Temporarily vulnerable consumers in a bank

services setting
Abdelmajid Amine
IRG Research Center, Université Paris-Est Créteil, Creteil Cedex, France, and
Sherazade Gatfaoui
IRG Research Center, Universite Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallee, Marne la Vallee, France

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how temporarily vulnerable customers and their bank advisors cope with incidents that occur over
the course of their service relationships.
Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative design based on ten case studies, involving interviews with both sides of the dyad (client–bank
advisor) and internal secondary data from the bank, was conducted.
Findings – The findings show that the two sides of the dyad span a gradation of coping strategies that are enacted to solve the incidents
encountered. Thus, temporarily vulnerable consumers turn out to be non-passive in their asymmetrical relationship with advisors and deploy residual
resources to co-create solutions.
Research limitations/implications – The results enrich the knowledge of consumers’ vulnerability insofar as the authors extend the transformative
service literature to temporarily vulnerable clients who project themselves beyond the crisis period and consider ensuring satisfactory levels of their
well-being.
Practical implications – The findings suggest that banks can refine their categorization of vulnerable clients by identifying those that remain
profitable and for which an effort is worth making, and those in whom it is appropriate to disinvest. They also prompt banks to design supports for
the advisors in managing increased stressful interactions with precarious customers.
Social implications – To prevent the risk of slippage by or exclusion of, vulnerable customers who experience serious banking incidents, the paper
points out the necessity to mobilize alternative levers from the public and associative spheres to allow these customers access to a minimum of
banking services.
Originality/value – As an early exploration of transient vulnerable clients, this research fuels the understanding of their capacity to consider co-
creating, alongside bank advisors, solutions to the incidents encountered with a view to preserving their well-being and ensuring their social and
economic inclusion.
Keywords Vulnerable customers, Bank advisors, Coping strategies, Social inclusion, Well-being, Case study
Paper type Research paper

Introduction [understood as the uncertainty of being able to cover their

expenses related to their basic needs (Loisy, 2000)]. Moreover,
The global economic crisis impacted the financial resources while the various terms used to describe so-called vulnerable
and capacity of large segments of the population, exposing
consumers (“fragile,” “precarious,” “poor,” etc.) are of little
them to life-changing events, including reduced incomes, job
help in characterizing this clientele, the banking sector is
losses and redundancies. Nearly every social class, including
nevertheless in agreement in describing certain phenomena
those who weathered previous crises, such as the upper classes
encountered in their relations with vulnerable customers, such
and young graduates (Couret and Metzger, 2009), were
as over-indebtedness[1] or defaulting on the repayment of
affected to varying degrees. As a result, many individuals and
loans. These phenomena can be seen as expressions of
households experienced precarious situations, with varying
customers’ vulnerability and point to the increasing interest in
degrees of vulnerability, in many cases for the first time. This
understanding their situation (Gloukoviezoff, 2010).
trend is confirmed in a recent Ipsos-Secours Populaire
The banking sector is a distinctive environment for the
Barometer (Baromètre Ipsos-Secours Populaire Français,
2018), which reveals that 39 per cent of French households expression of this vulnerability because of its close relationship
stated that they had experienced a precarious situation with households’ available economic resources and its powerful
influence on people’s inclusion or exclusion from the realm of

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Received 19 May 2018
Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/0887-6045.htm Revised 6 March 2019
6 May 2019
16 May 2019
Journal of Services Marketing
21 May 2019
33/5 (2019) 602–614 17 June 2019
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 0887-6045] 18 June 2019
[DOI 10.1108/JSM-05-2018-0154] Accepted 21 June 2019

