Moderator: Alex Allwood, CEO The Holla Agency.
Jane Merrick: GM, Marketing and Customer Experience at IAG.
Tanya Smith: Head of Global Experience, Citi Bank – Digital, Marketing and CX Analytics.
Jenny Williams: CMO, HCF.
Kareene Koh: Strategy Partner, Deloitte.
Transcription:
0:00 – Alex: Good afternoon everyone my name is Alex Allwood and I will be your moderator for today’s conversation. I’d like to firstly say good afternoon and welcome to the era where Customer Experience is the brand, where what your customer experiences will impact purchasing decisions, their future purchasing decisions and the decisions of their friends and peers too. Today we’re discussing creating a connected customer and the brand leaders on your panel today are accomplished customer experience practitioners. That is, they are differentiating and growing their brands in today’s highly competitive and commoditised market. I have Jane Merrick who is the GM of Marketing for Customer Experience at IAG. I have Tanya Smith, head of Global Experience at Citi Bank and Tanya is also in charge of digital, marketing and CX analytics. I have Jenny Williams the Chief Marketing Officer for HCF and I also have Kareene Koh who is a partner at Deloitte – and Deloitte does a lot of customer experience work in the banking industry. My name is Alex Allwood and I’ll be your moderator today. I am the CEO of The Holla Agency and we specialise in Customer Experience. I’m also the author of the book Customer Experience is the Brand. I thought we’d get started with today’s session by asking the panellists some questions. I might head straight over to Tanya.
2:03 – Alex: What does Customer Experience mean to your organisation at Citi Bank? What is your customer mission? And how does that align with your company values?
2:09 – Tanya: For us, Customer Experience is all about creating those remarkable moments. It’s not just about getting the basics right but it’s really doing something that is above and beyond that’s going to warrant a remark – and for a bank that’s quite a challenging thing to do to get a positive remark. Our mission is all about enabling growth and progress for our target clients. We are really focused on the affluent clients and getting focused on those customer journeys end to end to ensure every time they deal with us they feel better off after that experience.
2:47 – Alex: Kareene you deal with a lot of brands in the finance sector. What are you seeing in terms of their values laddering up to their customer mission?
2:57 – Kareene: We are seeing organisations are maturing in their understanding of customer experience where it previously would be embodied more in a mission, vision or in a series of statements. I think over time we are seeing organisations take it to the next level in terms of trying to embed it in everything that they do and how they behave. I think starting to embrace what it really means to be customer-centric and bringing it in the conversation, into the room and into the decision process rather than being an afterthought which is probably what it would have been historically.
3:39 – Alex: Jenny does HCF have a customer mission or a customer vision? How does that relate to the values?
3:47 – Jenny: I am going to answer it in two ways. Firstly as a non for profit entity the customer or member as always been at the heart of everything we do. That being said we have a company vision which is to make healthcare understandable, affordable, high quality and customer-centric which if you listen to that its about healthcare not about us. It’s about what is the customer’s experience with transacting with us. In terms of how that ladders down across our 20-20 strategy we have a variety of strategic goals and pillars of operation and the word customer or customer-centricity features in every single one of the boxes that sits underneath there. I think one of the areas where we differentiate from some organisations, and I wouldn’t say any particular organisation, is that we don’t have a customer mission. Everything we do has a customer element to it and that’s what we are trying to feed into the DNA of what we do.
4:56 – Alex: That’s interesting because we are often at executive meetings or at management meetings where the customer might get talked about but customer sometimes doesn’t really come into the conversation.
5:14 – Kareene: I had a really interesting series of pitches from some agencies and providers that were providing a particular service to us and what stood out was those that did customer testing as part of their process as opposed to those that didn’t. I asked one of the companies that it was obvious in the fact that customer testing was missing in their process. How do you build customer testing into that? They said a customer is in our name and it was. That was their token payment to the customer was that they made their name have the word customer in it.
