Treating people fairly when life is hard.

1. Why this exists.

Anyone can have a spell where dealing with a phone contract is the last thing they can manage. Ofcom requires every provider to have a policy for that and to publish it. This is ours.

2. Who it covers.

Everyone. We do not keep a list of “vulnerable customers” and treat those people differently. What we do is notice when someone’s circumstances make the ordinary process unfair, and change the process.

Circumstances we look out for include:

• Age — being very young or very old.
• Health — physical or mental illness, being in hospital, being in treatment.
• Disability — including sight, hearing, mobility and learning disability.
• Capacity — anything that makes it hard to understand or remember what is being agreed.
• Language and literacy — English not being a first language, difficulty reading.
• Bereavement — dealing with someone’s death, or their phone account.
• Circumstances — losing a job, a relationship ending, leaving an abusive home, being homeless, being in debt.

The list is not exhaustive and it is not a test. If something makes this harder for you than it should be, that is enough.

3. What our people do at a stand.

Our sales staff are not asked to decide whether you are vulnerable. They are asked to notice, stop, and get help.

If someone at our stand thinks you might be finding the transaction difficult — for any reason, and reasonable doubt is enough — they stop the sale and bring in their team leader, or a manager if no team leader is there. They do not complete it and sort it out afterwards.

They will not ask you why, and they note a need only if you ask them to. If what is going on matters to how we should help, they will put you through to someone whose job that is, and you decide what to tell them.

Nobody at Syncera is paid less for doing this. Our staff contracts say so, in terms: no one is penalised in their pay or otherwise for escalating a sale in good faith, including where the sale is then not made. We have deliberately removed the incentive to press on.

4. What happens next.

The team leader or manager talks to you and works out what would actually help. That might be:

• taking more time, or arranging another day;
• explaining it again, differently, or in writing;
• letting you take the paperwork away and come back;
• someone you trust being there with you;
• not selling you anything at all, because it is not right for you today.

We will say no to a sale where we should. We would rather lose it.

5. What we record, and what we do not.

If you tell us you need something different — larger print, a nominated helper, more time — we write that need on your account so you do not have to explain it every time.

We record the minimum. We do not record a diagnosis, and we do not label your account “vulnerable”. If what you tell us concerns your health, we record it only with your explicit consent, and only as much as we need to do the thing you asked for. At a stand, our staff note a need only if you ask them to. You can ask us to change or remove it at any time. See our privacy notice.

6. How to reach us, and how someone can do it for you.

Any of these:

• Email hello@syncerauk.com
• The form at syncerauk.com/contact
• The Syncera app, if you have it
• Write to Syncera UK Ltd, 20 Wenlock Road, London N1 7GU
• In person at any Syncera stand, if it is about your own account

Someone else can deal with us for you. A relative, a carer, a friend, an adviser, a support worker. We need your permission once, and we need them to agree to it too. After that we will talk to them. If you cannot give permission yourself, tell us what the position is and we will work with whoever holds the legal authority — a power of attorney, a deputy, an executor.

We set these arrangements up by email or post, not at a stand — our stand staff are not allowed to discuss your account with anyone but you, and we would rather they kept to that than made exceptions on the spot.

If someone has died, email or write and we will take the account from there. We will not make an executor repeat the story to three different people, and we will not chase payment on a closed account while it is being sorted out.

7. Services for customers with disabilities.

Free unless we say otherwise. Ask on any of the channels above.

• Emergency SMS to 999 and 112 — free, if you cannot make a voice call.
• Emergency video relay in British Sign Language — free, and wherever it is technically possible the data it uses does not come out of your allowance.
• Text relay — to and from your number, at no more than the cost of an ordinary call, with a special tariff scheme if you rely on it heavily.
• Directory enquiries — free, in a form you can use, and the service will connect the call for you.
• Bills, contracts, and any document we send you — in large print, on coloured paper, in Braille, or electronically. Free, on request, and we keep the preference on file.
• Someone else managing your bill — a person you nominate, and who agrees to it, can receive your bill, ask us about it, and pay it. Free. Nominating them does not make them liable for it, and we will never ask them to take on that liability.

8. If you fall behind.

We would rather hear from you early than send letters.

• We will warn you before we do anything about non-payment, and give you time to sort it.
• Any step we take will be proportionate and will not single anyone out unfairly.
• Where we can, we will limit any interruption to the part of the service concerned — we will not cut off everything if we do not have to. Outgoing calls to 999 and 112 keep working.
• If you are in financial difficulty, tell us. We will look at a payment arrangement, a cheaper plan, or pausing collection while you get advice. There is no penalty for asking.
• You can always end a monthly plan with one month’s notice and owe nothing further.

9. Checking this works.

A policy nobody measures is a leaflet. Every quarter we look at:

• how many sales were stopped and escalated, and what happened after;
• how many accessible-format and nominee requests we received, and how fast we handled them;
• complaints where the customer’s circumstances were part of the problem;
• whether staff training is current.

The Manager owns this review. Anything it turns up that needs fixing gets fixed and written down. Ofcom can ask us to show all of this and we will.

Nobody speaks to a customer for us until they have been trained on this policy and knows how to escalate. That is a condition of being on a stand, not a target.

10. Tell us if we get it wrong.

Complain — see our complaints code of practice. Complaints about how we treated someone’s circumstances go straight to a manager, not into a queue.