Keen Insights on Customer Experience

The need to improve customers’ experiences in interacting with insurers strikes me as so acute that I’m going to take a shot at the issue here, even though we’ve been hitting it hard in a series of articles from Capgemini and Salesforce over the past month. (The articles are here, here, here and here, and a related white paper is here.) I want to share what I found to be some keen insights from a webinar I hosted last week with executives from the two companies and with Donna Peeples, a member of our advisory board who was the chief customer experience officer at AIG and who is currently the chief engagement officer at Motivated, a consultancy she founded to help improve experiences. The basis argument goes like this: Customer ratings of their dealings with insurers are bad and getting worse, putting hundreds of billions of dollars of premiums at risk. Insurers need to solve the problems and even find ways to start delighting customers. Technology must play a huge role. But a lot lies behind that straightforward argument, and a lot of art, as well as science, needs to be applied to the problem. Thus the insights from the webinar, whose panelists, in addition to Peeples, were Nigel Walsh, vice president, insurance, at CapGemini, and Jeffery To, senior director, insurance, at Salesforce. The insights are too long to fit on bumper stickers but are still plenty pithy and deserve careful thought. The Problem Peeples: “Let's face facts. Who really gets excited about buying insurance? It's just not that much fun.” “We think of claims as our product, when in actuality peace of mind is really our product.” To:  “There's $400 billion in premiums across P&C and life that is at stake. That's because 70% of policyholders are making renewal decisions in the next 12 months.” “You lose, not just the customer for that one policy, but you lose the lifetime value of that customer.… The second thing that insurers will suffer from when a customer leaves is brand erosion, because in this day and age, with social media and mobile and so forth, bad news travels fast.” Walsh: “Insurers get compared to every other retail product or retail approach that consumers make. More often than not, of course, those are retail purchases that you make. They're joyful, they're delightful, they're exciting.” What Customers Want Walsh: “GAFA -- or Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple: If I could describe the ideal experience every one of us wants, we almost want data like Google have it, supply chain like Amazon have it, a community like Facebook have and a brand like Apple….This whole concept of GAFA to me gives you the ideal framework for what a great experience would look like.” The Key Words to Focus On  Walsh: Convenience: “Let me pick on Amazon and Amazon Prime, specifically. I'm still in awe that someone turns up on Sunday morning, first thing, with my package I ordered the day before, and it's just there…. The speed at which they operate and are able to fulfill those things, we need to apply that to a claims scenario or a mid-term adjustment.” Relevance: “We need to be relevant to customers time and time again, as opposed to approaches that we do once a year or at certain points in the year….Day in, day out. ADT and Nest is an example about how you become relevant to your customer by doing more than just insurance.” To: Seamlessness: “Customers are expecting the Apple-like experience….You want to provide that effortless experience to policyholders across all phases in their journey.” Stickiness: “If you can provide agents and brokers with the latest product updates, support and expertise with the same ease as in a community like Facebook, you're creating loyalty and stickiness.” Integrated: “Insurers have grown through acquisitions….I've worked with insurers who've got hundreds of different legacy systems, back-office claims, policy billing systems that they have to deal with, and you can't achieve a true single view of a customer without integrating all of these various pieces." The Solution  Peeples:   “Always start with the people. We have to stop thinking about sorting data, and we have to start thinking about beating hearts.” “We all talk about busting silos, but silos are like cockroaches. They're going to outlive us all.” “How do you think about those verticals where we all take such good care of the customer and say we own them, when in fact we're all just caregivers for a certain amount of time along that customer's journey? The elegance, or lack thereof, of those hand-offs is where I would also focus.” To: “If I'm a service agent or a sales agent, regardless of what device I'm using, whether it's a desktop or a mobile device, I want a single view of that policyholder that pulls together things like claims history, policy changes, interaction history, and add all of that in addition to policyholder profile information…. If I'm a life provider, it's important for me to know who the spouse and the children are because they could be potential dependents or beneficiaries. Tying all these pieces together requires more than just a unified front-end user