Reflection - Storytelling

Challenge & Selection

My challenge is a real case which I had a several months ago. It is about an insurance  company, which wanted to know how customers are experiencing their service during the  different service stages.     Their problem was that selling insurances is going quite difficult these days, as competition is  high and people are tending to contract insurances relying more on the price rather than  their service. The insurance company wanted to understand how they can make customers  believe in their service rather than in their price, but they did not know how to tackle the  topic and all intentions to find it out by themselves weren’t fructiferous.    They perceived that customers are quite satisfied with their service in general, but realized  that in case of claims, customers are dissatisfied and that they can’t handle expectations        We have selected storytelling, because we needed a way to make the company aware of a  reality which was not seen that way before. The company was used to analyse data and they  were working in silos without understanding a bigger context. To use the customer story  would have helped them to gain different insights and solutions.  Story telling allows us to visualize the service experienced from a customer point of view to  create more empathy from company side. Empathy which most of the times is not easy to  have if you never change your perspective.             Application  To understand the situation of the company and how customers are experiencing  their service, we decided to interview both sides to have: stakeholder view on  company side and customer view from outside.    We wanted to know in detail the way the insurance is working with their clients, the  processes from the early beginning until the end of the contract or their service when  there is a claim. The same thing we have asked the customers to have their point of  view.

Putting this information together we designed a case story, were both parties point of  view were mapped together in a kind of customer journey about their experience  before, at the beginning, during and after the service.     We were mapping all together with the different service stages, the customer mood  and company touchpoints, to visualize it and to tell them a story of an example  customer with al context.      The story we have created was presented to the company for discussing together,  identifying issues, solutions and finding new opportunities.

Insight  The insides we have gathered in this exercise were quite interesting and had a big  impact on the way the insurance company is visualizing their service behavior  towards the customers.    It was really helpful to review a story with the insights from stakeholders and  customers combined, to understand where are the issues in the communication  between both parties.    We found out that there are several gaps were customers, especially when they had  claims, felt kind of lost and the companies service proposition was not fulfilled from  customer point of view.   Customers were unhappy to have a lot of paperwork and about the time needed to  conclude the claim.     The overall experience was that the engagement of the customers was big at the  beginning of the contract and decreasing during the time.  When they just had to renew the contract they weren’t aware of the service. On the  other hand, if they had had a claim during the contracted period, the experience was  negative and they weren’t satisfied at all with the service.

Approach

Storytelling is a great tool to make people aware of things they won’t see just by  reviewing data.   In my case, the insurance company was aware of complaints from customers during  the claim process, but they did not know the great picture and were not seeing the  gap between there service proposition and reality.     We could have combined our story with visualization, which would had made it even  clearer to the company.

