Changing the Customer Culture at an insurance company

Challenge:

I work in a large insurance company and recently took over the Customer Experience department. Customer  satisfaction scores were dropping, our phone lines were clogged with unhappy customers and front line staff  (call centre) were really disengaged because they felt like they were bearing the brunt of all the operational  failures with customers. Back office staff refused to talk to customers, and would often not return calls or  emails from the call centre staff on customer issues.  I had to find a way to make all the back office teams  realise how some of their actions were really hurting customers and our brand, and start to build a little  empathy in the organisation.

Selection & Application

I chose story telling as my tool.  The company had previously hosted some customer service training, where  the trainer was not in the insurance industry, and our staff had trouble relating to her case studies of poor  customer service. To make the customers woes come alive, I knew I had to use stories and examples that our  staff could relate to – framed around our products, systems and processes.  I spent time with the Complaints  department, and selected several real complaints. I turned them into anonymous case studies, and divided up  the personas involved.  I organised to get a group of 30 back office staff across all functions – finance,  operations, claims, underwriting etc – into a large room. I then broke them into teams of four people each.  Each team received one case study, and each case study was written from 3 different perspectives, that of the  customer, that of the front line staff handling the customer and that of the back office staff where ultimately the  problem had arisen. The fourth person (“the observer”) in the team got to view all perspectives.  The story was  told layer by layer, and usually ending up with the customer perspective. The observer had to piece it all  together. By using the story telling technique, we were able to include emotions and build up the problem (and  resolution), focusing on the effort each side had gone to, to be understood. Each case study focused on how the  person felt while handing the issue – the customer was frustrated and lost, the call centre agent felt powerless  and stressed, and the back office staff felt hounded etc. At the end of the exercise, I revealed that these were  not embellished stories, but actual customer experiences within the last few months. Back office staff were  immediately connected to the customers and their role in triggering satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

Insights

This story telling tool worked better than I hoped.  Everyone agreed that the customers had actually behaved  really admirably during each service malfunction, and that is when we started to break down the myth that  customers are scary, angry and unreasonable! It also helped me to understand that back office staff simply  didn’t connect the customer to their daily roles. By delving deeper, I could see that our own internal processes  were choking up the back office teams, and we were able to come up with some interesting innovative ideas on  how to change small processes with big impact.

Approach

I really loved this tool and it had a powerful impact. We realised that the way to change the customer culture  was not only to put everyone in the customers’ shoes, but to show us our own individual role in customer  service. The only problem was it was related to only the story they worked on.  I decided to extend it further at  a later session.  I used Visualisation techniques to show each team how they were connected to the customer.  Once we had mapped out how each team was involved in the customer experience at all key moments of truth  (like when customers make a claim), we began to experiment with simple questions around what the impact  would be if one team made a mistake that wasn’t rectified, or if one team made a change without assessing the

impact to other teams further down the chain. Our staff could immediately see the impact, because the flow  was clearly shown in front of them, and everyone realised that if they weren’t serving the customer, they were  serving someone who was.

