Service Design. Ben Reason
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researchers discovered that many different people were giving advice about insurance who should not be. For example, friends and family were frequently believed to be the best source of insurance advice. People trust their father to give them good advice about an insurance policy more than they trust an insurance agent. (By “agent” here, we mean a representative of Gjensidige because there is very little in the way of an insurance brokerage market in Norway.)
The challenge, then, is how to work together with all of these invisible touchpoints. Insurance originally dates back to a time when people in a small community would pool their money to pay for an accident, such as someone’s barn burning down. This stimulated thinking about bringing back this social aspect, because insurance had evolved from a collective effort into these machines that customers don’t trust.
Choice
From an insurance specialist point of view, the more options you have the better you will be covered. Covering certain items, such as a new bike, but not others, such as an old PC, allows people to have insurance tailored to their needs.
At the same time, customers want simplicity. The paradox discovered in the insights research was that customers want very simple products, but they want to feel like they are making a choice from an array of complex products. The underlying need here is that they do not want to have to choose from lots of options, but they want the experience of having made their own choice.
Documents
When it comes to reading insurance papers, one of the typical quotes from interviewees was, “I just can’t do it.” This connects back to the issue of trust. On the one hand, customers do not read the details of their insurance policies, which means they blindly trust the insurance company to be right. On the other hand, customers do not trust the insurance company because they do not know the details of their policies.
Insurance companies produce enormously long documents, which is the main reason customers do not read them. Customers were saying, “Can’t we have just one document and could it be on one page?” but what people actually wanted and needed was a “What if?” structure they could study—one to explain that if this happens, the customer will get that from the insurance company.
Customers also had no idea where they kept their insurance papers. They know the papers are important and some people said they had them securely filed away, but when researchers asked to see them, the papers were in a complete mess. Interviewees would say, “Yes, they’re just over here,” but it would turn out to be a policy from two years ago and the latest one was still in a pile of papers somewhere. This means that customers have no clue about what they are insured for or what they are even paying.
Another reason people did not know what was in their documents is that most of the text is written by lawyers in “legalese.” Over the years, more and more text had been added to these documents without much serious thought about what was still needed. To counter this, Gjensidige reduced the size of their insurance policy documents by 50% to 60% just by taking out extraneous words and simplifying the language as much as legally possible. It took a team of four people a year and a half to do this, but they have done a brilliant job. Gjensidige also gained a small side benefit from reduced printing costs, but the big benefit has been in customer experience.
Company Insights
Filling In the Gaps in Public Benefits
In Norway, people assume that if something bad happens to them, they will be covered by the state, but they have no clue about what actually would be covered and what they should cover themselves. Customers need this information and they need people to talk to who can give them good advice, not just salespeople who are more interested in selling an insurance product than in what customers need.
As in many organizations, the underlying issue is hard targets for sales quotas and organizational structures that actually discourage customer service representatives from taking proper care of people. Gjensidige needed to change the way they measure performance internally so that the benefit could be experienced externally, which meant an internal culture change. Since this change was implemented, everyone’s primary measure is customer satisfaction on an individual basis. Customer-facing staff at Gjensidige get daily reports on their own customer satisfaction scores. The main data is gathered by sending customers an e-mail asking if they want to rate their experience after every customer contact by telephone or at a branch office. This feedback is added to a mix of other metrics to make up a comprehensive customer experience measurement system.
Being Personal
When it comes to customer relations, people see straight through things that are meant to be personal but actually are not. Humans are so well attuned to interpersonal interactions that communications such as “personalized” form letters can come across as almost creepy. Worse still, these kinds of faux personal communications are prone to simple glitches, such as old data or typos, leading to personalized life insurance letters being sent to dead relatives, or Mr. Jones being addressed as “Dear Mrs. Jones.” There is only one type of personal, and it is to be genuinely personal. For that to happen, of course, the company culture must be one that encourages it and one in which employees feel happy working. Grumpy, stressed people have grumpy, stressed interactions.
Consistent Communication Channels
Respondents wanted Gjensidige to stay on their channel, meaning that if they telephoned, they wanted the company to call them back, not send an e-mail or a letter. If they sent an e-mail, they wanted an e-mail back. Gjensidige made the strategic decision to keep all of their channels open, which is more costly because it is more complicated to manage, but the company believes it is worth the expense because it creates a better customer experience.
Language
Laypeople (customers) really do not understand the language of insurance. A lot of people thought a “premium” was actually a prize, for example. As such, Gjensidige needed to be careful that the insurance language that is clear to them actually means the same thing to their customers across all communication channels.
Formalizing Personal Routines
When researchers visited Gjensidige’s offices to interview staff, they saw a lot of sticky notes on salespeople’s desks and on their computers (Figure 1.1). Many people had created their own routines for more efficiently dealing with customers. The insight here was that some of the processes developed “on the shop floor” could be adopted and integrated into Gjensidige’s systems as standard approaches.
FIGURE 1.1 Sales staff build their own routines to make their process more efficient.
Redesigned processes deeply founded on insight from customers and staff were initially implemented as paper-based routines to avoid waiting for enterprise software to be developed (Figure 1.2). Later, these new routines were built into Gjensidige’s new customer relations management (CRM) system (Figure 1.3).
FIGURE 1.2 Paper-based routines were a quick fix for sales staff.