Embedding Financial Counseling and Responsible Sales into Customer "Trust Points" 

Financial capability is a set of tools and skills to effectively manage one’s finances within an environment that facilitates access to financial services. EA Consultants works with organizations to integrate financial counseling into their existing customer service and engagement activities to increase financial capability and allow customers to make sound financial choices.

With the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, we recently developed a toolkit for mortgage counselors and attorneys to provide integrated financial counseling to their clients; homeowners who are facing potential foreclosure. These professionals are trusted resources for clients in mortgage distress, but they are also busy and time constrained.  This limited CNYCN's opportunity to leverage these "trust points" to introduce financial counseling to their clients.  To tackle this challenge, we mapped the client journey to identify the most effective moments and touch points for counselors to introduce conversations about financial goals and behaviors. Combining in-depth qualitative client interviews and direct observation, the EA team identified clients' willingness and ability to process new information along the journey. Finally, we surveyed clients to identify the most relevant financial counseling content that would have the highest impact on this client segment.  CNYCN now has a tool that is efficient, by focusing on using the right trust point, at the right time with the right content.  

The work with CNYCN builds on much of our international work on responsible financial services. Outside the United States, we also find that front line staff are important trust points for clients. But much like at CNYCN, these staff face important time constraints and multiple responsibilities. This can threaten consumer protection when offering new products, such as insurance, if clients don't pay attention to or understand important information.  Our response is to embed educational content and delivery into existing interactions between front line staff and clients to address these constraints. In Argentina, for example, we collaborated with the Associación Mutual de Protección Familiar, a nation-wide mutual society, to strengthen their process for selling microinsurance to low-income clients responsibly. We redesigned sales techniques and marketing materials for front-line staff that could be delivered during key touch points with client testimonials and simple messaging to provide clients with sufficient information to make sound purchase decisions.  We then trained middle and senior management to understand that effective marketing and responsible sales can be one and the same.

Face-to-face financial capability training can be costly and time consuming for both clients and service providers.  These obstacles can be exacerbated by a lack of trust in new and unfamiliar organizations.  Often, there are only a few trust points that offer low income and vulnerable communities a safe space to discuss financial goals, problems and successes. Leveraging the relationship between front-line staff of organizations that have already built trust with their clients can help overcome these obstacles, but it must be balanced with a cost-effective plan that does not burden their time excessively. To do so, services must be customized to each institution's needs and structure and financial education should be offered using the right trust point, at the right time with the right content.