Bereaved customers
Somewhere in your organisation, today, somebody is going to answer a phone and hear a stranger say that their husband has died.
That call is the most emotionally loaded contact most organisations ever take, and it usually lands with whoever happens to be on the queue. They will be kind, because almost everybody is. Kind is not the same as competent, and the difference between the two is a process somebody has thought about in advance.
I am interested in the gap between how your organisation believes it treats bereaved customers and what it is actually like to be one. In my experience that gap is wide, and nobody inside the building can see it, because the complaints that would tell you about it mostly never get made. People in the first few weeks after a death do not have the energy to complain. They go elsewhere, or they go quiet.
The regulator has already said this
The FCA’s multi-firm review of bereavement and power of attorney handling in banks and building societies found staff unclear about what to do and how quickly, people unable to get at funds to pay essential bills, and customers lost inside fragmented systems.
They have since opened a review of consumer investment firms, covering platforms, advisers and wealth managers.
Where it usually goes wrong
The first contact
Somebody tells your frontline that a person has died, and the script has nothing in it for that. What follows is either an improvised kindness that goes nowhere, or a security question. Both are remembered for years.
The handover
They are passed to a specialist team, which is the right thing to do, except that the note does not travel with them and the whole thing is told again from the beginning. The second telling is the one that breaks people.
The waiting
Documents are requested, received, and requested again. Nobody can say how long it will take because nobody owns the whole of it. Meanwhile there is a funeral to pay for and an account that will not open.
The letter that arrives afterwards
Months later, addressed to the person who died, from a system nobody remembered to tell. This is the one that gets written about, and it is almost never malice. It is one database that never spoke to another.
Worth knowing
There are already free routes that do some of this for people. Tell Us Once covers the government departments. The Death Notification Service, run by UK Finance, covers a lot of banks and building societies. Life Ledger and Settld each cover more than a thousand companies.
If you are not connected to the ones that apply to you, you are making people do by hand what could have happened once. That is usually the cheapest fix available and the first thing I look for.
What I do about it
Walk the route
I follow a bereaved customer end to end through your organisation, across every channel they would really use, and write down where it breaks. Not where the process says it breaks. Where it does.
Train the people who pick up
Frontline staff, not just the bereavement team. What to say in the first thirty seconds, what never to ask, and how to hand somebody on without making them start again. Short, practical, and built for a contact centre rather than a conference room.
Rewrite what follows
The policy, the process and the letters. Particularly the letters, which are usually the oldest thing in the building and the part a grieving person actually holds in their hands.
Where to start
Ask me what it is like from the other end
If you want a sense of this before committing to anything, tell me which sector you are in and I will tell you what I would expect to find. I have been the person on the phone saying it, more than once, and I remember which organisations made it easier and which ones made it worse.
Or write to ollie@aftergrowth.co.uk. All six things I do.
