How to test critical banking journeys with customers in vulnerable circumstances
Consumer Duty has raised expectations for how financial institutions understand, monitor, and improve customer outcomes. Firms are expected to do more than measure operational performance—they need to demonstrate how they assess, monitor, and improve customer outcomes, including whether customers can understand, use, and benefit from financial products and services.
This is especially important for customers in vulnerable circumstances. Vulnerability is not limited to a specific group of people and is often temporary or situational. Life events, health conditions, financial pressures, bereavement, or changes in personal circumstances can all affect a customer's ability to navigate financial decisions and services.
As a result, banks and building societies face an important challenge: how do you know whether critical journeys are genuinely clear, supportive, and easy to act on for customers with different levels of confidence, capability, and support needs?
Traditional metrics can reveal where problems occur. But understanding whether customers truly comprehend a fee explanation, know how to respond to a fraud alert, or feel supported during a bereavement journey requires something more direct: observing customers with different levels of confidence, capability, and support needs as they experience those interactions.
Where standard metrics fall short
Most banks already track extensive performance metrics. They monitor conversion rates, complaint volumes, contact center activity, digital engagement, customer satisfaction scores, and operational KPIs.
These metrics are valuable, but they often tell teams what happened rather than why it happened.
A completion rate may indicate that customers successfully navigated an onboarding process. A complaints report may highlight issues with a product communication. A contact center dashboard may reveal an increase in calls related to fraud alerts.
What these metrics often fail to show is how customers interpreted the experience.
Did they understand what they were being asked to do? Were they confused by terminology? Did they lose confidence at a critical moment? Did customers with different support needs experience greater difficulty than others?
Without direct customer feedback, organizations may struggle to identify where certain customers are experiencing poorer outcomes or where additional support may be needed.
A real-world example
Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) faced this challenge as part of its Consumer Duty work. With hundreds of customer communications to review, the organization needed a way to assess whether customers truly understood the information they were receiving.
Using UserTesting, YBS created a structured process for evaluating customer understanding. Participants reviewed communications and explained them in their own words, helping teams identify areas of confusion before publication. The approach helped YBS increase customer understanding of financial offerings on the first try by 21% and improve its first-time pass rate for communications from 40% to 61%.
The lesson was simple: content that appears clear internally may not be clear to customers. Testing provided evidence of what customers actually understood and helped YBS improve outcomes before issues reached production.
Customer Story
Yorkshire Building Society + UserTesting
Learn more about how Yorkshire Building Society worked with UserTesting’s Professional Services team to address the UK Consumer Duty and raise customer understanding
Critical journeys to test
Not every banking journey carries the same level of risk.
Organizations should prioritize testing experiences where clarity, confidence, timing, and support have the greatest impact on customer outcomes.
Examples include:
- Product explanations and disclosures
- Fee and overdraft communications
- Debt communications
- Fraud alerts and fraud recovery journeys
- Onboarding and identity verification
- Payments and money movement
- Disputes and complaints processes
- Claims journeys
- Bereavement support
- Account recovery and account closure
- Customer service and support handoffs
These are often emotionally charged or high-consequence interactions where misunderstandings can lead to poor outcomes, increased complaints, operational costs, or loss of trust.
What teams should look for
When evaluating critical journeys, it's important to look beyond task completion.
A customer reaching the end of a journey does not necessarily mean they understood it.
Instead, teams should seek to understand:
- Do customers understand the information being presented?
- Do they know what action to take next?
- Can they easily find help when they need it?
- Do they feel confident in their decisions?
- Are key messages clear and easy to interpret?
- Does the experience create confusion, stress, or uncertainty?
- Are there moments where trust is lost?
- Do customers with different support needs encounter additional barriers?
Observing customers as they think aloud and interact with real experiences can reveal issues that would never appear in analytics dashboards or survey scores alone.
For example, a customer may successfully complete an identity verification process while still feeling uncertain about why certain information is required. Another may read a fee disclosure without fully understanding its implications. These moments rarely appear in operational metrics, but they can significantly influence customer outcomes.
How UserTesting helps
UserTesting helps financial institutions evaluate critical banking journeys with customers who reflect different levels of confidence, capability, and support needs.
Because vulnerability is often situational rather than permanent, organizations need access to a broad and diverse participant pool rather than a fixed customer segment. UserTesting enables teams to evaluate experiences with a wider range of customer circumstances, helping uncover risks that may otherwise go undetected.
UserTesting can help teams recruit and screen for participants with vulnerability-relevant characteristics, such as lower digital confidence, financial stress, age, or other support needs. For more sensitive characteristics, teams can work with UserTesting’s audience solutions team and follow appropriate ethical research protocols.
Video feedback provides direct evidence of what customers are thinking and feeling as they move through a journey. AI-powered summaries help teams quickly identify patterns and key findings, while highlight reels make it easier to share customer insights across the organization.
Centralized insights help teams move from isolated observations to a shared understanding of where experiences are succeeding, where they are falling short, and what should be improved first.
The result is faster, more informed decision-making grounded in real customer evidence.
How testing supports board and regulatory evidence
Testing with customers can also help organizations build a stronger evidence base for how they monitor, assess, and improve customer outcomes.
Traditional feedback mechanisms often identify issues after customers have already experienced harm or confusion. UserTesting enables teams to validate communications, journeys, and support experiences before launch, helping reduce risk earlier in the design and governance process.
Customer research creates a record of how experiences were assessed, validated, and refined over time. Teams can use findings to demonstrate where issues were identified, what actions were taken, and how changes were evaluated with customers before implementation.
This evidence can support internal governance processes, board-level reporting, and Consumer Duty discussions by helping organizations show that they are actively monitoring customer experiences and using customer insight to drive improvements.
Rather than relying solely on operational metrics, firms gain a richer understanding of how journeys perform in practice and where risks to customer outcomes may exist.
Importantly, testing helps organizations move from assumptions to evidence. Instead of inferring that a journey is effective because completion rates are high, teams can see firsthand whether customers understood key information, felt supported, and were able to make informed decisions.
Better outcomes for every customer
Understanding the experiences of customers in vulnerable circumstances benefits more than a single audience.
Many of the issues that create confusion, frustration, or poor outcomes for customers with additional support needs also affect the broader customer base. Improving clarity, support, and usability often leads to better experiences for everyone.
Testing critical banking journeys with real customers gives organizations a practical way to identify risks earlier, improve experiences faster, and build confidence that customers are receiving the support they need when it matters most.
As Consumer Duty expectations continue to evolve, firms that combine operational data with direct customer insight will be better positioned to understand customer outcomes, strengthen internal decision-making, and deliver experiences that work for all customers.
