This is a long detailed blog for people in the insurance industry – health warning: you’ll be bored otherwise. The messages are:
1) Customer effort, both physical and emotional, is in the detail of the journey, hence I’m sharing this as feedback not criticism.
2) It may be complex to do but marketing promise has to be met with operational detail that makes it simple for customers.
3) Sales and service go hand in hand when buying decisions are made.
4) In this category, you can’t make up for the price of the product with so-so service. And no one in this category offers Amazon like service.
5) Most of the customer effort is systematic to the company rather than the workforce.
Please share your thoughts & comments. I must see if we can do one of our self serve audits on this sector this quarter
Stardate 15111. Trying to give someone my insurance business through last week – multiple cars by 17th Jan. Should it be so hard?
I’m only fishing because NFU are incompetent at claims handling. 1 year later, a car park prang which witnesses reported is not resolved – the issue being a very poor lack of process. Made worse by duplicate, uncoordinated process with legal cover company DAS. So I don’t feel I should reward their excellent sales office by being loyal. Not after their initial quote was way over the odds – seemed like a try on, but was actually just poor details. It came down by 40% on asking. Still 40% over the price of a competitor quote.
I know Aviva have started doing multi car so I tried their site. There’s a discount, but no website process so I moved on. Too hard to do one car at a time.
Admiral are known for introducing multi car and have a website that handles multi car so I tried that. Entry was easy. Alas it didn’t work completely so I had to call earlier in the week. I got a handsome quote but the office was shutting at 9pm so he couldn’t close the deal. Good follow up email linking me back to my quote. But next day the website didn’t work again. So I called. I learned it doesn’t show you details of the quote anyway eg what the excess is. The agent couldnt access my quote because the last person hadnt logged out if it. Long hold whilst supervisor is asked to get other person out of it. No success. We give up – he cant do anything. They follow up by phone next day, I’m busy. I try website again – still doesnt work. I phone. Last agent didnt log out – I wait, I hang up. So I’m still looking. Can I bear ringing them again?
Stardate 14111. OK its Friday so I better sort it out. I mailed my concierge service the request on Weds as they have a great broker they rate – no contact centres they say. I call the broker contact – on voice mail. No response so I’d better start looking.
So I thought of people I know. LV have a good reputation for low contact rate and low customer effort inside the industry. I went to the website and there’s no multi-car function so rather than enter all the cars one at a time and then see if they could link them I phoned. Very short IVR routing, straight to the point. Very poor, long winded regulatory message to follow. Here’s the conversation:
“How can I help?” “Your web site doesnt seem to have a multi car function?”
“No but I can help – what car do you want to insure?” “As I said its multi car.”
“Sorry yes. We don’t do muti car. (Silence) “. I give up.
Very low effort. No business prevention officer. Speedy. Must get onto the next caller who may want to buy something. Doh !
Ok, next – Just tried the RAC site. No multi car process. Good FAQ showed me I can insure more than one car but one policy each. So that would be 4 quotes and 4 sets of paperwork. Looked for phone to call anyway but can’t find one.
OK, next – try the Meerkats – Comparethemarket.com – It will only take me into a single car quote and there’s no search function to see if they do anything else. Not so simples.
Ok, run out of people I know well, so I google “multi car insurance”. Looks like DirectLine and Moneysupermarket are the next stops. The Directline link page explains a discount but the site looks like a one car process. Ah well I’ll try. Start with the first car. Apart from not letting me say my phone number is a mobile ( it has to be day/evening/ talk type) the input is pretty slick. What’s different is they have a claim category for outstanding no fault claims which is handy. But then….What’s this you have to have a tracking device otherwise you cant get a quote. I give up. Haven’t even started on the other cars. Why didn’t you say that at the start!! Not so “direct” and no chance of carrying that route on.
Ok, next – Moneysupermarket from Google. The google link page explains multi car but has no facility for doing it!! I go to the car insurance page and start. Different – car first. No multi car process. I start but it tells me to enter a valid reg number – I have derrrr. I try again with capitals and spaces and it works. Scarily it tells me my car valuation – which is rubbishly low. 10 mins later and I’ve got the single quote done but there is no feature for multiquote in the process and all I get is back where I started – LV is the lowest quote. And I am really low energy now and not going to work though this for 3 more cars.
In this middlle of all this an Alex Vantwout of DAS calls to talk about the outstanding claim they’re just picking up after 6 months. He gets an ear bashing as he can’t hear feedback and it reminds me why I’m bothering to look around and not just defaulting to NFU.
Come on Peter – sort it now – busy weekend and week ahead so there wont be time to sort it out.
