Empowering customers: The role of Support Hub in enhancing NewDay’s services

Why is supporting vulnerable consumers so important to NewDay given the products it offers and the consumers it serves?

NewDay’s purpose is to help customers move forward with credit. We believe that credit is a force for good and that responsible and accessible credit expands possibilities. Our diverse portfolio covers a wide range of customers including those who may struggle to access credit elsewhere and need support building their credit file. The FCA conduct regular research that outlines that around half of UK adults experience characteristics of vulnerability, and we know from our own research that our customers are may be more likely to experience these. As such, it’s important to us that we have a deep understanding of our customer’s customers’ needs, design our products and services with that in mind and more importantly can revisit these and adapt when we see areas which may not work well for customers.

What are some of the innovative ways NewDay is supporting its vulnerable consumers?

We’ve spent a lot of time investing in and refining our technology to support our customers. It’s really important to us that customers have seamless online journeys where they can self-serve but if things go wrong, or customers need additional support, they have a choice of channels to contact us. We use technology such as intent detection to ensure customers are directed to the right team first time when they need support via our voice or chat channels.

As more and more services are now available online, we adapted in our Contact Centres recruiting and we are training ‘Digital Coordinators’. These are colleagues who are on hand supporting customers who need a little more help with online journeys, taking their time to walk customers through how to access and self-serve online. Our agents have access to a suite of help videos and useful links which they can send to customers to explain more complex topics such as interest and charges, signposting to external support or information about how their statement is structured.

Over the last few years, we’ve also been using AI to support our agents in delivering fair outcomes for our customers, through tools like Clever Nelly and our own inhouse Agent Assistant so we ensure that our colleagues have the knowledge to give customers the right information with appropriate context.

We also partner with a range of 3rd parties to provide additional support to customers. We’re proud of our partnership with Experian Support Hub, being involved in the design and launch of the “tell us once” solution which makes it easier for customers to notify us of their support needs. We’re also in the process onboarding a number of other brands to enhance accessibility including the introduction of BSL interpreter services.

What are some of the most important ways to empower your call centre staff when interacting with vulnerable consumers – what has worked well for NewDay?

It’s really important to us that our colleagues feel empowered to do the right thing for our customers. Our front line agents all receive dedicated training on vulnerability and are invited to attend regular events from external 3rd parties sharing lived experience.

Whilst it’s important in a regulated firm that we have processes and procedures in place, we recognise that sometimes we need to do things differently. One of our core company values is ‘do the right thing’, this is a message which resonates throughout the company from the Board down to the front line and feeds into our reward and recognition schemes.

They need to feel that they can step outside of process where it’s right to do so and we have a number of mechanisms in place which support them to do so, these include ‘virtual floorwalker’ channels where they can quickly seek management or subject matter expert support and more importantly our outcomes focussed quality assurance framework allows for ‘justified deviation’ meaning that agents can feel empowered to do the right thing and not be penalised by a rigid QA framework.