5:55 – Jane: Just following on from that, I work at IAG. So a main consumer brand for those that don’t know is NRMA insurance. I was a little disappointed that it was quite small on the previous slide from the gentleman that showed before. I think as an insurer historically its predominately around product and pricing. We had an interesting situation a couple of weeks ago, I was at an IAG Leader’s offsite which there were 150 senior leaders getting together. One of the ladies who got up and spoke is our Chief Customer Officer now and she’s been coming to these sessions for 10 years. This was the first one we had actually on customer. It’s always been about product or pricing and we’ve probably been on this customer centric journey for about 3 years. It’s really only starting to gain a lot of traction in the last 12 months. I think it’s starting to get strongly embedded within the organisation and one of our key missions is to creating world-class customer experience. We’ve been having discussions around what that actually means because it’s quite a lofty sort of mission. Is it as simple as every time a customer has an interaction with us or a touch point with us that they walk away feeling more positive about the brand or about the experience that they’ve had? We are certainly focused on trying to do that across the customer journey and we’ve done a lot of work to see what are those key points and key things we need to do to close those gaps?
7:40 – Alex: You have an interesting story. As you said, your program is quite new, three years into transformation but you started with mapping the entire journey from end to end and after all that work was done it sat on someone’s desk and gathered dust for a long while. What was that change? What happened between that huge body of work and starting to get in the game?
8:12 – Jane: I was explaining to Alex when we started this about three years ago. We started a customer experience team across the organisation. It was fairly new and no one really knew what they did. We employed a lot of consultants to come in and help us to navigate this new thing that we wanted to do. We developed so much data and so much analysis and got into a sort of analysis paralysis. We had these big books and within them we had personas, profiles, customer journeys and data points. Where the gaps were and where the right things were and they all just sat there looking lovely. It was really only after a period of time where we had people and we had done all the groundwork we thought about how we were going to bring this to life in a way that our people can relate and we can change the culture. Then it was working out ways to ‘operationalize’ that operation and the data. Now we have done it in a number of different ways whether that’s through visual customer journey or a number of initiatives, which I might talk about as the panel goes on. The biggest challenge was how do you take away from that big data and be able to practically apply it to affect everyone in the organisation to change their mentality.
9:41 – Alex: Kareene you’re on the consultant side. How are your clients bringing their work to life within their organisations?
9:55 – Kareene: It’s interesting because the challenge that Jane just mentioned is one that we see often. Clients will undertake grand visions around customer experience and sometimes in the urgency to get there the customer actually gets left out of that process because they are so desire to get to the end that they forget to actually talk to the customer, which is really critical to the process. A second challenge that we see is that once people get past that process, the initial strategizing and design phase that they struggle with the execution. That’s when you need the culture and the organisation to change and for it to really start to work with you whether that’s through BAU initiatives or projects. You still need a broad alignment around what you are trying to achieve. That’s the part where I personally get excited is that execution challenge because I think the organisations that are really pushing forward in this journey are the ones that are really striving to deliver real outcomes to customers and consistently going back to their customers and testing that.
11:09 – Jane: One of the things I’ve noticed doing a lot of transformational change is the default go to in a project, particularly when you’re implementing technology is you do a competitive analysis. You figure out what everybody else in your market is doing. The IT team will come in and talk about what pieces of technology you have to hook together and what are the dependences. What usually happens is everybody has a clear view of what they need to build and you’ve gotten all the way to the point of getting PSG funding and everyone’s decided what the scope of it is before you’ve actually started the user groups, whereas if you turned it completely on it’s head and start the ideation process with the users quite often you find what your competitors have done is a waste of time and quite possibly you could bypass the technology solutions that you had in place. It’s a little bit more blue sky thinking that needs to be in play when you want to transform.
12:26 – Kareene: It’s interesting as well because with that traditional delivery process people can get caught up in the land of projects, scopes and budgets. What I think is the real challenge is if you think about what ultimately your experience vision is – you need to keep coming back to that and challenging yourself to whether or not you are in the process of implementation because it was a journey you started or are you actually going back to the market and your customer and saying ‘even though we started this 6 months ago does this still make sense?’
12:58 – Alex: Designing customer experiences from the customer’s point of view are very much at the centre of your customer connect program. Would you like to give us a feel for the program at a local level, a global level and maybe some of the challenges that you have experienced over the last couple of years with implementation?