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 Consumers in a bank services setting
Abdelmajid Amine and Sherazade Gatfaoui
consumption. Like other service activities, banking designs its
service offerings according to the profitability of its customers
and their contribution to the bank’s financial performance,
without necessarily considering the potential (dis)advantages
that this may have on the well-being of the people concerned
(e.g. vulnerable clients and contact staff) in the community or
society as a whole (Anderson et al., 2013; Rosenbaum et al.,
2017). However, understanding of bank customers’
vulnerability is in its infancy, even though accounting for such
vulnerability might enable researchers to identify key
managerial issues, address relevant and recurrent situations,
preserve their well-being, and ultimately avoid the problematic
marginalization of vulnerable clients.
A banking relationship involves two main stakeholders – the
customer and the advisor – both of whom must mobilize
resources to sustain the relationship. While this commitment is
acquired in the context of a so-called “normal” relationship, it
is a different matter when it involves vulnerable clients. In this
latter interaction situation, the two stakeholders (advisor and
client) are in an asymmetrical relationship, to the advantage of
the bank. This vision, however, should be challenged to the
extent that it assumes, on the one hand, that the bank has no
interest in keeping precarious clients in its portfolio, and on the
other, that such clients experience the situation passively and
are unable make themselves heard or defend their interests.
The question, thus, arises of the willingness to maintain these
vulnerable clients in the bank’s business portfolio and the
possibility of investing resources in nurturing the advisor-client
relationship in this more or less risky context.
Although the emerging interest in the topic of vulnerable
customers’ relationship in the area of services mainly concerns
chronically vulnerable customers (see, for example, the JSM
special issue in 2016), no previous study has, to our knowledge,
either investigated the specific case of clients’ episodic
vulnerability relationship management or the contribution of
these customers to shaping solutions for maintaining their
inclusion in the banking system. The present research aims to
make good this lacuna by investigating, for the growing number
of clients who are going through episodes of vulnerability in the
course of their banking relationship, the coping strategies
implemented and the resources deployed individually and/or
jointly by the client–advisor dyad to preserve their relationship.
These preliminary considerations lead to an important issue
that has not been addressed: What coping strategies do
vulnerable clients and their advisors implement in banking
relationships? This question can, in turn, by subdivided into
two subsidiary questions. In what interaction contexts do those
strategies get constructed? Then, to what solutions or outcomes
do the strategies lead?
We, thus, make two main theoretical research contributions.
First, we test the potential of extending transformative service
research (TSR) in the case of customers’ episodic vulnerability
in their service relationships. Second, we enrich coping theory
by testing its relevance at the level of the dyad, where the
vulnerable client and the advisor seek to adjust mutually to
the constraints of episodes of precariousness in contrast to the
mechanisms of individual adaptation usually studied in the
literature on coping.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. First, we
present a theoretical framing of consumers’ episodic
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vulnerability. We then detail our methodological approach,
built on retrospective case studies of vulnerable customer–
advisor dyads. Next, we derive a gradation of five coping
strategies implemented by the dyad members to manage the
banking incidents encountered. Finally, we draw managerial
and societal implications aimed at preserving the inclusion and
well-being of vulnerable customers and the welfare of advisors.
Theoretical framework
Consumers’ vulnerabilities
The issue of vulnerability is central to many current debates at
theoretical, institutional and societal levels. This concept refers
to the experience of fragility[2] as a result of life’s unforeseen
events. More accurately, vulnerability can be understood as
stemming from a set of risk and uncertainty factors that impact
people’s jobs and their finances. It can be operationalized
through the simultaneous absence of stability in terms of
employment (not having a stable job), health (impaired
physical, cognitive or psychological capacities) or housing (the
homeless or those housed by other people, for example) (Loisy,
2000). Various sociological studies have described the
economic (loss of resources and loss of employment) and social
(breakdown of social links and exclusion) aspects of
vulnerability (Castel, 1991), but research is less well-developed
in relation to consumption and marketing, leading to
misunderstandings and some inappropriate uses (Smith and
Cooper-Martin, 1997).
In the consumption research area, some authors such as
Brenkert (1998, p. 13) define the vulnerable population as:
[. . .] likely to be brutalized by others (individuals, enterprises or institutions)
such that it has one or more deficits simultaneously (physical, cognitive,
motivational, social), and thus is less able than “normal” consumers to
participate in the marketplace.
In the same vein, Gondard-Delcroix and Rousseau (2004, p. 1)
conceptualize vulnerability as “the likelihood of welfare
deterioration as a result of a shock produced by external
pressures on dominated individuals.” Moreover, Baker et al.
(2005, p. 134) view consumer vulnerability as “a state of
helplessness arising from an imbalance in market interactions
or in the consumption of marketing messages and products.”
Nevertheless, by stressing external reasons and
underestimating the ability of consumers to mobilize their own
resources to deal with vulnerability, these definitions offer a
rather passive perspective on vulnerable consumers, who
seemingly fall under the domination of the market
environment, which alters their living conditions and well-
being. Yet, such a viewpoint obscures people’s capacity to find
and combine resources, even residual, to regain control of their
destiny.
If previous marketing work has addressed the issue of
vulnerability by focusing on registers that structurally disqualify
subpopulations of consumers such as disabled customers
(Beudaert et al., 2017; Kaufman-Scarborough, 2001), the
elderly (Moschis et al., 2011), the homeless (Hill and Stamey,
1990), low-income families (Hamilton, 2009), poor rural
migrants in metropolitan cities (Lee et al., 1999; Wang and
Tian, 2014), a form of vulnerability that has not received the
attention it deserves concerns temporary or transitory
vulnerability. This form of precariousness is associated with the
 Consumers in a bank services setting
Abdelmajid Amine and Sherazade Gatfaoui
growing proportion of individuals facing unforeseen events that
disrupt the normal course of events and alter their standard of
living. Vulnerability is, thus, no longer a permanent feature and
becomes an episode in people’s lives, caused by external events
(reduced purchasing power, health problems, etc.) or by the
individuals themselves (addictive or at-risk behaviors).
Therefore, for the remainder of this study, we use an “episodic
conception of the vulnerability” of consumers, in the sense that
they find themselves “temporarily unable to cope with their
current or exceptional expenditure because of external
constraints they are undergoing or their own risky behavior,
which ultimately affects their well-being”.
This conceptual shift toward the temporary or transitory
vulnerability of consumers’ echoes the field of observation
chosen for this research, namely, banking, insofar as clients’
financial situation may worsen following changes in their
professional, health or personal situation. Consequently, their
status will change from “right” profitable customers to “at-risk
right” customers retained in the client portfolio or they may
become “wrong” customers, with whom the bank may consider
terminating the relationship (Woo and Fock, 2004). This
question of the contribution of customer value to the financial
performance of the company (Kumar and Reinartz, 2016) has
been studied in the literature to help manage resource
allocation by the organization from the angle of customer
profitability analysis, a retrospective approach to customer
value (Pfeifer et al., 2005) and from the standpoint of customer
lifetime value, a prospective view of customer profitability that
predicts future cash flows and their volatility (Gupta et al.,
2006).
On another level, Brenkert (1998) and Baker et al. (2005)
raise questions related to the response strategies of both firms
and consumers to situations of vulnerability. Three types of
responses can be identified:
1 responses of consumers to their experiences of
vulnerability, including behavioral adaptations in which
they implement cognitive and emotional coping strategies
(Heckhausen and Schulz, 1995);
2 responses from the market (firms) and public policies,
such as the introduction of measures to help and/or
protect vulnerable consumers (Baker et al., 2005); and
3 new forms of solidarity in the voluntary sector and civil
society (Fraisse et al., 2007).
Transposed to the case of the banking relationship, the first two
types of response not only refers to the behavior of the
vulnerable client and the advisor but also to the bank’s practices
and its interest in managing the vulnerability of its customers.
This focus on stakeholder responses proposed by Brenkert
(1998) and refined by Baker et al. (2005) is interesting because
it gives a significant role to vulnerable consumers’ adjustment
strategies and also acknowledges the arrangements
implemented by account managers to assist them to mitigate
the deterioration of their well-being.
Empowering vulnerable customers
Vulnerability has mainly been studied from a negative
perspective, emphasizing the tendency for this subpopulation
to be marginalized and excluded from the market. However, a
counterbalancing emphasis would be on the ability of
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vulnerable people to deploy residual resources (Rosa et al.,