experience. You need to actually unify the underlying pieces.” Walsh: “[The three most important areas for focus are] connecting elegantly, engaging regularly and seeing completely.” “Engaging regularly is actually a tough challenge for insurance organizations because ultimately, why would I want to talk to my insurance provider unless it's a time of crisis? …There are some great examples, from the connected car, the connected home, the connected self, where we can actually regularly engage with each of our individuals that we want to market to and talk to. That's really, really key.” “Millennials want to connect the way that says, “We actually have no clue what we've bought. We're worried about what we've bought. Therefore, can we speak to someone that's going to give me the assurance and confidence and walk me through the process?” Peeples: “The call center folks generally, not always, are some of the lowest-compensated. Maybe some of the least-trained. But they still represent the brand every single day as surely as the senior executives when they're speaking on analyst calls or to Wall Street. Those people are really where the rubber hits the road. If you haven't gone out and stood in the retail locations and seen the interactions, if you haven't sat at the caller processing centers… these are the warriors of your brand and of your company.” “There was a study that was conducted around call centers that found that, in 2013, the average number of screens that a CSR would have to pull up to get to what you and I as a customer would think is a relatively simple answer, was five. That number jumped in 2014 to seven…. I would encourage just a very thoughtful process around connecting those systems.” “We have to recognize that we no longer have the benefit and control of a monologue at the customers or stakeholders. It's no longer ‘word of mouth’; it's a ‘world of mouth’ out there.” “We talk a lot about the customer's journey, but there's also equally as important an employee journey that creates this double helix that is the corporate DNA.” Walsh: “You can actually break the problem down into some quick hits. We've got some clients that launch products in 30 to 40 days. I say that to most people, and they almost fall of their chair because the usual time for these things is six, 12, 18 months….You need to tweak it, or it's going to fail. But with modern technology at least you can try and prove it and move it into a full rollout or move on to a different thing.” Peeples: “We need to listen to our customers, get out of our focus group of one, out of our own head.” To: “It simply will not work to turn to the predefined business process maps that you've done in the past. Don't turn to those. Think first about the customer and agent experience, what their goals are, and design the customer experience around those goals. Don't pave the cow path.” “Rationalize. Make those tough decisions about what systems that you have in your spaghetti factory of legacy systems, which ones of them are strategic and which ones are you going to sunset.” “Unify. Before you can even take the first few steps toward actually deploying or designing, you need to get basic blocking and tackling stuff done, like governance. Like having a common data model in place so that everyone agrees on what the data is, how it's defined and where it's going to come from. Unify the visions across the various levels in the organization.” “You want to be able to measure your results. At the end of the development and after we've let it run for a little while, have we met our objectives?” “Before problems even arise, you want to be so in tune with where that policyholder is in their interactions with you or in their life events that you are able to actually provide value-adding services and information before it even has to be requested.” Walsh: “Think big, start small, act quickly.” “The cross sale, up sale is a constant, constant challenge. Most companies that I work with right now have an average of 1 to 1.1 products per customer. Best in class will tell you that it's probably 3 products per customer. What's the route for 1 or 1.1 to 3?” Final Words Walsh: “Believe me, it's absolutely possible to do some crazy things out there.” Peeples: “Let's be honest here, we talk about hearts and minds, but it's really about hearts, minds and wallets.” “By the numbers, 55% of our customers tell us that they would pay more for guaranteed better service, and 82% of our customers would buy more from us if we just made it easier for them. 89% of our customers said that they would quit doing business with us after a bad experience.” “Stop thinking about transactions and start thinking about relationships. Whether they're customers or they're employees or they're part of the bigger universe of stakeholders including the intermediaries and the legislators and the regulators, it's about the people.” “Always keep the people in mind. Be data-informed and technology-enabled, but always think about the people.” To hear the full webinar, click here. To see the slides, click here. If you want the full transcript, email me at paul@insurancethoughtleadership.com.