13:17 – Tanya: I’d love to talk about customer connect but before I do that because that is more of a local tactical initiative where we identify customer pain points and try to solve them but drawing on very similar experiences from what you guys were talking about. Traditionally Citi Bank has started with the business case, ticked off the financials and checked at the end whether that’s going to work for the customer. So flipping that on it’s head is something that is really important in changing our culture and starting with the customer but even that wasn’t enough. Often we’d start with a customer and say 20% of our time we’ve worked it out and then we’d spend 80% on the solution. I’m actually involved in this program we have it’s called ‘Discovery 10X’ and it’s a global program so we try and find customer pain points which are so significant that if we resolve them there are multiple countries that will benefit. We partnered with this company called Bionic and they are a about getting really big complicated companies like Citi Bank to really think about the customer. I thought I was very customer-centric and what really surprised me was how much time we spent really nutting out the customer problem. We were in rooms for days exploring the customer issue and it was quite a frustrating experience because the way our culture works is it’s so solution orientated that you constantly want to jump into ‘What are we going to do about it?’ This company was really good at bringing us back to the customer and once we’ve really nutted out and went ‘Okay we’ve definitely got it now’ it went back to ‘Do you know that or is that an assumption?
Then validating all of your hypotheses and finding objective ways to test that out in the market. We’ve been in the industry for so long with lots of people and a huge amount of knowledge they also assume they know what the customer needs or what the customer thinks. You’ve really got to pull it back and check your knowledge before you start building a solution. That’s quite a change from the way we think about things in banking. Back to the customer connect, that’s the same sort of principle but a much faster tactical approach – rather than trying to solve something globally we look at all of our social data we look at what our front line staff are saying and the call centre staff when we get complaints or negative NPS. We look at all of that and see where is our process falling down? We then get cross franchise teams to come together so in the past similar to what Jane was saying that there was just one department that looked after customer service whereas now we see there’s a role for legal clients, operations, technology and marketing to all solve this together. We’ll map all that out but in a fast agile way and within 6 weeks the project’s done. It’s actually really rewarding because you really see the decline in complaints and the jump in NPS as soon as you tackle one of those pain points you know when you’ve got it right.
16:37 – Jenny: I think that’s an interesting idea about analysing complaints and big wins where you talk about what you can do. It’s actually just centralising that information because there’s so many channels where those complaints come and some of them get artificially amplified. If someone figures out what the MD’s email address is then suddenly that’s an executive level problem for one complaint meanwhile you’ve got 50 complaints in social media about other things which is completely different and you are not focusing on it because you are focusing on the email that got sent to the CEO. It’s those sorts of things about putting the right balance on what the pain point is. I was thinking about the strategy versus the tactical and I think it’s really important to have a balance between both going on at the same time. The devil is actually in the detail when it comes to lot of this stuff. How do you actually deliver it at the front line? And what are all the bits and pieces you need to make it happen?
17:48 – Kareene: To build on your point Jenny I think what we’re seeing organisations doing now is marrying the answer to the ‘Do you know what the customer wants by combining data and the analytics capabilities with actually talking to customers and using the smarts of the data with the power of design into techniques?’ That’s where I think you start to get into different solutions in really solving the pain point for the customer through the eyes of the customer but validating that it’s a scaled problem by using your big data to verify that.
18:22 – Alex: Jane would you like to add to the conversation about some of the challenges you’ve had to overcome in rolling out your programs?
