How we support vulnerable members

My name is Riffat Tufail and I am the Vulnerable Customer Manager.

I lead a team within Customer Operations to support our members when they find themselves in vulnerable circumstances.

As you can imagine during COVID and the ongoing pandemic, that we're all experiencing, sadly more and more of our customers and our members are finding themselves facing challenging situations like redundancy, or financial hardship - and I'm really proud as to how we've stepped up within Standard Life to support these members.

Some of the ways we've been doing this is we ensured that our Helping Hand Champions, who are our vulnerable customer champions within operations, received extra training in 2020. An additional 13 hours in fact, including some specialist training from the Samaritans about how to handle difficult conversations. We also created a financial hardship conversation guide in conjunction with Cowry, who are behavioural psychologist specialists, and that again ensures that we're having the best conversations with members when they contact us about these scenarios.

For customers, we've been working hard to ensure that they are protected from scams, so we introduced stop and think wording across our customer platforms. We also prioritise service for key workers and NHS staff. And finally we're making a difference by ensuring that if somebody needs money the same day or they need a faster money out payment that we're able to arrange that and help them in that moment that matters. so this year I'm continuing to focus on supporting customers who are impacted by the pandemic and also making sure that our colleagues are supported because these aren't easy conversations to have.

But I'm really excited as well about our wider program that we're going to be delivering in 2021 and also I hope that we are able to connect a bit more in 2021 because we're all missing that face-to-face interaction.