2012) that enables them to create a space for action, even in an
asymmetrical relationship such as exists with a bank. In doing
so, they try to protect themselves from possible practices in the
bank’s interest, such as predatory lending (Hill and Kozup,
2007) or limitation of access to credit facilities.
From the customer’s standpoint, the theoretical framework
of TSR seems particularly relevant for shedding light on the
transitory vulnerability of consumers in their relationship with
banks, in particular, because it makes the well-being of
individuals and collectives central to the outcomes of service
activities (Anderson and Ostrom, 2015). Anderson et al. (2011,
p. 3) define TSR as “service research that centers on creating
uplifting changes and improvements in the well-being of
individuals (consumers and employees), families, social
networks, communities, cities, nations, collectives and
ecosystems.” The TSR perspective views customers as players
acting on the market system to make their voice heard and
change the situation to their advantage. Thus, even vulnerable
customers can be expected to activate capacities to draw on and
combine marginal resources through interaction with the
organization and its staff so as to improve their well-being. This
empowering consumer view is consistent with Sen’s (1985)
broader theoretical “capabilities” framework, which explicitly
does not consider vulnerability a “non-capacity” and instead
introduces individual resilience as a resource that enables
people to cope with situations of fragility. Emphasizing the
freedom to be and to act, at a personal and social level, Sen
(1985) proposes reducing precariousness by improving
people’s “capabilities” in the long term and ensuring their
freedom to choose different ways of conducting their lives.
Through the resulting social opportunities, it becomes possible
to reduce vulnerability, and thereby lead to more fulfilling lives.
Consumers are, therefore, vulnerable if they are unable to
make necessary adjustments to protect their well-being when
exposed to adverse external events or when they engage in risky
behaviors that may impact their living conditions and welfare.
The ability of individuals and households to avoid vulnerability
or reduce it depends not only on the resources they initially
have available but also on the accessibility of these resources
and the ability to use them effectively for satisfying their needs
and achieving their goals (Sen, 1985).
Vulnerable customers’ coping with critical situations
Transposed to our research topic, individuals’ resilience
derived from the work of Sen (1985) implies that far from being
constrained by the asymmetric relationship with the bank,
vulnerable clients are able to mobilize resources and deploy
strategies to adjust to this unfavorable situation. The notion of
coping (Lazarus, 1966) is relevant here, in that it refers to a set
of reactions and mechanisms for dealing with stressful
situations. Folkman et al. (1986, p. 572) complement this
perspective by introducing individual resources needed to
handle stress, defining coping as the:
[. . .] person’s cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage (reduce, minimize,
master or tolerate) the internal and external demands of the person-
environment interaction that is appraised as taxing or exceeding the person’s
resources.
Moreover, these authors consider coping strategies as response
protocols aimed at either acting on the problem that generated
 Consumers in a bank services setting
Abdelmajid Amine and Sherazade Gatfaoui
the stress so as change it or regulating the emotions induced by
the situation that produces anxiety or stress. The objective of
implementing coping strategies is threefold – the minimization
of the threat, the positive reassessment, and the search for
emotional support – with a view to neutralizing the sources of
stress.
In the context of banking, temporarily vulnerable clients
experience episodes of economic and social fragility that are
intrinsically stressful and inducive of anxiety. They also face
demands and pressures (from the market, bank policy and
bank advisors) that exceed their resources and require them
to adapt their behaviors in response. Coping involves all the
resources used and actions taken by people to avoid or
manage the internal and external tensions to which they are
exposed (Hibbert and Piacentini, 2003). For episodic
vulnerable clients, these tensions are produced by declines
in income or changes to their social situation or physical
conditions (Beudaert et al., 2017), giving rise to a loss of
bearings that lowers their self-esteem and causes stress and
anxiety. We seek to identify and analyze the coping
strategies that temporarily vulnerable clients implement
conjointly with their advisors with a view to preserving, as
much as possible, their banking relationship. The
perspective of ending the relationship can be painful for the
actors in the dyad, especially when they have invested a lot in
terms of temporal and affective resources in the previous
stages of the relationship (Dwyer et al., 1987).
Methodology
We take a longitudinal, qualitative approach, based on 10
retrospective case studies (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 1990)
conducted with a French mutual bank. Each instance of the
banking relationship always involves a client and his/her
advisor, thus, making this dyad the most relevant unit of
analysis for identifying the rationales of actors punctuating this
commercial and human relationship. We, therefore,
interviewed both parties of the dyad to obtain their twofold
view of the service relationship as social interaction (Jeantet,
2003) and the coping strategies they implemented. As a
multifactorial approach, involving interviews with both sides of
the dyad and secondary data from the bank, our case study
method enables us to depict the history of the client-advisor
relationship and identify the tensions surrounding the
vulnerability experiences and the various coping strategies they
mutually applied.
In addition to the discourses of the two members of the
dyads, we used two types of internal secondary data, namely,
on the one hand, the bank’s database of its clients that reports
on the history of the banking situation and the financial
incidents that have punctuated the relationship between
customers and the bank; and on the other, customers’
complaints arising during vulnerability episodes, which helped
to identify the problems faced during their service experiences
(Strauss, 1993). These secondary data complemented the
informants’ narratives and fed into the various adjustment
strategies deployed by vulnerable clients and their advisors to
maintain (or possibly terminate) their service relationship.
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Data collection
The banking sector is an appropriate setting because it uniquely
reveals the vulnerability that clients experience and it inherently
involves interactions between clients and advisors, which have
effects on different aspects of these disempowered clients’ lives.
For vulnerable clients, a lack of expertise and knowledge
related to banking operations (financial illiteracy) can
accentuate their fragility and create even more precariousness
for them (Gathergood, 2012). In addition, banking
mechanisms and policies (e.g. overdraft charges) can even
mean that the bank is partially responsible for sustaining the
vulnerability of customers, who also suffer information
asymmetry and substantial financial dependence on their bank.
Critical incidents (Flanagan, 1954) served as the initial
determinants of client selection. That is, with the help of the
managers of the bank branches, we selected clients who had
experienced some situation of “temporary” vulnerability, as
revealed by bank incidents encountered over the previous five
years, at the time of the data collection. A critical incident
affecting the banking relationship (i.e. rejection of checks
issued and default on payments) implies experiences of
vulnerability for customers; it is also a vector that drives actors’
implementation of strategies to adjust to episodes of
vulnerability. Furthermore, apart from the level of incident
severity, the frequency of banking problems is also indicative of
the client’s degree of vulnerability, whose main consequences
are increased over-indebtedness and the risk of litigation.
We sought insights from the marketing and sales department
of a French mutual bank, four branches of which agreed to
serve as the locus for our research. The bank branches are all
located in the Ile-de-France region, two of them in the east
Paris area and two in the west Paris area. The locations of the
bank branches selected provide a diversity of catchment areas,
and thus, customers’ profiles, as the affluent western outskirts
of Paris contrast with the poorer eastern suburbs.
We, thus, defined, with the managers of these bank branches,
the criteria of eligibility of customers for being part of the
sample: having encountered banking incidents over the five
years prior to collection, experiencing isolated or recurrent
incidents, both serious and minor[3], and the varying duration
of the client’s banking relationship. In total, 10 advisors
attached to these branches volunteered to collaborate and share
their client portfolios with us. The preselected clients were then
contacted by the advisor to obtain their agreement to
participate in the research. Thus, 10 dyads, associating
temporarily vulnerable clients and their respective advisors,
were retained for investigation. In this research, the case study
is the dyad. On each occasion, the two members of the dyad
(client and advisor) were interviewed separately to examine the
banking incidents that had marked their relationship, and
which both parties remember.
Moreover, during the period of data collection that lasts from
January 2016 to February 2017, we conducted additional
interviews with four dyads of the 10 cases studied to investigate
incidents that occurred during our presence in the bank
branches and that weakened the banking relationship (by
moving the implemented coping strategy to a higher level).
This finally led to a total of 28 face-to-face in-depth interviews
with 10 customer–advisor dyads in the four bank branches
(Table I for the clients’ and advisors’ profiles).
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Abdelmajid Amine and Sherazade Gatfaoui Volume 33 · Number 5 · 2019 · 602–614