So on the saga ran in the car through the afternoon – whoops that reminds me, I forgot to try Saga. The broker goes through all the details by phone. Tries to reach me, the concierge tries to reach me. I eventually get back to them but they still dont have a quote but say they can get one Monday afternoon – but insurance runs out at noon Monday so I suggest earlier.
I tried Admiral again from the car. I guess & press 1, 1, to avoid endless messages and it works. The quote isn’t locked out this time and I get the answers to questions I wanted swiftly and a follow up email so I can conclude over the weekend if I want. Well handled Lisa Chapman. I ring my daughter as she’s used Admiral and she says they’re pretty good.
Stardate 17111.First thing this morning I need to resolve. I go to Lisa’s email from Admiral but there’s no web link to conclude on after all. I try and old link and the website doesn’t work again.Work, as in real work, needs to be done so I leave it til much later, as I know it’ll be hard yards on the phone – obviously their preferred channel as the number’s on the email twice..
Later I call the NFU sale office to give them the last chance to keep the business. In a meeting and wont be out for an hour – that’ll be too late. But he does call straight back, we compare and email, he rings back. Reading my earlier text, I’m wondering why I let them try again. It’s the thought of more paperwork for a new supplier. Just shows how much a good sales person could do in the branch network. And how much the thought of hanging on to a call centre can put you off. They tried, called back and couldn’t get near the Admiral price. The broker didn’t ring back this morning. The di is cast.
I try the Admiral quote and the website still doesn’t work, so I call, press 1,1 and guess what – the quotes not been logged out and he has to get help to access it. Groooan. I hang on and it’s sorted mercifully quickly. Prad goes over the details again as I glaze over to a welsh accent heavy enough to give Indian call centres a good name. We complete and he sets me up for the possible customer survey.
Job done? I doubt it and wait to see how well the paperwork rattles through the system next.
All I wanted was a “best service is no service” renewal or purchase for some high value business. I was quite happy to do the work myself. Nobody could do that.
It must be the cold weather. I’m churning a lot of my regular domestic suppliers, many of whom I’ve been with for a very long time.
Why? With all the snow, I’ve some spare laptop time which I never usually have. I have just enough time to put in the customer effort required. And with some that’s considerable.
So who are the losers and why?
EDF, 20 years – For over estimating bills and then being hard to deal with. See an earlier blog on customer effort with all the details of how they generated churn.
Friends Provident, 15 years – For not sharing risk in an insurance product and being so painful to deal with – both to try and buy from and to try and cancel with. I resorted to cancelling my direct debit rather than go through their cancellation process. If anyone at FP wants a full blog on the numerous dumb contacts, do get in touch.
BT, 30+ years – For overselling BTVision and damaging the already weak broadband service back to the world of the 1990s. And then requiring me to lock into a further contract. My replacement will be no better, but to get any progress BT wanted me to lock in to new a term contract rather than doing what they could to provide the service I was paying for.
Southern Counties Fuels have just been added to the list ( 6.5 years) – for making an exceptional £150 charge if you want fuel in the next 3 weeks before Xmas. Blatant exploitation of the cold spell. In addition they over charged on the last bill. After years of faultless low effort business, it smells like they must have had a change of management?
All are trying for “bad profits”, as Don Peppers would call them. The policy decisions may be made far from the front line, but it’s clear to those people on the front line that these are not policies that customers appreciate.
But the effort in moving supplier results in lethargy and policy makers rely on it. I shouldn’t be so lethargic or else I encourage companies to keep doing dumb things to customers.
This video is from a site called The Connected Kingdom which appears to be sponsored by Google – though it seems more like a government PR exercise. Nevertheless some useful stats on internet use in the UK.
The point of the video is that the UK is a great place to start an internet based business. I just wish I could get the internet at all. At home, in the wilds of Kent, I frequently give up, depending on time of day. Yesterday in N Ireland, it was so slow I couldn’t check a flight time.
Internet on the phone is at best iffy, even in London – as much to do with network congestion as coverage.
What has been noticeable is the impact that first BBC iPlayer had and subsequently BT Vision has had. There was a noticeable slow down locally when BT Vision became available. Maybe we need to be officially declared a deprived zone and internet TV prevented until we get a network upgrade. It’s great that fibre is being rolled out in the network – I’d be happy if the wet piece of string to our local exchange was dried out.
You can see a map of speeds around you on Top 10 or test your broadband speed at sites such as Speedchecker and Speedtest.
Anyway take part in the internet access debate on the Connected Kingdomsite, not ours There are plenty of discussions on the Connected Kingdom site to join in – take a look
The case studies mentioned in the video are worth a read too. I like mydeco Labs as another good example of crowdservicing and crowdsourcing.
(Thanks to #freshnetworks – a useful daily source of good stuff – which led to me to this)
I spent a couple of days this week presenting to a large financial services business and encouraging them to learn some lessons from social businesses.
