Validating your customers' understanding

Using our Customer Understanding Hub, we can test your key documents and give you a benchmarked score on understanding for Consumer Duty and the FCA’s requirements.

Surface pain points in your communications so that you can improve your customer engagement and loyalty with prospects as well as existing customers.

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Customer Understanding - a neon sign reading blah blah blah

Our expertise, insight & conclusions

Ahead of the July 2023 deadline, we tested more than 250 documents with 1,000 end consumers. Download our white paper, Consumer Understanding – shaken but we’re not stirred. 

Drawing from insights gathered we unearthed evidence of regulation that challenges an industry.

Jargon and complexity still dominate, with just one third of documents we tested given a rating of 4 out of 5 or above in our benchmarked Customer Understanding scorecard.

How our testing works

Get actionable insight through a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods either by accessing your target market, or by using your own customer base. We can recruit quality, proxy customers, at pace, thanks to our always-on community, filled with retail investors, The Wise Society. Our members are profiled so we can find the right participants that suit your current or future customer base. We select the right audience for you depending on your requirements across: financial sophistication, gender, age, financial products held, level of wealth, vulnerability etc. If additional sample is required, we can source that for you.

Participants then join our customer understanding hub for the duration of your activity. They are shown a range of communications, which we choose together, based on an agreed prioritisation framework. Documents across the entire customer journey can be tested: pre-sale; point of sale; ongoing service materials; and exit communications for retail investors.  

A series of activities can be combined over a few days to reflect, in part, the customer journey and build on participants’ understanding.

Our actionable recommendations will provide you with evidence that you are meeting good outcomes. We recommend using the tool as part of your regular testing cucle to ensure ongoing product governance and risk management, as well as helping you to prioritise spend.

Get in touch to find out how you can use our Customer Understanding Hub.

A quote from our client

“The Wisdom Council have been supporting us with consumer research on an ongoing basis and the work has been fantastic.

It is a slick experience, quality testing, and then great analysis output. The whole team at TWC have been great to work with and we are really pleased with the quality of work undertaken. They have been there at every turn!”

Consumer Research Team – St James’s Place

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Integration of quant and qual tools

We utilise multiple tools to validate understanding of your key documents. Qualitative tasks are built into the platform to gather comments and overall feedback on documents.

Participants can also add their opinion directly onto documents via short surveys, annotation and highlighter tools – all facilitated and moderated by The Wisdom Council researchers.

Our modern, social-platform-style hub generates richer feedback as participants are more engaged in the activities presented to them.

Evidence ready for the FCA

Our aim is to provide you, your firm’s Consumer Duty Champion, and the Board with a concise report, which evidences good outcomes and proves your avoidance of foreseeable harm towards your customers. Our reporting will also offer detailed insights to improve your individual documents and identify key themes and principles to apply the learnings across your broad suite of comms, making the testing cost effective. Leveraging our experience of testing communications for 10 years, our team of researchers will perform an assessment of each document against four key metrics:

  1. CLEAR – How well did participants understand key messages and potential outcomes?
  2. RELEVANT – Did participants understand why they were sent the document and how relevant it was to them and their needs?
  3. ACCESSIBLE – Was the format and language east to access and engage with?
  4. COMPLETE – Does the document have sufficient information and signposts for where to go for more information and support?

Your documents will then be scored from 1-5, and the scorecard and findings will be presented to you in a dashboard. Where themes emerged in the research, principles for best practice from a broader industry perspective will be shared. We are also able to share with you how your overall scores compare to our benchmarked standard from across the industry. 

As the Consumer Duty deadlines has passed, our platform remains relevant for testing comms as part of your ongoing good governance practice. We are part of firms’ regular review processes so that they can identify ongoing triggers to test as key documents develop and customer needs continue to evolve.

Contact us

We draw on deep industry expertise, insight and our independent perspective to develop the tools you need to make savings and investments more accessible to all.

Get in touch to find out how, together, we can deliver financial products and services that your client wants and needs.

The Wisdom Council

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