Table I Characteristics of the banking relationship cases

Dyads
No. of years of No. of years of Monthly Coping
Gender/age of Gender/age of relationship relationship income Recurrence strategies
Cases the client the advisor with the bank with the advisor in euros of incidents Context of the incident mobilized

Case 1 Male aged 36 Female aged 39 10 6 1,400 Isolated Loss of job in past six Mutual
incident months adjustment
Case 2 Male aged 29 Female aged 29 10 3 1,800 Infrequent Spouse’s sick leave for Influence
incidents one year
Case 3 Female aged 51 Male aged 28 20 4 2,000 Infrequent Delay in payments of Claim to the
incidents wages hierarchy
Case 4 Female aged 30 Female aged 30 15 2.5 1,700 Recurring Episodes of Avoidance
incidents overconsumption linked
to a period of depression
Case 5 Female aged 65 Female aged 35 30 2 1,200 Recurring Excessive over- Dissolution
incidents consumption following
the death of the husband
Case 6 Male aged 34 Female aged 32 12 3 1,300 Isolated Unexpected one-time Mutual
incident expense due to spousal adjustment
sick leave
Case 7 Female aged 28 Female aged 32 2.5 2.5 1,600 Infrequent Significant expenses Influence
incidents following health care
costs
Case 8 Male aged 45 Male aged 36 8 4 2,200 Infrequent Expenses due to a divorce Claim to the
incidents and a period of illness hierarchy
Case 9 Male aged 56 Female aged 55 13 2 1,800 Recurring Excessive over- Avoidance
incidents consumption, whereas the
spouse lost her job
Case 10 Female aged 45 Male aged 31 16 0.5 2,100 Recurring Extended delays in Dissolution
incidents payment by the
customer’s clients

Two interview guides, one for clients and one for advisors, The interviews lasted 75 min on average and were all recorded
helped us establish the history of the relationship and identify and transcribed. The analysis followed an intra-case and inter-
incidents faced. The interview guides focused on the case thematic content approach (Miles and Huberman, 1984;
circumstances for initiating the relationship, the nature and Yin, 1990), as detailed in Figure 1.
context of any significant incidents, the adjustment strategies
used to cope with problems, and the evolution of the Data coding
relationship following the implementation of these strategies. To organize the data collected and support the interpretations, we
To ensure the reliability of our results, we focused on critical followed the steps recommended by Miles and Huberman (1984).
incidents that both advisors and clients agreed were
vulnerability episodes (Glick et al., 1990). Moreover, to ensure Figure 1 Data collection process
the internal validity of transcripts and preserve the qualitative
research ethics, we sent back the interview transcriptions to our
Data collection
key informants (Mero-Jaffe, 2011). As we did not receive any
comment from their side, we considered that they agreed with
the accuracy of the transcriptions. Later, the interviewees’
responses were double-coded independently by the authors to
reduce the subjectivity of the data interpretations. With respect Step 3
Customers and Advisors' Step 1
to the double-coding process, we made systematic comparisons additional interviews Collection of internal / Interviews with advisors
Analysis of episodes of external secondary Sending back of transcripts
of the coders’ respective categorizations. When discrepancies vulnerability occuring data Selection of customers sample
during the collection of data
appeared, the two coders discussed these until they reached a
consensus and adjusted the coding accordingly by specifying or
modifying it (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). We also, when Step 2
appropriate, cross-checked the interview narratives with Interviews with clients and
Submission of transcripts for
secondary data (e.g. clients’ claims) to enhance the reliability of validation

the collected data through source triangulation (Jick, 1979).

