Building Brand & Customer Loyalty: Insurance

Situation

With a strong base of operations on the West Coast, this leading Insurance Group focused on growth through geographic expansion. The company first entered the Midwest, Texas the next year and three Eastern states two years later. With a core philosophy built around customer service, they have carved out a market niche by offering insurance directly to consumers, providing a wide array of insurance products and 24-hour telephone access to licensed insurance professionals.

As the company began to enter new areas of the country, they were quick to realize that the game had changed. Accustomed to having strong name recognition and a good reputation, they were now faced with being the “new kid on the block” in a highly competitive industry. Also, their research showed that consumers were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with insurance providers in general. It was in these market conditions that they saw opportunity. By leveraging their customer service strengths, they could win over customers and build market share.

Complications

New Market Realities
Intense competition, commodity-driven product offerings and rising acquisition costs are driving new ways of thinking about—and executing against—a customer-centric business strategy.

Approach

Create a crystal clear vision.
To build a performance culture focused on the customer, your people first have to “see it.” Everyone must share the same vision and buy in to what success looks like for your company. The company’s philosophy was to treat every customer interaction as an opportunity to beat out the competition.

Call center agents get this message from the moment they enter the organization. Even the new hire training program is customer-centric. Immediately after they become licensed agents, call center representatives are introduced to the company’s customer-driven business model.

This is done early on so that they see how every aspect of their job ties back to the customer. Even as they learn company policies and procedures, they see it from the customers’ viewpoint. New hires come to understand that the quality of their interactions with customers is what drives the company’s success.
Adopt a measurement system everyone can embrace.
While there are many approaches, the company chose the Net Promoter® score as the metric to gauge their overall customer effectiveness. The score is calculated by taking the percentage of customers who are promoters (those who are highly likely to recommend your company or products) and subtracting the percentage who are detractors (those who are less likely to recommend your company or products).
Align your processes to succeed.
Process alignment is the backbone of any strategic initiative. The management team took a hard look at their processes to be sure they aligned with their vision for an exceptional customer experience. They adopted our Call Strategy™.

The service model applies behavioral psychology to help representatives develop the skills to effectively navigate through customer conversations. The discrete steps in The Call Strategy are based on meeting the customer’s emotional needs throughout the interaction, thereby getting predictable responses that enable the agent to lead the conversation to a successful conclusion.

Approach (cont.)

4. Invest in your call center agents.
When service is your competitive advantage, you need to invest appropriately in the people interacting with your customers. In the insurance industry, the call center agent is often the primary customer touch point. The company saw the strategic value of their call center agents and viewed them as the mechanism for delivering the brand promise—day in and day out. With more than 300,000 monthly calls coming through the call center network, there was little margin for error. Every interaction was looked at as an opportunity to improve or detract from the quality of the customer experience.

The company rolled out training from the Senior Vice President level on down. The training develops decision-making and advanced customer interaction skills needed to consistently excel in every customer conversation. The staff learned to take control of the call regardless of the customer’s situation or level of emotion.

This can be essential when dealing with customers on insurance matters, which can often bring a lot of personal frustration that presents itself early on in the phone call. An insurance representative that is not equipped to deal with the complexities and intensity of that situation is at risk of losing a valuable customer.

5. Live and breathe a performance culture.
The organization is passionate about the value of coaching and makes it a top priority. Without effective coaching, you just won’t reap the benefits of any skills training you have provided your team.

It’s interesting to note that the company took the issue of time management head on. By performing a time and motion study, they were able to illustrate there was indeed time in a manager’s day for coaching. Once people understood the value and were given the right tools, the momentum shift began.

6. Build support up, down and across the organization.
To ensure consistent results were achieved, the company identified champions in each call center location. Each is a certified master coach who is intimate with The Call Strategy service model and the approach to providing Focused Feedback. Each champion is held accountable for ensuring that the coaching process works effectively and consistently in the call center.

This infrastructure has brought a degree of camaraderie and creativity into the process. For example, the team has developed a call library that showcases examples of quality customer interaction. Supervisors and agents can access this learning tool as a way to get some fresh approaches to common customer situations.

In addition, master coaches function as the conduit to senior management, bringing success and challenges forward. They make it their business to demonstrate the impact this initiative is having on the growth of the business. With the measurements and processes that have been put in place, it is easy to translate quality customer interactions into organizational benefits.

It’s the master coaches’ role to make those links for the executive team and shine a light on the results that are being achieved.

Results