The Importance of Empathy: Vulnerable Customer Skills

The FCA has been clear: fair treatment of vulnerable customers isn’t about policies on paper, but about the end result – the achievement of good outcomes.

With the complexity and variety of customer vulnerabilities – and the depth of response now required – we’ve seen so many firms asking how can they make sure their teams get fair treatment of vulnerable customers right?

Training is one of the most direct ways to build awareness, not just of the regulatory requirements, but of the actual experience of vulnerable customers. In the race to create and implement policy in the wake of the Guidance document and the Consumer Duty, we’ve seen time and time again firms overlook this very important facet of fair treatment.

Look at any FCA publication on fair treatment of vulnerable customers, and one word will pop up repeatedly: empathy. In the case of working with customers with characteristics of vulnerability, empathy isn’t a soft extra, it’s a core professional skill.

With so much work to be done on compliance and the Consumer Duty, empathy can feel a bit like background noise, rather than a central part of what fair treatment really looks like.

Vulnerability isn’t always visible. It can be temporary or long-term, and caused – or exacerbated - by events like bereavement, illness, or even financial distress. Customers don’t often label their own experiences as ‘vulnerability’, and the majority won’t know that firms can and want to help them.

This is where empathy comes in, and why it’s so important to the FCA.

An empathic approach helps frontline staff to recognise the subtle clues that someone is struggling and needs that early support to help them achieve good outcomes. It helps staff to respond in a non-judgmental way, which can have a huge impact on disclosure rates, and make a major difference to outcomes.

Empathy isn’t about being overly emotional, or getting drawn in. It’s about understanding another person’s perspective and adapting the approach to best support the customer.

And it isn’t just frontline staff who need to know how to use empathy to support vulnerable customers. Senior staff, and those who design products and services, need to understand how characteristics of vulnerability impact their target market to know how they’ll interact with the products themselves. If those systems don’t account for real-life challenges, then those products won’t deliver.

Our dedicated Fair Treatment of Vulnerable Customers training course uses a scenario designed to encourage learners to ask questions about compliance with customers’ actual experience at the forefront. Empathy comes naturally to many, but in a structured, regulated, environment, staff also need to learn how to apply it professionally.

Our e-learning course helps staff to understand why practical support matters, and how it links to regulatory expectations, to learn techniques to build rapport and actively listen, even in time-limited calls, and explore real scenarios where empathy – or lack of it – directly shapes customer outcomes. By using examples, videos and interactive tools, this course supports staff in building not just knowledge, but intuition – the sense of how to understand and support vulnerable customers in real time conversations.