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 Consumers in a bank services setting
Abdelmajid Amine and Sherazade Gatfaoui
In the data-reduction phase, we started extracting relevant
verbatim comments to build subcategories and then categories of
meaning, while moving up in terms of theorization.
The banking relationship is systematically embodied in the
exchanges between the client and his/her advisor, thus, making
the dyad the case studied and the episode of vulnerability the
appropriate unit of analysis for identifying the actors’
interactions and strategies that punctuated this commercial and
human relationship. The coding process used a mixed model,
in that some categories of meaning are expected, insofar as they
generally stem from research questions and key concepts (Miles
and Huberman, 1984), but other categories were anchored in
the data and emerged naturally during the analysis.
The intra-case and inter-case analyses allowed us to
characterize and structure the content of the narratives from
each dyad and between dyads. First, we organized these dyad-
level narratives according to the frequency of critical incidents
(isolated, infrequent and repeated) and the type and severity of
the incident. We were, thus, able to identify and characterize
the vulnerability episode (ex-ante categorization). Second, we
structured the content of the cases according to the different
adjustment strategies that the clients and advisors mentioned
(ex-post categorization). Third, we used contextual features and
the history of the banking relationship [e.g. duration, frequency
of client-advisor interactions, quality of the relationship and
client (dis)satisfaction], extracted from the secondary data, to
gain a fuller understanding of the evolution of the banking
relationship.
Findings
With an empowering perspective on vulnerable clients, we
consider them active participants, with resources and skills
(Sen, 1985), even if residual, so they can adapt their behaviors
to the interaction with the advisor and come up with
satisfactory solutions that preserve their well-being. In addition
to the resilience of vulnerable clients, this research highlights
the coping strategies deployed by clients and their advisors to
decide on, adapt, circumvent or even depart from the service
relationship norms with a view to finding solutions to the
incidents encountered.
Coping strategies operating between vulnerable clients
and bank advisors
The clients’ and advisors’ discourses reveal five coping
strategies implemented by the dyads for managing the tensions
generated by experiences of vulnerability (Figure 2). Each
vulnerability episode is associated with a critical incident that
adversely affects the client’s financial situation. By examining
the frequency and severity of the banking incidents, we were
able to distinguish coping strategies used in response to isolated
and infrequent incidents of low severity (6 cases out of 10) from
those resulting from more frequent, serious incidents (4 cases
out of 10).
The five adjustment strategies range from mutual
adjustment, in which the client remains within the advisor’s
portfolio in view of the quality of the relationship to date and its
profitability to bringing the banking relation to an end due to
the destruction of trust and the deterioration of the client’s
profitability.
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Figure 2 Key coping strategies used by vulnerable customers and bank
advisors
Mutual adjustment (Cases 1 and 6)
In Case 1, an instance of a mutual adjustment strategy, the
client and advisor adapt their behavior to cope with an isolated
and low-severity vulnerability episode and seek a compromise
and mutually satisfactory solution that can re-establish their
trust. Behavioral adjustments are initiated by both parties. The
client reduces certain types of expenditure to prove good faith
and attempts to overcome the vulnerable situation, while the
advisor agrees to an exceptional overdraft for an extra period of
time to demonstrate the bank’s support for the client during
this vulnerability episode:
Case 1: Dyad (Client: Male, aged 36; Advisor: Female,
aged 39).
Client: Three years ago, I lost my job overnight [. . .] I quickly
contacted my advisor and told her [. . .]. She trusted me [. . .] I
was very careful about my expenditure and I always warned her
in the event of problems [. . .] I have never gone over the
overdraft provided.
Advisor: He has always been serious, so I know I can trust
him [. . .]. It was necessary to provide an exceptional overdraft,
which I extended to him for six months rather than four [. . .].
He completely changed his spending [. . .]. These clients deserve
to be helped, and the proof is that he is now solvent again.
Case 6 is also an illustration of a mutual adjustment strategy.
It concerns an isolated incident (exceptional expenditure) that
was viewed by the bank as fairly serious. The incident
management modalities are similar to Case 1 in terms of
mutual adjustment; the client committed to reducing his
expenditure and the advisor decided that the quality of the
relationship was more important than the client’s short-term
profitability:
Case 6: Dyad (Client: Male, aged 34; Advisor: Female,
aged 32).
Client: [. . .] I had to pay medical costs of almost 1500
euros. I always paid attention to everything, my advisor was
well aware of that [. . .] I offered to use my existing savings of
300 euros and find a solution, because a big check was going
to be unpaid.
Advisor: We’ve known each other for three years [. . .] Despite
his difficult financial situation at the time, he is a serious client
who has always managed his budget well [. . .]. We were able to
negotiate overdraft fees and set up a small loan.
 Consumers in a bank services setting
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The adjustment strategy, responding to one-off vulnerability
episodes and fueled by a climate of trust built on past service
experiences, makes it easier for advisors in Cases 1 and 6 to
decide to help the vulnerable customer rather than strictly
comply with criteria of profitability. These customers, now
temporarily in financial difficulty, have in the recent past been a
source of profitability for the bank and are likely to become so
again. Regarding the trade-off between the primacy of
“profitability” over “quality of the customer relationship,” the
advisor in Case 1 emphasizes the importance of the human
aspect of the customer relationship, even if it means deviating
from organizational norms:
Case 1 (Advisor: Female, aged 39): For those customers we know well and
who have not given rise to any problem previously [. . .]. We sometimes
allow ourselves to bend the rules [. . .]. I felt it was possible for a while,
waiting for my client to bounce back [. . .]. You know, we are human too.
Nevertheless, in Case 6, the advisor qualifies her trade-off
between the quality of the relationship with the vulnerable
client and the client’s profitability, while still maintaining that
the bank must certainly help its customers, but only up to a
certain point and not to the detriment of profitability:
Case 6 (Advisor: Female, aged 32): I did it also because it was still profitable
for us [. . .]. Even if we have the legal duty to support customers in difficulty,
it is only up to a certain limit because the bank is not a charitable
organization. We must be profitable, and today there are dedicated
structures for situations that cannot be managed in a commercial bank
setting.
Strategy of influence (Cases 2 and 7)
This coping strategy is characterized by the client’s efforts to
persuade the advisor, who may be reluctant at first to grant a
special request (e.g. overdraft and exceptional loan). This
strategy calls for a climate of trust between the client and the
advisor, characterized by personal affinity and a friendly
relationship. Past experience has shown the advisor that the
client will meet his or her commitments in terms of reducing
expenditure or repaying the overdraft or loan on time:
Case 2: Dyad (Client: Male, aged 29; Counselor: Male, aged
29).
Client: I’ve had financial worries on four occasions in the last
ten years [. . .]. But I had always behaved irreproachably with
my bank. My advisor [. . .]. Trusts me since we know each
other [. . .]. He gets on well with my wife and we never forget the
holiday season. And we know that if it happens to us again, he
will be there, so we reward him [. . .]. He facilitated a loan
buyback, and sometimes he has given us an overdraft when we
were in the red.
Advisor: I helped him make a loan repayment to restore his
situation at the beginning [. . .]. He has had overdrafts on
several occasions following incidents later on in his life and I
supported him because he is someone who wants to get out of