18:35 – Jane: I think there’s been a huge amount of challenges and I think probably the biggest one is around the focus within the organisation. How do you balance getting the right thing for the customer within a cost environment? That commercial aspect is a really important part for us. There’s been a lot of discussions that we’ve had especially with the front line talking about things like grade of service, how long you can be on the phone to meet a customer’s needs and there really has been this cultural journey within the organisation. What we’ve done to try and operationalise that is a couple of things. One is a program that we developed called ‘For the love of Sam’. We wanted to put a name and a place to all of our customers and Sam is a common female and male name and we wanted to bring that customer view into the room. What would Sam think? What would Sam’s view be? We now have every department in the organisation has a ‘For the love of Sam’ plan that is actually integrated across all the areas. We look at those different pain points, what are we doing about it? And what is your personal responsibility? Either yourself or within your team to address those things and we are revising those plans now every 90 days. I think that’s been a great cultural piece and I think the other piece that has driven our cultural changes is we’ve run experiments. We had a theory around trying to adjust customer needs by selling it could be a little more than us trying to sell a product we think the customer needs to be cross sold on. We changed a lot of those conversations that we were having on our front line and within our branches. We started off very small because people were getting concerned about if we start asking the customer questions about what are their needs? What part of their lives do they need protection in? There was concern that the time on the phone would blow out and we wouldn’t be able to deliver commercial results. What the results showed within the trial is that once you spend the time connecting with the customer and having that emotional engagement and really understanding what they want and address that need resulted in much higher sales and conversions. We started off with just a couple of teams doing this and now it’s rolled over to all of our front line staff, all of our face to face networks and we’re trying to work out a way to roll it out over our digital platforms as well. We are completely shifting the way that we are selling and retaining our customers to more of needs based focus. We are seeing the customer problem and not just coming up with a solution. The cultural piece has become quite a big thing and certainly we’ve now got customer advocacy scores in everyone’s goals and is a really big part of our balance score card across the organisation, both our CEO and Senior Leaders. David Thody from Telstra spoke at a session I was at a few weeks ago and they actually had customer advocacy in their balance score card and one year they didn’t meet their target and no one got a bonus which was a massive kick up the bum for the organisation. We’re not at that point yet but it’s a really big part of what we’re trying to achieve as an organisation to get those results because at the end of the day we believe that driving that great customer experience is going to drive great commercial outcomes at the same time.
22:30 – Jane: I would echo that having customer experience metrics in KPIs that go all the way to the top and filter all the way down is a fantastic way to implement a cultural change. A key indicator of success is when that cascading hasn’t happened then you don’t get that impact the organisation is looking for.
22:53 – Jane: We have now a Net Promoter Score at just an industry level with a consultant in every interaction. Each area receives feedback on their performance, which is great going from high to low.
23:09 – Alex: I wanted to ask you Kareene. You are dealing with a wide variety of clients. What challenges are you seeing especially in organisational alignment or cultural alignment around putting customer first?
23:22 – Kareene: We certainly see a variety of challenges and a big one in execution is the challenge between those that are centred around the customer and are really passionate in embracing the customer and the older world that might still be geared and framed around traditional ways of delivery. That can be really challenging when you are trying to think of everything from a customer’s perspective and then you’ve got an organisation that’s geared around waterfall delivery with very different motivators and incentives. That’s where that KPI pieces comes in because unless everyone in the organisation is aligned around the same goals then it’s really hard to drive change. I think another challenge I see in clients is the challenge of moving and the pace and agility that Tanya talked about before. How do you actually deliver in an agile way? Because keeping pace in today’s environment is far harder than it used to be. The market moves quicker and customer expectations are moving very quickly. We are now not sitting in a slow moving environment and in the digital world people have very strong expectations of experiences and they will switch off very quickly if it doesn’t need those. So irrespective on surprise and delight you must get the basics right.
24:47 – Alex: I mean the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google have been very customer-centric for a long time, for over 10 years. They are well developed both inside and outside of their organisations and this is what is driving customer expectations. Are you seeing that too, especially in banking?
25:06 – Jane: A very similar thing, we have embedded it in all of our scorecards and it really factors into the people’s bonuses. If they are not performing even if they have driven a lot of revenue for the organisation if they are not resulting in happy customers then they’re not getting nice bonuses. It’s much more about long sustainable growth and we actually find when you get positive NPS there’s a nice revenue correlation as well. It should be an and, not an or. I think culturally when we first started talking about the customer it did feel like a bit of an or because you think about cost saving over here and so that is going to deteriorate the customer experience. As we moved on more of a digital journey you can actually take cost out and improve the customer experience that was definitely a mind shift. Now I think the organisation has really embraced the customer experience, it’s not so much that they don’t believe in it or don’t see value in it but there’s often people who have been writing policy or they have their head in spread sheets and we’re quite a remote organisation with 90% of our acquisition coming through digitally people aren’t expecting to have to pick up the phone and have a conversation. By changing that expectation some very talented, smart people that think about the customer but the idea of actually talking to one is something that panics them and it’s a different way of working. That is something we are coming to grips with and that’s why we did the customer connect. No matter which role you have, whether you are front office or back office you are expected to talk to customers and understand what they’re going through. When you are writing a risk policy you also have to think about how does that save credit losses but how will the customer feel about that? What does that mean from their perspective? You can’t understand and appreciated that unless you’re having regular interaction with customers.