One of the major chords was about the values of the business: being open, transparent and honest and in public. I was using 3 examples of ”crowdsourcng” and “crowdservicing”: Mini showing its customer ratings for sales and for service on its dealer sites, first direct ( happy 21st!) sharing customers good and bad commentary and giffgaff(happy 1st birthday yesterday ! ).
giffgaff works with its customers on all facets of the business – product development, sales, marketing and service. to be able to do this it has to transparent, open and honest. How many telcos would publicise their network outages?
Look at what first direct is doing next – inviting customers to join their Beta Lab to help them develop their products. A step too far for your business? Or just a step back into history if you are an IT company who have been doing this successfully for ages.
Back at the events, we were discussing how that could work for a financial services company. Just imagine sharing your internal customer feedback and customer data on your website. Publish your NPS scores and verbatims for example?. Publish your quarterly customer research?
Let’s face it, very few people in your business get to read it, let alone act on it. So what if the tables were turned and executives had to explain to customers what they were doing about the experiences represented in the data. The pressure would really be on to show the public audience that you are serious about customers.
Today, it might look like a very brave step indeed. But imagine if in a year’s time all your competitors were doing this and you were still afraid to do it. How would that look?
Oh and by the way, whether you like it or not, customers are already sharing their feedback and data anyway. Do you think they don’t know? Your job is to help them know more and do something about it – not hide the data.
Today, corporates are allowed to be not open, not transparent. At some point soon that will become very difficult without looking dishonest.
Dare you share your customer data on your website? Discuss
I referred in an earlier post about how values are key to online communities. It’s about being social, not about social media.
I read this piece in LBS’ newsletter about Saatchi & Saatchi’s internal approach to values. There are some nice themes in it:
A) The importance of purpose – it’s really important to have a purpose that matters to people and to keep communicating relative to that purpose at all times ( and yes ours is “How do we stop doing dumb things to our customers and our people?”)
B) If the purpose isn’t relevant to some people, they shouldn’t be there
C) The social, as in societal, aspect of work is important to people and you can give it room to breathe at work.
It reminded me of the performance system of one of my previous businesses where we ran an 20/80 scheme. You could take up to 20% of your week to achieve your out of work objectives, as long as you got your work done. You had to share those objectives in advance. Which made it overt and ok. And helped colleague communication. You got beaten up if you didn’t achieve them – people loved that. You didn’t have to mention the in-work objectives they set themselves – they were always motivated enough to do that.
I also like their phrase “Lovebrands” for firms like Amazon, Google and Southwest where people really feel part of it ( you can download “100 things you can learn from…. ” for each of these companies from ourlibrary ). Virgin also gets a mention. I’m less sure about that one. The brand is up there, but the subbrands are not. At an event recently people were asked to describe Virgin if it were a car: Alfa Romeo – beautiful when it works.
Good video here about Best Buy’s use of retail staff to provide a new channel of customer support in the US. Great idea for adding a channel without necessarily adding cost. Though I hope the shop staff keep their heads out of the screens for shoppers
Follow them at #twelpforce or see them on Twitter.
Had a great time last night at a Cambridge Network #cbnwk . Fellow speaker was Simon Elliott and he had fascinating insights into CRM. I’d kinda forgotten CRM as last decade thinking but obviously wrongly.
Simon has developed bespoke membership CRM platforms for his various employers over the last ten years- and has done it for Abcam a fascinating company that provides antibodies to the scientific community. 70,000 different products that all look like spit in a test tube!
1000 orders per day and no salesforce – a company that thinks buying journeys not selling.
What’s interesting is that all queries coming in our routed by an analytics engine according to who’s working, how big their inbox is, their expertise, the history on so on. Now’s that ‘s clever CRM.
There was some debate about the 50,000 emails a day going out. But again the CRM analytics are working out who to send what based on new products, new information and relevancy.
This should be called BRM not CRM – buyer relationship management.
I’m looking forward to judging the Professional Planning Forum Awards again in 2011 – is it really 10 years ! It’s fascinating and illuminating to see how hard people work to improve the customers’ lot.
Here’s Paul Smedley, director of PPF, talking about the awards
Jonathan Wilson is a member of our advisory board and has been involved with Budd since its inception. He delivers executive coaching for Budd clients and is particularly interested in group behaviours and their impact on business and personal performance. Jonathan was involved in many start ups including Laker, Virgin Atlantic and City Airport.
I’d like to share his thoughts on “social business” and his views on the future of consulting.
“One of the many delights of of being part of this Board is the quality of the occasional dialogues.