difficulty [. . .]. He was careful about his expenditure during
these periods [. . .]. He made it up to me each time by giving me
wine or chocolates [. . .]. So I sometimes yielded further than is
strictly allowed.
Offering gifts to the advisor to procure a loan that might
otherwise not be granted or postpone a repayment term is in
certain respects a deviant practice, in that it seeks to corrupt the
decision and pressure the advisor to alter his initial position.
Here, the client used gifts as leverage to obtain credit or loans
that would normally not be extended in this kind of situation.
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Case 7 also depicts an influence strategy in which the client
plays on the emotional register and uses gifts to influence his
bank advisor’s decision. In this case, the infrequent incidents
related to exceptional expenditure and an overdraft were
deemed less important by the bank. The arrangement between
the two parties is based on the value of the relational quality in
past service encounters and using gifts and the emotional bond
as vectors of negotiation:
Case 7: Dyad (Client: Female, aged 28; Advisor: Female,
aged 32).
Client: I had unexpected outgoings including a rather large
dental bill [. . .]. I arranged with my providers to stagger
payments but sometimes I was unable to honor payment
deadlines [. . .]. My advisor really supported me without
hesitation, so I sometimes give her a present, as she is
passionate about coffee and tea.
Advisor: She is a serious client who calls me in the event of
problems to find a solution. She is very friendly and endearing [. . .].
And we sometimes have coffee together outside the office [. . .].
Exceptionally I decided to arrange an overdraft, rather than a loan,
given her history and her repayment capacity.
This influence strategy is deployed within a climate of mutual
trust and relational proximity fueled by reassuring past
experiences (incidents overcome), but which is weakened by
the occurrence of a new financial incident that makes the
advisor hesitant regarding the client. This strategy, which
instrumentalizes the emotional bond between the client and the
advisor, eventually overcomes her doubts and leads a favorable
decision for the client.
Cases 2 and 7 illustrate the influence strategy, with the issue
of the trade-off between the client’s profitability and the
relational quality emerging more clearly in the discourse of
the advisors, who are hesitant or make the favorable response to
the customer request conditional:
Case 2: (Advisor: Male, aged 29). We are human [. . .]. But if it happened
more often with more serious incidents and large amounts, I would not be
able to go beyond the limit that I have already sometimes exceeded. That is
not our role [. . .]. We are subject to strict rules regarding financial risk.
Case 7: (Advisor: Female, aged 32). I did warn her that this would be the one
and only time I could do this it for her [. . .]. You can go over the limit once
in order to help, but I won’t take the risk if it happens again.
Complaining to the hierarchy (Cases 3 and 8)
When the client and advisor fail to find a common solution, the
client may turn to the hierarchy and request arbitration. This
strategy fits in with the “coalition” tactic used to influence a
target’s decision by seeking support from other actors (Plouffe
et al., 2016; Yukl and Tracey, 1992). This “indirect” influence
tactic seems more effective in an upward direction when the
aim is to inflect the decision of the ascendant partner/
interlocutor in a relationship. In our study, this strategy arises
because of the client’s dissatisfaction with the advisor’s refusal
to respond to his or her request or find a viable arrangement to
restore his or her financial position. The client is upset by the
negative and inflexible attitude of the advisor, who might be
new to the bank branch and be unfamiliar with the client’s
banking history. At this stage, the client feels compelled to
challenge the decision of the advisor that is deemed
unacceptable, by referring to the branch manager and seeking
his aid to influence the advisor’s position:
 Consumers in a bank services setting
Abdelmajid Amine and Sherazade Gatfaoui
Case 3: (Client: Female, aged 51). [. . .]. When I had a lot of money, I gladly
accepted offers [new banking products], and I feel I can claim a privileged
relationship. Times are difficult in consulting [. . .]. I lost a contract and I
have a cash-flow problem [. . .]. A young advisor had just arrived, he spoke to
me as if I were “worthless” when I asked for an exceptional overdraft, and he
said “No”[. . .]. I went to see the branch manager [. . .]. He knew my
situation and said “Don’t worry we will find you a suitable solution.”
The claimant considers herself to have always been a “good
client” and “a solvent customer” and believes that she “should
be listened to and supported” in this exceptional event. This
negotiation between the client and the branch manager tends to
reestablish the link between the client and advisor and explore
possible solutions that would be satisfactory for both the client
(recovering her self-esteem) and the bank (perpetuating the
relationship with this “rather profitable” client):
Case 3: (Advisor: Male, aged 28 years). [. . .]. When I arrived in this branch, I
was not familiar with all my clients’ accounts [. . .]. She had a large overdraft
following a late payment [more than 3000 euros]. [. . .]. And I said no at the
time [. . .]. The client took it very badly and I later realized I had
mismanaged the situation [. . .]. The manager made the necessary
arrangements to restore the client’s situation because he knew her financial
situation well and her banking history.
Case 8 is also characterized by infrequent incidents, but it
involves a large overdraft that the bank takes rather seriously. In
this case, the client appealed to the hierarchy and pointed out
the quality and history of the past relationship, in which there
had been no major incidents. This customer believes the bank
should support him, in view of his past status as a good
customer who has subscribed to new financial products offered
by the bank, and thus, claims, as “a fair return,” that the bank
should help him:
Case 8: (Client: Male, aged 45). I have always been a good client and I find it
unacceptable that I was denied an extension to my bank overdraft for a few
months while I was financially recovering from my divorce and a period of ill
health [. . .]. My advisor refused to help me. I found his attitude scandalous
and wrote a letter to the complaints department.
This client’s comments are supported by the following
verbatim taken from his letter of complaint:
[. . .] I have never caused any problems to the bank since I opened my
account [. . .]. You are quick to offer us plenty of products when all is well
and to squeeze us when things go wrong. It is scandalous and inhuman [. . .].
I am losing everything and instead of supporting me, you rob me of the few
savings I have left.
Following this letter, the advisor, with the agreement of the
branch manager, finally granted an exceptional overdraft of
e250 for a period of six months and suggested that the client
use only half of his savings in the immediate future to meet his
unpaid debts:
Case 8: (Advisor: Male, aged 36). I was only doing my job, even he was a
client without any past incidents. His exceptional situation was serious, so
we must limit the risks to the bank and for the customer himself. I had no
choice but to use his savings to deal with the loss of income related to his
illness and divorce [. . .]. The Branch manager only pushed back the
deadline by six months.
The complaint strategy can escalate from the client’s
dissatisfaction with the advisor, to complaining to the branch
manager, and even to taking it to the customer complaints
department. This difficult situation involves a trade-off
between a compromise that takes into account the quality of the
customer relationship (seen as profitable in the past) and
profitability criteria. Contrary to the adjustment and influence
strategies rooted in a climate of trust, the complaint strategy
occurs in a tense climate that leads the advisor to prioritize the
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limitation of the risk of altering the customer’s profitability over
the history and the past quality of the relationship.
Avoidance (Cases 4 and 9)
Client-driven avoidance, following repeated episodes of
vulnerability, reflects a sense of shame and diminished social
image following excessive spending. Avoidance may occur even
if the client and advisor maintain a good relationship. A
succession of possible severe incidents eventually alters
communication between the members of the dyad, causing the
