Best Practice Case Study: Lloyds’ link to clinical, emotional support for cancer patients

As treatments improve and more people are living with cancer, increasing financial help is vital. In 2014, Macmillan published a report outlining how banks could help.

Having reviewed its support of vulnerable customers, Lloyds Banking Group worked with Macmillan to understand how the customer experience could be improved. This included setting up a dedicated team to provide financial support to customers, diagnosed with cancer, who bank with Halifax, Lloyds Bank or Bank of Scotland.

As a bank with 30 million customers, LBG collaborated with Macmillan on its approach to supporting customers affected by cancer with the objectives being to develop and implement:

• A new telephone-based specialist CST trained in partnership with Macmillan to support people affected by cancer;
• Training frontline and specialist staff at Lloyds on the financial implications of cancer;
• Improved customer journeys to enable early identification of customers affected by cancer and prompt referral to the CST;
• Design of more flexible policies and processes to help customers manage the financial impact of cancer;
• Joint branding in-branch and online marketing to promote and signpost to the service to encourage disclosure.
• A reciprocal referral process to maximise the opportunity for customers to benefit from holistic support.

Lloyds’s successes included:

• Giving customers access to the CST since launch on November 2016;
• Macmillan referring 1,200 customers to the CST;
• The CST referring more than 500 people to Macmillan’s Financial Guidance Service;
• Through referrals from Lloyds Banking Group, Macmillan’s financial support teams identified an additional £229,000 in benefits, grants and other support for Lloyds Banking Group customers.

Lloyds worked together with the charity on a joint marketing campaign which launched through multi-media channels in July 2017. The objective of the campaign was to raise awareness of the financial impact of cancer and the bespoke service available to Lloyds Bank’s customers.

Post-campaign results showed many results, such as the fact that calls increased from an average of 14 to 49 a day – a rise of 250 percent.

Lloyds also saw that awareness of the CST among audiences living with cancer increased from nine percent in August 2017 to 24 percent in December 2017.

Partnership awareness
The group also observed a 900 percent increase in referrals from the CST to Macmillan, while awareness of the partnership among diagnosed audiences increased from 13 percent in August 2017 to 24 percent in December 2017. Among diagnosed audiences, Lloyds Bank believes it is now the most recognised company to support Macmillan.

Lloyds’s messages were also relevant and engaging; people spent an average of four minutes and 12 seconds on the Macmillan webpage. The previous dwell time was one minute, 44 seconds.

Key achievements
1. Lloyds raised awareness and encouraged people with cancer to disclose to their bank, and seek financial support, so that they could get back to the things that matter most in their lives. Cancer patients are on average £570 a month worse off because of the diagnosis. Despite this, only 11 percent of people tell their bank about their diagnosis.

2. Lloyds provided more than 2,300 customers affected by cancer with personalised support across Lloyds Bank, Bank of Scotland and Halifax, with an average customer monthly saving of £107 over a six-month period. Lloyds also transferred customers to Macmillan for emotional, clinical and practical support, as well as wider financial support such as pensions, insurance, grants or claiming welfare benefits.

3. Lloyds organised training of 18,000 frontline staff on supporting customers with the financial impact of cancer. The group also oversaw bespoke training of 120 specialist colleagues in the Cancer Support Team (CST) to help customers manage the financial impact of cancer.