In line with The Collaboration Network’s Vulnerability Week 2025, Ageas’s Chief Customer Officer Caroline King discusses how organisations can build customer trust through transparency and understanding.
As found in January 2025’s UK Customer Satisfaction Index, high levels of customer satisfaction correlate with emotional connection and perceptions about an organisation’s customer ethos, care for customers, openness, transparency and reputation.
These factors underpin how we build trust with customers and when given the right amount of focus, they enable stronger, more empathetic connections with customers, including those who are living with characteristics of vulnerability.
Temporary vs permanent
A key focus for me is the difference between a temporary and a permanent vulnerability.
It’s important to identify and approach permanent and temporary vulnerabilities differently and recognise that the appropriate way to approach and empathise in every interaction is different. Once individual circumstances are understood the approach can be modified according to customer needs.
For example, financial difficulty may be a temporary vulnerability for one customer, but the outcome of a permanent neurological condition for someone else. Memory loss due to an injury may be a temporary vulnerability, while someone living with dementia will need ongoing support.
Recognising and responding
As my colleague Stephen Linklater recently discussed in his article, customer needs are ever evolving, we don’t just expect a certain level of efficiency, as customers we require openness and transparency.
We must build trust to create an environment where vulnerable customers feel confident to disclose sensitive information, particularly where that information is to be recorded.
At Ageas we have committed to better understand customers living with characteristics of vulnerability through the Ageas Care Programme. A part of this is our use of the Ageas Care flag, where with customer consent, we can apply a specific flag to a policyholder’s account to ensure awareness of their needs at every point of contact.
These flags have been designed to enable us to understand a customer’s circumstance. They capture the support they need, for example alternative formats of communication, speaking slowly or having someone named on their policy to help them manage their insurance, including a Power of Attorney.
Having this information not only helps our people to understand how they can support a customer, but it also supports our work to understand the experience of our customers.
Connecting and engaging
Empathy is at the core of training for our customer-facing roles.
Empathy is only made possible with a level of confidence and understanding, and for this I recommend the use of a learning needs gap analysis.
In my experience this insight enables companies to ensure customer-facing employees know what to say to customers who are experiencing difficult and upsetting situations such as symptoms of dementia and domestic and economic abuse. At Ageas we’ve extended our training to neurological conditions that may impact how a customer feels when managing their insurance, such as autism, ADHD, and dementia symptoms.
Vulnerability champions
Whether it’s a claim handler interacting directly with a customer or someone in our underwriting function working on policy wording, every employee contributes to the service a customer receives.
All our people are vulnerability champions, and I believe it is extremely valuable to facilitate a business-wide level of understanding in terms of recognising vulnerabilities and how these needs can be supported. We have rolled out mandatory vulnerability training for all Ageas employees and the feedback has been positive, with people telling us they’ve used the training in both their personal and professional lives.
Digital future
As online self-service becomes the norm, one of the major challenges to building customer trust through transparency and understanding is identifying customer vulnerabilities in a process where there is no human interaction, where digital customers can easily become invisible.
To tackle this, we need to identify where we can enable customers to proactively self-declare their vulnerability circumstances and offer direct access to the support they need. Fundamentally it means that to support all vulnerable customers, we need to find a way of bringing the same empathy we deliver in person but embedded in our systems.
By sharing insights and best practices across industries through cross-sector collaboration, we can improve customer service not only for our own customers, but for the communities we operate in.
We recognise we can always do more, and whether it’s gaining insight through cross-sector collaboration, identifying areas of improvement for our training, or developing innovative technology, we always put customers at the heart of everything we do.