client to discontinue the dialogue and temporarily avoid
meeting the advisor to save face:
Case 4: (Client: Female, aged 30). At one point I was so ashamed of myself
for spending beyond my means and I had no solution, I kept a low
profile [. . .]. I did not answer the phone right away or I did not call back
right away because I did not know how to explain my situation once again. I
had problems in my private life with a man, I was spending money on him
when I had a decent salary [. . .].
Nevertheless, such behavior by a client who is dissatisfied with
his or her inability to control consumption and the overuse of
financial resources can gradually lead to the dissolution of the
relationship:
Case 9: (Client: Male, aged 56). I had several unpaid debts, but I had no
choice at the time [. . .]. I have three children and my wife had lost her job, so
we could not do without help [. . .]. First, I avoided the advisor’s calls
because I did not yet have an answer from the social worker [. . .]. Then we
got help for the outgoings for the children, and for food, the family was there
to help us [. . .]. We also have some savings [. . .]. That’s how we managed to
get out of it. Not thanks to the bank, which charged us fees, even if my
advisor did what she could.
Advisor-initiated avoidance may occur when the client behaves
in a “deviant” way, such as over-spending and ignoring his or
her financially precarious situation. In this form of avoidance
behavior, the client does not comply with the plan agreed to
with the advisor, which harms the relationship and potentially
presages its termination:
Case 4: (Advisor: Female, aged 30). After the third time I think, I felt that
she avoided me [. . .]. At the time I was very angry because I had already
supported her on several occasions. I am a woman too [. . .]. But in this case
it was too much [. . .]. I had to be firm with her [. . .]. This woman was with a
man who took advantage of her and her money [. . .]. And she spent beyond
her means and she continued doing so [. . .]. If she had not changed her
behavior, she would have ended up in litigation and I could not have done
anything.
Case 9: (Advisor: Female, aged 55). This client started making unreasonable
purchases when his wife lost her job and he found himself with an
overdraft [. . .]. Then, he disappeared a few days until he found a solution or
even provided an explanation [. . .]. He was lucky because he got help and he
had some savings as backup, which helped him to cover overdrafts for
several months [. . .]. Without savings he would have ended up in litigation.
The question of the trade-off between “customer profitability”
and “quality of the service relationship,” thus, becomes marked
in the advisor’s discourse, especially as it represents “a moment
of truth” for the continuity of the service relationship. If the
clients in Cases 4 and 9 had not had some savings to guarantee
the payment of unpaid bills and/or reduced their expenditure,
termination of the service relationship would have been the
only way out.
Dissolution of the relationship (Cases 5 and 10)
The ending of the relationship is often the prerogative of the
advisor, who no longer wishes to keep the clients in his portfolio
because they have constantly failed to respect their
commitments, such as when their consumption remains
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unchanged despite a lack of financial resources. Such clients
might refuse to accept their vulnerability and continue to
consume beyond their financial means to preserve a social
status linked to a previous position. Therefore, clients who are
becoming insolvent may be called in by the advisor or branch
manager to set up a “disputes” procedure and to transfer them
to the appropriate litigation department:
Case 5: Dyad (Client: Woman, aged 65; Advisor: Woman, aged 35).
Client: I was forced to change my advisor at one point [. . .]. My advisor
refused to see me and help me when I needed it [. . .] you know at my age we
still want to be taken care of [. . .]. I have had three or large overdrafts over
the 30 years I have been with “X” bank. [. . .]. I think they can help me
anyway [. . .]. I have a decent retirement pension but my husband died and I
needed to feel alive [. . .] my advisor did not like me spending money to
ensure my well-being.
Advisor: I put an end to my relationship with this client [. . .] I followed her
for years [. . .]. She had lost her husband [. . .]. But she constantly over-
spent [. . .]. I had to act like a cop and we didn’t get on [. . .]. I couldn’t
explain anything to her [. . .]. Superfluous expenditure for her beauty and
well-being [. . .]. She risked losing her account [. . .]. Another advisor took
over her account.
Termination of the relationship can also, however, be initiated
by the client. This less usual situation may occur if the
vulnerable client is assigned a new advisor, who ignores
the history of the relationship and fails to take account of the
client’s integrity in the ongoing negotiations. The client feels
discredited or reduced simply to an account number, and
therefore, decides to change his or her branch or bank if he or
she blames the advisor for this feeling of disgrace:
Case 10: Dyad (Client: Woman, aged 45; Advisor: Male, aged 31).
Client: One day I came across a young advisor who had just arrived [. . .] I
was in a difficult situation in that my clients had delayed paying their bills
and I found myself with cash-flow problems [. . .]. The advisor refused to
give me an exceptional overdraft – which my former advisor would have
given me. He then said I was “irresponsible” and threatened to take me to
court. I thought his approach was disrespectful and I refused to accept the
branch manager’s apology. I then asked for my accounts to be transferred to
the bank where my former advisor had gone.
This quote was supported by a letter, sent to the branch
manager, announcing the client’s decision to end the
relationship with the current advisor and banking branch. This
case expresses the client dissatisfaction vis-à-vis the advisor who
was disrespectful to her despite her seniority and her virtuous
past banking history. The following excerpt, issued from her
complaint letter, testifies to this:
I’ve always been a good client for the bank [. . .]. I do not tolerate a young
man who comes down and lets me get high when I could be his mother. It’s
a question of respect [. . .]. When it comes to subscribing to the bank offers,
some of your advisers who can be doubted the skill and training are all
smiles, and when a little glitch occurs there is no respect for people [. . .] It is
intolerable. This is the reason why I inform you of my will to transfer my
accounts to the branch X.
Figure 3 summarizes the five coping strategies deployed by the
client–advisor dyads according to the frequency and severity of
incidents, and the potential outcomes in terms of the banking
relationship.
Discussion and conclusion
Our findings shed light on the management of the service
relationship with temporarily vulnerable clients and make
significant contributions at the theoretical, managerial and
societal levels.
Theoretical implications
In contrast to previous studies that assume vulnerable clients
are completely submissive or market dominated, due to the
resource asymmetry that is to their disadvantage, our results
show that they have residual resources that they mobilize to
influence the course of the banking relationship. These
resources are not systematic or formalized, but they emerge
during interactions with advisors to move things forward and
lead to co-creating negotiated ad hoc solutions that generate in
these customers a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction
similar to what Sharma et al. (2017) have identified as
“eudaimonic well-being.” Such temporarily vulnerable clients
find the resources needed to rebalance the relationship, in that
they can project themselves beyond the crisis episode, in
contrast to chronically vulnerable clients, who have internalized
their precarious and dependent status. This finding
corroborates the relevance of our decision to focus on clients’
episodic rather than chronic vulnerability more commonly
addressed in the literature.
In addition, our results highlight the relevance of extending
the TSR framework (Anderson et al., 2013; Rosenbaum et al.,
2011) and the capability perspective (Sen, 1985) to the specific
case of temporary vulnerability. Consumers experiencing an
episode of vulnerability, deriving either from external
constraints or from their own deviant behaviors, find that their
situation becomes more fragile and that their position with the
other stakeholders in the service relationship becomes
Figure 3 Changes in vulnerable client–bank advisor relationship
following incidents

