Customer Loyalty Is The 'Holy Grail' For Insurance Businesses Today

For benchmarking and measurement, you need to identify key areas, with customer input, where you can make a difference, then benchmark and measure yourself against the best. From there, you need to identify gaps and improve on your performance. You can use the obvious tools, such as customer satisfaction and loyalty surveys, to help you measure your progress from the customers perspective, but you should also look at scoring your customer service efforts through other means.

Concerning process design, you may want to look at your processes in order to improve your service and delivery, and change them where necessary. Dont change them just because someone came up with a good idea, or because you can implement a cool technology. Change your processes when they add value to your service delivery from your customers perspective. Along with process redesign, be willing to change your organization, if necessary. If your most knowledgeable and experienced customer service representatives (CSRs) “graduate” from contact center work to analytical or project work, thats fine. Just remember that your customers may then be left with inexperienced CSRs.

Customer loyalty is the true measure of your success. The actions you take to build upon the relationships your agents and brokers have developed with your customers will be key in maintaining and growing your customer base. Find out what it takes not just to satisfy customers, but to make them loyal. Then, do it.

The companies that will succeed in the future will move from providing quality to providing value. In the service areas, this means moving from a mindset of “doing things right” to “doing the right things, right.” While handling transactional requests well is important, it only “gets you into the game.” You need to make sure you are a problem-solver, one who delivers value at every opportunity.

It is not possible to over-communicate. From a service perspective, good communication begins with listening to your customers and those closest to themyour agents and brokers. Use focus groups and surveys to develop both a customer-listening strategy and an associate/employee-listening strategy. Then, tell them what youve learned and what youre doing about it.

When it comes to your people, a strong service team, dedicated to your vision, is a must. Your team must build on your relationships with your customers. You must understand your customers needs, wants, preferences and values; reach the right customers/prospects in the right way; retain valued customers; and align processes, organization and technology with what customers value.

You might even consider adopting a “customer comes second” philosophyyour employees come firstand youll see a renewed vitality for your company from your staff. Then, watch that vitality manifest itself in the way your staff serves your customers.

The bottom line is that you need to scrutinize how you operate in each of the above seven areas. Your efforts to provide best-in-class customer service will push your organization to be more customer-driven and provide you with a valuable competitive edge over your competitors.

is a Customer Service manager for Mutual of Omaha, based in Omaha, Neb. He can be reached at [email protected].

Reproduced from National Underwriter Life & Health/Financial Services Edition, December 10, 2001. Copyright 2001 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.

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