About Legal and General
Legal & General is a well-established financial services organisation supporting customers through every stage of later life.
Within the Lifetime Mortgage Service team, Customer Outcomes Manager Elizabeth Elphick and her colleagues are dedicated to helping people over 55 understand their options for later life lending. This includes exploring ways to finance essential support such as in-home care, or to fulfil personal plans like a dream retirement holiday.
Legal & General partnered with Victoria to help the team better understand the experiences of customers who are deaf or have a hearing loss, identify barriers within their customer journey and enhance the accessibility of their services.
Customer service is central to Legal & General’s approach. With an average customer age of 69, the team recognised that age-related hearing loss and deafness are among the most common disabilities their customers experience.
As Elizabeth explained:
“Customer service is at the forefront of all we do. Our customers are all over 55, and we know our average customer is aged 69. And because we identified that age-related hearing loss and deafness are among the top disabilities our customers face, we knew that we could do more to help those customers if we had the right advice and training.”
They were also keen to understand where their processes already excelled and where meaningful improvements could be made.
Legal & General worked with Victoria to carry out a comprehensive accessibility audit across all customer touchpoints.
This included:
- A full review of customer service functions, systems and processes
- Assessment of core scripts and the IVR system
- Observation of customer journeys across multiple departments
- On-site time spent with frontline and support teams
- A review of website accessibility
- Lunch and Learn sessions for staff across the business
- Insight from a deaf colleague who shared lived experiences of customer barriers
Elizabeth summarised the wider impact:
“Because what we recognised and appreciated was that the audit wasn’t only useful for our deaf customers: it made us more aware of other vulnerabilities too.”
“What we appreciated was that there was no disruption to our daily function whatsoever. It wasn’t at all intrusive, and Victoria was so respectful of our processes, procedures and etiquette. Also, all the suggestions for improvements that were made were done proactively and with respect.”
— Elizabeth Elphick
“Legal and General is a massive organisation. So to help source the best options for training etc. we have a Group Customer Function department. They were aware of Victoria, and as some budget was available, they asked if we would like to use Victoria’s services. We jumped at the chance to take part in the audit and learn from it to improve and also identify the strengths we did have so we could build on them.”
— Elizabeth Elphick
“In particular, they worked with us on our core scripts and Interactive Voice Response (IVR), which had been operating a little too quickly and identified the need to put a ‘hold’ option at the end so people could speak to an operator if they wished to.”
— Elizabeth Elphick
“Victoria hosted ‘Lunch and Learn’ sessions with our staff and was fantastic at communicating with our teams at all levels. No question was left unanswered, and nothing was too much trouble for her.”
— Elizabeth Elphick
“They completed a full audit of our functions. It was fantastic and highlighted several things we could improve.”
— Elizabeth Elphick
“We’ve made improvements to our IVR system. We’ve also amended our core scripts and added more questions to capture any vulnerability at the start of the customer’s journey.”
— Elizabeth Elphick
“She also brought a deaf colleague who gave us first-hand knowledge of how some services are not helpful to the deaf. That was useful to us as a business as she also explained why she, as a deaf person, would actively avoid certain companies because of the experiences she’s had in the past.”
— Elizabeth Elphick
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