How VoC data has won NPS boosts for Zurich Insurance

Photo by israel palacio on Unsplash

There are great benefits to letting your customers do the talking. At Medallia’s London City Tour event, CX Network spoke to Clairy Moraitou Global Head of Customer Insights and Analytics and Monika Schulze, Global Head of Customer and Digital Experience at Zurich Insurance, to discover how the insurance brand is using customer insights to accelerate and personalize experiences.

Voice of the customer

How is Zurich capturing and actioning the voice of the customer to improve customer experiences?

Clairy Moraitou: At Zurich we capture the voice of the customer through our NPS programs. One of our major NPS programs is our Transactional NPS program in which we capture, through the Medallia platform, customer feedback along different customer journeys. Our TNPS program exists in 25 countries where we operate and in 11 different languages.

We get the customer responses, analyze them and develop actions at the local level. We have set up an entire governance model around the action planning and development, comprising of customer committees and customer boards; these teams analyze, prioritize and decide to embark on projects based on customer feedback.

Monika Schulze: One of the vital elements to move from data to action was to get everyone, including the leadership team, excited about the voice of the customer.

Three years ago we held a big leadership team event and asked the leaders how important customer feedback was to them and they were all incredibility enthusiastic. If you don’t have buy-in from those at the top you will never get the money and support for CX programs. The leaders had first-hand experience of the voice of customer and could feel customer pain points, which sparked their support for these programs. Based on that, we set up a program where the top 100s of the company, comprising 50,000 employees, were interviewing customers regularly on top of the employees that close the loop with customers on a regular basis. That made a tremendous difference. The leaders had first-hand experience of the voice of customer and could feel customer pain points, which sparked their support for these programs.

Read: Customer feedback, signals and satisfaction: Market Report

Could you please tell us a particular CX success story at Zurich?

Moraitou: When we obtain customer insights and analyze customer journeys we identify pain points in our customer experience propositions. For example, one pain point that we had concerning our claims journeys was that our customers wanted to know the real-time status of their claims. Customers would complete the necessary paperwork and file the claim, but a few days later they were not informed about the progress of their claim. To address this issue, we implemented a notification system on top of the claims workflow system which enabled us to message customers at important points in the claims journey to provide visibility to the customer. As a result, we received good feedback and the NPS score improved significantly.

Another case that shows the link between two different sub-journeys was encountered by analyzing customer feedback we obtained during the claims journeys. We found that a lot of our customers hadn’t completely understood the entire array of risk coverage of the policy they were acquiring. They were unaware at the time of purchase that some specific risks were not covered.

So, what we did in a few locations including Spain, Japan, and Austria is that we implemented personalized videos with very simple language that explained what their policy covers. This has drastically improved both the policy issuance journey and the claims journey.

Schulze: What I underestimated in the beginning was the importance of internal buy-in. The company is very data driven so you always have to show results. To fulfil this we have created a digital book which contains a lot of examples comparing old customer experiences where we had lower scores to the new and improved customer experiences.

We also created a lot of customer videos to illustrate incredible real life case studies. In one episode, an elderly lady in the UK was suffering through a storm, she couldn’t reach us because the claims department were overwhelmed by the volume of incoming calls due to the storm, so she used a chatbot for the first time in her life to reach a solution for her issue.

What are you most excited for in regards to customer experience in 2020

Schulze: We want to progress from a touchpoint view to a journey view. Then we will tackle the major pain-points against a journey. You also have to look at new ways of serving the customer and innovation, this is why I have enjoyed the Medallia conference as it is rooted in forward thinking: how new technologies can push customer experiences further.

For us technology plays an important role to improve the customer experience at each step of the journey.

We have created a suite of services, a global digital platform where countries can download digital assets to tackle their pain points and maintain innovation projects to accelerate the customer journey. This is something unique in our industry, which I think will help us quite a lot. It makes little sense for every country to develop their own chatbot from scratch for example, we have to join forces, working together is key.