The data science team at Aviva developed a framework to measure whether vulnerable and non-vulnerable customers are being treated fairly and creating standardised reporting to meet ongoing Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) requirements. By doing so, the Aviva team has delivered numerous benefits including improved regulatory compliance and increased operational efficiencies.
“Inspiring story to demonstrate how data can be used for good.” – Judges’ comment
Aviva’s data scientists standardised identification of vulnerable customers using natural language processing techniques that were collected from more than 12 million customer conversations – which in turn created an increase of 800% for identifying possible vulnerable customers – alongside a codified framework of over 100 different outcome measures covering 88% of Aviva’s active policies of how customers experience Aviva. Sub-types of vulnerability were identified (health, life events, resilience and capability) ensuring that the differences in needs, and how well Aviva met them, for each type of vulnerability could be understood (for example, someone with a health condition has a different need from someone with financial concerns). This unified view of customer vulnerability created the basis to profile customer outcome measures. This represented the first systematic use of data to understand the treatment of vulnerable customers in Aviva within a cohesive framework as previously this was siloed into individual product teams or communication channels.
To build the outcome measures, new bespoke analytical views for each Aviva product focusing on customers were designed, combining policy, customer, and interaction data in a single location. To enable comparison between different product lines outcome, measures were grouped into demographic, policy information and customer experience. This grouping allowed for a comparison across the product range and the identification of general area performance. Both vulnerable and non-vulnerable customers were scored for all outcome measures to determine whether they were being treated fairly and the results shared with each product or operations team and internal customer working groups.
The importance of regulatory compliance cannot be overstated as the FCA issued fines of £51m in December 2022 alone. By utilising data to create a new system that improved compliance and customer care, Aviva formed a new way of working with data to improve multiple aspects of its business. Through codifying the outcome measures and embedding the reports, the Aviva data team has increased operational efficiency by reducing manual efforts, centralisation of reporting and the availability of enhanced data sets for other projects. The standardised view of vulnerable customers has given more confidence in reporting of vulnerable customer profiles and enabled a faster, more comprehensive response to FCA queries, reducing time to complete these queries from weeks to days.
