but getting together alongside other firms in the same industry meant that we have been able to talk about the issues and opportunities in the same language. Trying to deliver disability support and inclusion within the specific banking context was key to the discussion – and key to the success.

Our organisations collectively serve tens of millions, so you can quickly understand why it’s important that we drive consistency. That might be consistency in the language we use, so consumers recognise the same services regardless of their provider. Consistency between providers is also vital so we can see in black and white the areas where we need to close gaps in service provision.

We have seen that in order for an organisation to make its services more accessible across digital and non-digital channels it needs to look holistically across the organisation, and often work with suppliers, consumers and other stakeholders to deliver accessibility across all functions. This is no small task. If you could go back in time to before Nationwide started its journey in making its digital and non-digital journeys more accessible, what guidance would you give yourself before you started your accessibility journey?

There are definitely some key ingredients needed to help make for a successful ‘inclusive cake’:

1. Write it down. This applies to so many components: your vision, your risks, your actions, your best practice, the standards you’re setting. If you write these down then magic can happen, as what gets measured gets done. People can see where you’re headed, what you’re doing and what they need to think about.
2. Progress not perfection. When writing it down you might feel that what’s in front of you isn’t ‘perfect’ or the ‘right answer’, but don’t let that stop you. Commit to advancing from what you’ve written down – then the only way is up, and you can really see how you’re making incremental gains.
3. Listen. This can take many different forms, but it’s important to listen to your customers or service users; either through ‘real time’ examples like project-specific research, surveys, roundtables, user testing, or in the form of ‘lagging’ methods, for example complaints analysis and outcome testing of recent interactions to see if customer needs were met.

What do you think is the best way to ensure that lived experience is brought into the design and implementation of new support that organisations offer their customers?

It’s an art as much as it is a science, and we’ve sought to draw in aspects of lived experience from across the business and from the best external sources. For us, that’s meant research organisations and charity groups that can provide outside perspectives – for example, our work with the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute has meant that we can draw insight not just from their own experts, but from their panel of people who have lived experience of mental health problems.

Meanwhile, our own Member Connect panel of engaged customers and feedback from our disability employee network Enable has given us the internal Nationwide perspective from colleagues and customers. Hearing everybody’s thoughts and experiences gives us the broadest possible information base, and those diverse experiences help us develop the best possible responses for our diverse range of customers.

When you really start to understand your customers’ needs, that starts to dictate what your goals need to be and what you can start to build on. It’s a process of evolution, not revolution – methodically working to make sure we’re understanding what we’re doing, where to put the yardstick so we can measure our success, and getting it done.

What are your personal circumstances and how does it affect the management of your daily life?

This is always a slightly tricky question, because it entirely depends on context! But this is exactly what I would say, as a late-diagnosed autistic person. I found out that I am autistic a few years ago, on the heels of finally learning that both of my children are autistic and otherwise neurodivergent. That’s now basically a classic story: that parents realise that the reason our children remind us of ourselves at the same age… are the same reasons we always felt “different” and struggled a bit when trying to do certain things.

So that’s two things already: I’m autistic, and my children are too. The third important thing is that I am and always have worked full time in pretty demanding jobs – for the last several years as a program and portfolio operations manager in tech-driven drug discovery start-ups in the Cambridge UK area. I give everything for my job, and then some – I can’t help it! I also give everything for my children, one of whom is now grown up and the other just about to start secondary school.

So you can already imagine what life looks like in our family: it’s extremely busy, often tricky, never boring. I sometimes feel like my default is being pulled in many different directions, all of which I tend to want to give my full attention to, always. And I have several times the amount of paperwork and interacting-with-service-providers to get done than someone who does not care for neurodivergent offspring, because there’s paperwork for them too: the normal amount plus multiple times that, to get needed support.

When I have to engage with service providers, this is usually just one more thing – often the least important thing that is going on right now – and yes, that also includes figuring out what rate I should go for when the current mortgage contract ends, what pension provider to go with or which pension plans to consolidate or not and so on. These things are a big deal of course, but for me it takes that extra effort just to make space to think about them – and after that, it takes more time again to figure out what I need to do and find the energy to do it.

And, finally, once I am online to fill out a form or on the phone to answer some questions, it’s more likely than not that I either get interrupted – often due to my caring responsibilities – or the energy I could muster is sapped by inaccessible portals or phone calls.

Specifically, when engaging with service providers (e.g. banks/ utilities) what are some of the challenges you have faced?

Among the most difficult challenges for me are online portals that send the customer around in loops – this usually happens when you have just that one question that is not answered on the FAQ page. You find one “help” link you click on, that leads to another, there’s a third link… and you’re back where you started. Then you can’t seem to find an email or phone number for some sort of support or helpdesk, so you check one more time, just to make sure you haven’t missed anything… and around you go again.

At this point, I have probably run my energy down (“run out of spoons”), and/or one of my children needs me for one thing or another. So I leave it for now, often not to get back to it for a while.

Another challenge, for similar reasons (interruptions etc.) is when a portal times out. I just needed to answer a question, maybe step away from my screen for a moment – but when I get back, I am locked out and need to start over.

A third example would be when the reasons certain information or documentation needs to be provided are not clear. Context and reasons for asking for something are always helpful, probably for the majority of people. I’ve always been alert to this from my professional experience as well, thinking about personal and sensitive data sharing. But especially for disabled people, there is a good chance that there is an additional sensitivity around disclosing certain information anyway.

So the reason any information or data like this is asked for has to be made very clear (it’s astonishing how often this isn’t the case, even where it is legally required). And the process for providing it has to be as secure and straightforward as possible – for example, don’t make me go through fifteen minutes of filling online forms and then tell me you need a photo of my passport – so I have to scramble over to where I keep the passports, grab it, run back, find my phone, take a photo, and am probably locked out by the time I’ve done all that because some family member asked me a question in the middle of this as well (see above).

At this point I’m not sure I still have the energy to continue.

Just give me a list up front of what I will need before I start on the form!

What steps/support could your service providers take to help you engage with them more easily and/or use their services?

As mentioned, the easiest steps are:

• Provide different options for getting support to complete a task – online, via phone, or via email. Maybe don’t require people to install an app to interact with your service!
• Check that there are no “holes” or loops in your online processes – links that send people around in circles, or cases that fall just slightly outside of the “standard customer” the portal was designed for where people can get stuck.
• Think about your timer on the form: can you allow more time, or could it be made possible for people to pause the timer and get back to it later?
• Provide up front, easy to read information on what information you are going to ask for, why, and what documentation the customer or service user will need at hand before they embark out your form.