27:03 – Jenny: We’ve implemented a program to that point and I think that’s a really strong point. The further removed you are from the customer the harder it is to get your head around what impact your role had on customer experience. We have a program called ‘Working Together’ where we have the back office actually sit with the front line staff. If you’re from IT and you decided that you are going to construct this system that requires an operator to go into 5 different systems in order to answer a basic question and you sit there and you listen to the frustration of the conversation as they go through that exercise suddenly you are going to go back to your day job with a whole different feel for what you do.
27:44 – Alex: Jane I think you and I were talking about your program, which was at a conference. A ‘walking in your customer’s shoes’ program. Was that your program?
27:56 – Jane: We’ve got a couple of different ones. We’ve got ‘Customer Connections’ not ‘Customer Connect’ – shows how unoriginal we are. We are working through a revamp of that program at the moment where it just used to be going and sitting next to front line staff, to actually now having more of a tiered version where you can get an NBA in customer immersion which will be sort of a six day program which will be fully engaged and fully immersive. Recently we also did an exercise where we gathered at the senior leader’s place as I mentioned before, where we had 150 leaders out there and everyone had to go into groups of 3 and ring our customer advocates and say thank you for being a customer. We also wrote thank you cards to the consultants that managed that interaction. So with 150 people we did it for over an hour and it was about 1500 calls that the group made. We had people that had worked there for a long period of time who have never spoken to a customer in really senior positions. A lot of our customers are long standing customers that have been with the organisation for 40-50 years. In the group that I had we had three customers named Margaret who were all ranged between 65 and 75 and they had all been with NRMA for about 50 years. We made all these calls to the customers to basically say thank you and it was the first time some of them had really heard from us in way we weren’t trying to do something. We’re looking at rolling that out more in depth through the organisation but the really nice thing is recognising the employee and colleague that’s actually driven that interaction. There’s a really good piece of theory from Forrester around alignment around employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, which we’re really looking forward to have good, happy and engaged employees to be able to deliver that experience. Also how we can make employees feel recognised rather than just paying bonuses but actually just having a thank you card is a really nice experience. I’ve got some sitting on my desk and I have to make calls this week. We are committed to doing this every week and we are committed to rolling that out. We started out just doing advocates because we wanted to just ease people into these conversations and then we will be moving onto detractors and passives as well. The passive conversation is ‘What would have made your experience even better that we would have been able to make an advocate out of you?’ This is another piece of work that we are doing about how can we continue to move that experience? NPS is really hard to move and so we have been working on this for a while and it’s a really difficult metric to move. We are focused on making sure every interaction is right rather than focusing on the Market NPS. With the belief that if we can focus on the interactions that we can control and improve NPS and market scores.
31:40 – Alex: Have you had the opportunity to measure any of those internal programs in terms of the results or the impact in terms of staff attitude and mindsets?
31:50 – Jane: Probably not at this point. It’s quite early days to be able to do that. We do measure employee advocacy as well as customer advocacy and there’s a lot that drives towards employee advocacy. We’ve had a lot of change within the organisation and so we know where we are at the moment and where we would like to move. These types of programs really help to drive towards some of those more effective outcomes for both parties.
32:25 – Kareene: I think what’s interesting that you’ve touched on Jane is that a lot of these programs is when you start to bring in the voice of the broader employees into the design process as well you get some really powerful insights. In talking to customers you observe and see the nuggets but when you bring in the employees into the mix they’ll bring at times many years of experience that they can bring to the frame. They are often really passionate because usually the things that bother customers are often the same thing that bothers them because they will be the ones that have to face those challenges.
33:40 – Alex: Kareene are you seeing more brands co-creating with their customers to change interactions? What sort of experiences are brands working on?
