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Consultancy

We test your customer journeys at the moments that matter most and where your customer is least able to advocate for themselves — that could be a claim, a bereavement, arrears, a complaint. These are the moments the Consumer Duty is clearest about: support that meets the needs of customers in vulnerable circumstances, and no unreasonable barriers to a claim or a complaint. Our work is most valuable where automation has either replaced or is now assisting a person. The question is simple: does the automation still deliver what the rules intend?

At Alsper Consultancy we believe efficiency should make the customer’s journey better, not only the firm’s. Every firm is using new tools to work more efficiently, and it should. That’s where we fit in: we test that journey.

Why it differs

Compliance checks the file after the event. The companies selling automation test their own product. Accessibility testing asks whether a journey can be used, not whether it delivers the right outcome. We test the journey as your customer lives it, independently of anyone who built it.

How it runs

  1. Walk it as a customer would, not as the file says.
  2. Find where a process has replaced, or now assists, a person.
  3. Follow the vulnerable customer’s path, not the one where everything goes smoothly.
  4. Report against your own outcome measures, and show where customers in vulnerable circumstances get a worse outcome than everyone else — the comparison the Consumer Duty asks firms to make.

I start by watching the process work as it really does, before changing anything. That’s how I turned round underperforming retail stores, and it’s how I still work.

Soon after qualifying as an adviser, I was handed phone scripts for talking to clients. I rewrote them so they worked better for the client and for the firm — the same thing I test for now.

Training in medicine taught me to ask the right questions in the right order, and to explain why I’m asking — the thing a claims journey most often forgets.

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