Advisor: This client was haughty and very sure of my positive response – as if
further overdrafts were her due [. . .]. I had just arrived at the branch and
told her that she had to better manage her accounts in this kind of situation,
but she took it badly [. . .]. I explained the reasons of my decision but she
refused to listen to either my objections or those of the branch manager [. . .].
She later transferred her accounts to another bank.

The risky behavior of some customers who are going through

an episode of vulnerability and who consciously or otherwise
fail to take control of their consumption and spending further
discredits them in the eyes of the account manager and
contributes to the dissolution of the banking relationship.

610
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Abdelmajid Amine and Sherazade Gatfaoui
increasingly imbalanced. By advocating satisfaction and the
pursuit of the well-being of consumers who are not served or
are poorly served in the service relationship (Fisk, 2009), these
theoretical frameworks are relevant for analyzing the situations
of these temporarily vulnerable clients. The latter are involved
in shaping solutions to ensure their minimum level of
satisfaction, maintain their inclusion in the market system and
preserve their dignity and wellness (Oosterlynck et al., 2013).
Moreover, as a commercial service activity, banking is
designed to generate profits without explicitly worrying about
the effects of its (potentially deleterious or positive) practices
and decisions on the welfare of their consumers and their own
staff (Rosenbaum et al., 2011). As a result, the account
managers of temporarily vulnerable clients find themselves
under pressure between two opposed injunctions that they have
to reconcile: on the one hand, the injunction from the
organization to prioritize the profitability of customers and their
contribution to the financial value of the company (Gupta et al.,
2006); and on the other, a moral obligation to respond
favorably to the increasing specific demands for service from
their clients (Ryals, 2006), including those experiencing an
episode of vulnerability. Advisors must, thus, make sometimes
complicated decisions to strike a fair balance between financial
indicators that govern the maintenance or dissolution of the
commercial relationship with the client, and more qualitative
assessments of their more or less detailed knowledge of the
quality of the previous relationship with the client as
the guarantor of his or her solvency. These trade-offs tend to
vary depending on whether the service relationship is about:
“right” clients, who are trustworthy and profitable and are
experiencing a slight financial problem, favoring the
implementation of a mutual adjustment strategy; “at-risk right”
clients, who are fairly profitable but are facing incidents of
medium or fairly recurrent severity, which give rise to the
mobilization of influence or complaint strategies; or “wrong”
clients (Woo and Fock, 2004), who become financially risky,
face serious and frequent incidents, which consequently lead to
avoidance or dissolution strategies.
Finally, this research contributes to the enrichment of coping
theory by showing that, in the banking relationship, the
incidents encountered by clients and that are markers of
episodes of vulnerability generate stress for both parties of the
dyad (client and advisor) and encourage them to seek together
and individually, adjustment strategies in response to these
tense situations. Our findings reveal that these joined coping
strategies span a gradation of arrangements introduced to find
solutions to incidents in the banking relationship. This
progressive nature of service relationship management echoes
the loyalty, voice, exit (LVE) model (Hirschman, 1970), while
refining it to the extent that, in addition to “loyalty,” which
meets the trust-based mutual adjustment strategy, “voice,”
which is similar to the complaint strategy where clients protest
against the advisor’s negative attitude and “exit,” which echoes
the dissolution of the relationship, our results reveal two further
strategies that fit into the interstices of the LVE model. On the
one hand, the strategy of influence implies a kind of quasi-
loyalty, in that it is oriented not only toward maintaining the
relationship but also features opportunism on both sides and
“borderline” arrangements to preserve the service relationship.
On the other hand, the avoidance strategy constitutes a pre-exit
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stage, in that it predicts relationship termination and functions
as a last-ditch effort to reduce the tension between the client
and the advisor. On both sides, evasive behaviors allow the
clients to avoid losing face (Goffman, 1982) and the advisors
not to endorse the client’s non-compliance.
Managerial and societal implications
From a practical standpoint, our findings challenge banks’
practices (and more broadly those of companies) toward
temporarily vulnerable customers. In the current economic
context, customer managers often must deal with tense
situations with clients whose life circumstances involve
economic and social difficulties of varying severity. With the
proposed typology of client-advisor coping strategies, this study
suggests a set of levers that banks can use to adjust their
marketing strategies to the various situations experienced by
their (temporarily) vulnerable clients and to help advisors
manage these portfolios over time.
For clients, bank initiatives should involve the prevention of
damage and support for vulnerable clients, so as to avoid their
over-indebtedness or social exclusion. For example, under the
impetus of new consumer protection legislation (in France
since 2007), banks have developed specific products and
services that limit the risks of negative incidents and the costs
linked to repeated overdrafts, to help vulnerable clients re-
establish normal operations in their banking relationship.
As a follow-up to these initiatives, our results invite banks to
develop dynamic tools for analyzing the evolution of the
situation of their clientele to refine their categorization of
vulnerable clients and distinguish the segment (s) that remain
economically profitable in the short or medium-term and for
which effort is worthwhile from clients in whom it is
appropriate to disinvest and hand over to the public authorities.
Therefore, being able to detect such clients upstream through
quantitative and qualitative criteria (i.e. scoring, frequency of
incidents, savings capacity, signaling by economic and social
partners, etc.) would be a useful catalyst for redeploying bank
resources for vulnerable clients with capabilities (Sen, 1985).
Symptomatically, the case of more vulnerable clients leading to
avoidance and dissolution strategies are highly resource- and
time-consuming and are ultimately less efficient even for banks
adopting inclusive positioning. These overly fragile clients are
not able to adjust their behavior due to their gradual shift into
enduring precariousness. These situations of extreme
vulnerability that commercial banks are unable to manage the
call for special care by public support agencies or collective
associations to help such people rehabilitate in the medium or
long term and train them in strict budget management.
The issue of managing the banking relationship with
vulnerable customers also challenges the banks (and firms) to
redesign customer managers’ functions and ensure their ability
to manage tense and uncertain situations associated with the
increased precariousness of their clients, while also avoiding
stigmatization, pity or condescension in their attitudes. The
emotion-management skills of front-office staff are, therefore,
important because of their direct involvement with sensitive
interactions (Collard, 2011). Previous work has shown that
these employees are insufficiently supported by their
organization, which does not take enough account of the
physical and psychosocial risks they face when dealing with
 Consumers in a bank services setting
Abdelmajid Amine and Sherazade Gatfaoui
distress (Ughetto, 2011) and sometimes violence on the part of
vulnerable clients. Banks would also be better able to raise the
awareness of advisors to the value of temporarily vulnerable
customers, who represent a significant reserve of solvent clients
(“right” and “at-risk right” customers; Woo and Fock, 2004)
and who are worth providing with suitable support so that they
can bounce back financially and be retained in the bank’s
portfolio.
Finally, the social responsibility of the public authorities
requires them to take over from the bank in managing the
situations of the most vulnerable clients because of their legal
and moral obligations to work toward the inclusion of these
fringes of society, and allow them access to a minimum of
banking services so as to facilitate their reintegration into the
economy. In addition, the involvement of the public authorities
in preventing the risk of slippage by or the exclusion of,
individuals experiencing recurrent and serious banking
incidents, it also is vital to activate alternative levers from the
social and associative sphere (Oosterlynck et al., 2013) to
guarantee these populations’, if not well-being, at least “better-
being.” By ensuring support for vulnerable consumers who
might be excluded from commercial banking, this alternative
policy promotes inclusion in consumption settings by re-
creating social ties and reinforcing the values of solidarity and
sharing (Fraisse et al., 2007). Another lever that could be
activated by public authorities or the associative sphere pertains
to education for vulnerable customers. It is necessary in this
effort to deploy emancipatory pedagogies (Freire, 2001) and
instill financial literacy with the aim of helping vulnerable
consumers effectively overcome asymmetries entrenched in
(non)merchant relations that can fuel discrimination and social
inequality.
Limitations and future research directions
Although this research has a twofold advantage – being based
both on a longitudinal approach and on a dyadic analysis of the
banking relationship management – it is, however, not exempt
from certain limitations. In particular, one major difficulty we
encountered, which more broadly concerns researchers’ access
to vulnerable publics, is the need to expose their financial
problems to the investigator. In the present case study, this
difficulty was exacerbated in two respects. On the one hand,
respondents who are not structurally precarious do not wish to
be labeled as such, and often hide their predicament even from
their immediate circle so as to avoid losing face (Goffman,
1982). On the other, some clients who adopt behaviors deemed
at-risk or deviant by the bank are also tempted by withdrawal
because they tend to avoid any social interaction (with the
investigator) that may discredit them, thus, resulting in a
number of refusals to collaborate in our research. This twofold
difficulty raises questions about the selection bias that could
have tainted the sample of clients who agreed to collaborate in
this study. Although this source of bias cannot be completely
avoided, there are indications that our findings are affected only
very slightly. Indeed, our sample covers cases that illustrate
different coping strategies, including ending the relationship,
whereas one might have feared that the only clients
participating would adopt an enabling vision of their
vulnerability and would agree to reveal their episodes of
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precariousness to display their will to get out of their fragile
situation.
Another research perspective opened up by our work derives
from the French cultural context, in which bank customers
benefit from legal protection and banking advisors have a
certain leeway in interpreting the rules associated with the
granting of credit. Replicating this research in more constrained
socio-economic contexts, where advisors are required to strictly
enforce banking arrangements and rules, and customers have
less protection, would potentially open the way to the
emergence of other adjustment strategies.
Notes
1. According to Gathergood (2012, p. 591), over-
indebtedness is considered as “delinquency on
repayments [in the sense of failure in the payment of a
contractual financial term or the repayment of a loan]”,
[. . .] and it characterizes “individuals who might have too
much debt relative to their optimal level of borrowing”
(p. 593). Marron (2012) supplements this definition with
the fact that over-indebtedness potentially compromises
the freedom of individuals by depriving them of these
sources of funding in the future.
2. The term “fragility” (or fragile customer) is the one used
by French banking professionals to characterize
vulnerable clients who experience recurrent and/or severe
banking incidents in varying degrees.
3. The level of severity of the incident was jointly defined
with the branch manager and advisors.
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Corresponding author
Abdelmajid Amine can be contacted at: amine@u-pec.fr