33:17 – Kareene: A lot more organisations are talking regularly to customers whether that’s through scaled panels or through more pointed user testing. I think they are combining that with the data analytics and particularly I work a lot in digital so we are checking interactions at a more digital level. We are seeing more organisations following their sentiments, taking a look at what is going in social media and seeing linkage between what’s happening with their brands in social channels and in review sites. I think the Voice of Customer can be heard through many different lenses and it’s about having the ability to synthesise that where you can get to the heart of the insight and act on it. The insight’s one thing but it’s actually doing something about it that’s really powerful.
34:21 – Jane: We’ve created another program of work within the organisation called ‘Listen, Learn, Act’. It’s trying to address the point that you made earlier. All the departments within an organisation have these walls set up within the whole of the business so if you hear of an issue you can put it up on the wall and then you take personal responsibility for trying to solve that problem. Some of these problems are big problems, which require some discussion around investments, and some of them are really small irritants that someone can try to take on and address. We would have solved thousands of these small challenges and we’re trying to address that with people taking accountability and then seeing the satisfaction of their initiative that they raised be able to go through what did they learn and then acting on it.
35:31 – Alex: That’s a nice segue into quick wins. Tanya have you had some nice quick wins that you can share with the audience?
35:37 – Tanya: I think everybody embracing it from the top of the organisation down so all of the leadership team making calls. Once a month we do almost a day just focusing on the customer and I think when all of the staff sees how important it is then it just gets momentum and snowballs. Definitely seeing on a scorecard is a fast way to get people to change their mind on how much time and effort they put into it.
36:11 – Alex: I think we talked about the same thing Jenny, in terms of behaviour change through reward and including that into the scorecard. What have you seen there in terms of quick wins?
36:20 – Jenny: I think that’s absolutely true. People may have frustrations in their process and have their ways to get around things. It’s just been like that for decades and a lot of our staff have worked for our company for decades and they just get used to doing things the way they are doing it. The quick win is to float them out of their day jobs and to look at what they do and how they do it and see if they can make adjustments. A lot of those things are just process related not system related and all that’s every been required historically is the chief of that department and the chief of that area didn’t like each other or had some conversation that cascaded into how people did their jobs that way. So then them asking ‘Can we do it differently?’ is one of the quick wins that have been established. In a very simple conversation I just talked to one of my peers and said ‘Why don’t I do this part and you do this?’ It becomes a totally different experience.
38:15 – Alex: Dumping the dumb rules. Jane, Have you had some quick wins? You’ve shared a lot of your experience today.
38:23 – Jane: None of them have been really quick. I think the most impactful is calling the customers actually and that’s something that is just really easy to be able to implement. A lot of the other programs take a lot of time and getting things into balanced scorecards takes a bit of time as well. So I would just say talking to customers and speaking to people.
38:53 – Jenny: It works both ways it actually highlights and connects people within the organisation who typically have so few contacts it sort of grounds everyone. We had a situation where some email system inadvertently sent a lot of emails to a few customers and so the CEO’s decision on the way to deal with it is that he split up the people that received too many emails amongst the executive leadership team and to call 10 people a day for a week until it was done. We worked our way through the apologies to all of these customers and that was a very insightful exercise. Its empathy isn’t it? I think you can quickly build empathy by having conversations with customers and there’s no technology boundary in doing that and once that empathy’s there then I think you can create so many experiences in a different way.
40:00 – Alex: We are quite disconnected these days from connecting with our clients on a physical level expect if you have a storefront. We all text each other, we are all facebooking each other so it’s getting back to talking to customers.
40:14 – Jenny: It’s also the focus group of one I think. In many instances we are our own customers. I’m a health insurance customer; you guys probably use banks and have car insurance. We all use the products and its very easy to fall into thinking this is the way it should be because when I use the product this is what I care about whereas that might not be what everyone else thinks.
40:43 – Tanya: It does make it quite real when one of your staff, say my mother couldn’t get an account because she needed 5 documents or my uncle went through this terrible fraud process so he cancelled his card. All of a sudden you are getting involved because you’re trying to solve all these problems. It’s kind of like the personas it makes it real and having a few experiences like that I think is good for senior managers but also the rest of the organisation.