As you note, Pete, richness and success (however we define those things) are very much about values. Like you, I feel that transparency, honesty and sharing are core values. They are core because they lead to very practical benefits themselves and because they are integral (whole in themselves). A practical benefit of transparency is that it enables awareness. A benefit of honesty is that it adds reliability to that awareness. Transparency and honesty interweave in that making things transparent which encourages honesty. The two together lead towards integrity. Sharing is vital because it is an intrinsic part of relationship building and sound relationships are life sustaining for people, organisations and communities.
Other key factors that grow relationships are trust, reciprocity, fairness, patience and pace. Many relationships grow (climb, spread, deepen) over time. A key piece of learning, that many people forget in the hurly-burly of ‘busyness’, is that relationships last longer and grow out of transactions. So a purpose of each transaction as well as hopefully adding value in itself, is first that it develops the relationship and second it develops the skill and abilities of the people involved to form more, better, relationships.
Business relationships & communities are a particular kind of relationship in which agents of the business are usually relating for a definable – usually financially quantifiable purpose – usually in a competitive environment in which there are other contenders both for value proposition and the relationship. This distinguishes them from some (not all) communities.
A few propositions have been suggested in the course of this dialogue that I think I see it a little differently. Tim writes elegantly about problems and opportunities in organisations. He writes “because they are complex, they have no accountability”. I agree-ish. I wonder if it is as much because they are complicated and opaque that they have little accountability. I might add that because few managers understand complexity, between them in their organisations they produce more and more complicated procedures to try to control the complex and uncontrollable. They quite quickly focus most of their energy on their complicated procedures and misleading key performance indicators and lose sight of the ‘real’ performance in front of them.
I wonder sometimes whether business organisations do anything except provide the context for people to relate in. They often provide a way for people to evade their responsibilities as in, “The organisation has decided…”. I wonder if organisations can decide or do anything? People decide and do things together in the name of their organisations and an art of leadership is growing and, as Tim says, nudging things along.
David [Jaffe] brings out the richness of the Board, agreeing and disagreeing with the core proposition. He notes the double challenge that most managers have produced for others. We are terrified that we may miss something important and we are overwhelmed by unendingly increasing torrents of information hitting us through more and more media. We know we are going to get soaked. Probably while trying to work out the make up of the Niagara Falls of our current data and while we don’t notice that we are being swept over the Victoria Falls of strategic change.
So what can we do? Much more to suggest but, Limebridge, Budd, you Pete and all our close colleagues share fractal, self-similar, scalable qualities. We can help people by using our experiences and our way of internalising and externalising those experiences to help managers/organisations to become more self-aware and thus in much greater ‘control’ or more powerful.
We can write and publish about that as David and Bill have done so well. Managers would like to think that they can learn for themselves and they can extensively or slowly. Our engagement and presence, our ability to ask the right question in the right way of the right people at the right time is the result of years of learning and experience. It looks much easier than it was to learn. That deludes people into thinking it easy.
So our, your, Budd’s, Limebridge’s, David’s, Tim’s rare if not unique, added value is authentic presence to help people learn how to do what seems much easier to do than it actually is.”
We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about communities and the future of business this last 2 weeks. Well someone has to. Serious head scratching, some desk learning, asking the best people ( thanks Heather, Tim particularly, our advisory board members).
We met the guys from giffgaff this week who epitomise the good example of what’s possible with social business- v inspiring:)
It made me realise that we are very rich in community building experience that once understood, we can liberate further:
1) Today I had an inspiring day: helping 4 companies as a result of our client communities helping each other.
2) Last night we had a v fine time talking about apps with people we work with, some regularly, some from time to time.
3) Tuesday I learned what an unconference was and that we invented it first in LimeBridge.
Just 3 examples of the communities we’re in and have helped to generate.
The most significant step in learning for me this week was that social business is not about social media, it’s about being social. It’s about your values. And it’s not new. If your values bring people together and they include being transparent, honest and sharing then you can build social businesses using today’s tools.
Social businesses can build and grow fast on a popular sentiment: that companies don’t work for their customers and their employees. Amazon, eBay, first direct, Innocent are not new businesses but they are businesses that grew fast and strong because they are social businesses with very strong values and ethics.
I’m going to invent a word for it: being an “uncompany”.
I think Budd from now on will be an uncompany. LimeBridge already was, we just didn’t know it.
Next year we want to generate another community of people who share our passion and are trying to make “The Best Service Is No Service” processes work in their businesses. That’s why we’re thinking hard. Maybe our manifesto should just be that passion: “How do we stop doing dumb things to our customers and our people?”
#humap what if 360 reviews said "how I feel as a result of working with u" rather than "what I think of u"08:01:25 PM February 02, 2012from web
don't you just hate turning up the airport early for a flight that doesn't exist.... And apols to those I'm missing today due to deadlines08:57:52 AM February 02, 2012from web
There are plenty of discussions on the 