41:08 – Alex: I wanted to finish up on talking about return on investment programs because I think it’s a really important element to starting a customer experience program, not only are the scores, scorecards and KPI’s but actually how we are going to measure the return on our investment and return on the initiative. Kareene you are working with a lot of brands, how are they measuring their ROI?
41:40 – Kareene: It’s interesting you touched on NPS Jane because I think there’s an increase in frustration with NPS. It is a little opaque and difficult to articulate value. I think personally in the work that I’ve done it depends on the maturity of the organisation as to where the ROI is. I think for a less mature organisation often there are operational and more traditional productivity types of measures that you can use to demonstrate ROI whether that’s optimising spend or optimising processes the kind of things that Jenny was talking about. I think for the more mature organisation it’s about loyalty. What you really want is to create a real relationship with a customer and the real intimacy whether it’s measured through NPS or another measure when you unpack it it’s about loyalty. I want them to go away and feel that it was a fantastic experience. I want them to tell other people that it was a fantastic experience and I want them to be loyal to our brand and me. It needs to be earned and that is ultimately what it comes down to.
42:55 – Alex: Have you seen any of your clients using very simple metrics of customer lifetime value, customers kept, customers retained, customers won and customers lost?
43:06 – Kareene: I think there are probably all of those and many more. Ultimately I think for me they are somewhat important though I think they need to be really understood because most of the time you can make a metric work to tell the story that you want to tell. This is probably the strategist coming out in me. What I think it’s about is really looking at a true reflection of are our customers choosing us?
43:44 – Jane: For us, lap rates are the metrics that determine the ROI and it’s really straightforward. We can measure customer experience and what we’re doing in it by using NPS and through customer engagements. Customer lifetime value is not as important to us since someone really healthy has a lot of customer lifetime value whereas someone who is chronically ill has a bad lifetime value. Ultimately they are both customers and they pay the same premium. It’s not their fault if they are sick or if they are healthy – well sometimes it is. The bottom line is the lapse rate. In any organisation you’ve got acquisition, which is the bucket that you fill up and see how quickly is it leaking out the bottom. It’s not rocket science you know.
44:47 – Alex: Tanya you’ve got a complex set of products there. How are you measuring your customer experience?
44:53 – Tanya: I mean NPS is a big focus so we do take a look at how profitable our advocates are versus our detractive. It is important to look at it over a decent amount of time because in banking there’s a lot of honeymoon rates. You may have someone on a 0% balance transfer so they are extremely happy but they are not making you any money in that point of the relationship. Over time you see that you’ve got advocates that are also more profitable and are more engaged and they have a deeper relationship. A good customer is also a long-term profitable customer.
45:33 – Alex: Jane Would you like a final comment?
45:34 – Jane: I think I’d agree with everything you said and it’s one of those things where you can measure all those metrics that you’ve been talking about. In insurance we look at everything and I think it also comes down to common sense. It shouldn’t’ be rocket science. If we are developing and delivering good customer experience then I expect the customers are going to stay with you and be satisfied which leads to all that ongoing behaviour. It’s the right behaviour system and it’s the way we want to be treated ourselves.
46:12 – Kareene: I think just to add to that ultimately there needs to be a trust and the customer needs to trust you. They need to trust that you are going to do the right things and they need to believe you are worthy of their business ultimately. Whether they express that changing to another provider but for me I think trust is something that we are hearing more and more people talk about whether because there are more negative things in the market or it’s the positive in the market. I think trust is something we are going to see a lot more of.
46:51 – Jenny: One of the areas for instance for us is how someone chooses to engage with us when they are having a health incident. If they call us before they go and decide on a specialist and a hospital we can make it cheaper for them and cheaper for us because we’ve got arrangements with some doctors. There’s a lot of information and data that we can gather from 1.5million lives that we’ve covered for 30 odd years that can help them in that journey. It can help them and it can help us. Customer Experience in that instance is that do they trust us enough to call us then? Or do they just bring the bill to us at the end of the day and get upset that we don’t pay what it’s cost? That’s the fundamental difference in Customer Experience in the health insurance space but we don’t earn the right to be consulted before they go into it unless we build that relationship before they get sick.
48:04 – Alex: If you could put your hands together to thank our panel today and thank you to everyone here.
First Published: https://goo.gl/5MHc0R