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.
FIGURE 1.3 The new routines were added to the CRM system. A field for customer-specific notes (on the left) functions like a sticky note.
Simplifying IT Infrastructure
All of a customer’s details are entered into Gjensidige’s S2000 mainframe system, which crunches through the numbers and risk analysis in the actuarial tables to produce an insurance offer. Management said that it was the most brilliant system in the insurance industry in Norway. S2000 is very flexible, which means salespeople can manipulate more parameters than Gjensidige’s competitors, but salespeople did not see an advantage in this flexibility. It was too hidden, and in their conversations with customers, the salespeople realized they did not need this flexibility.
Such a flexible system also has the overhead of being more complicated. For instance, a customer could not have a house and a car bundled up in one insurance product. This made it more difficult to create a joined-up experience for the customer.
Putting Insights into Practice
One of the things that hampers product innovation in insurance is the time delay. Organizations only find out whether an innovation will make or lose them money after they see the level of claims, which can take several years. Thus, the insurance industry traditionally is conservative about innovation. The customer insights gathered by the design team helped inspire confidence in bringing new ideas to market.
Using the material from the insights research, Gjensidige ran co-design workshops with different groups within the company and generated 97 ideas, five of which were chosen for further development. Finally, the team came up with one new service proposition.
Gjensidige had about a dozen products for everything to do with people, from individuals to families. From an insurance point of view, this meant that they had a fantastic array of tailor-made products for different eventualities. From a customer point of view, this meant that people felt like they were faced with impossible life insurance choices, such as gambling whether they would die of cancer or in a car accident, because nobody could afford to buy all of the policies and be 100% covered. Customers faced the same dilemma when choosing which possessions to insure—the dog or the laptop?
The breakthrough concept for Gjensidige was to go from offering 50 products to just two: one to cover the individual and his or her family, and one to cover everything they own. From an insurance point of view, this was very radical, but in an example of the value of the expertise that exists inside organizations, the basic idea came from Gunnar Kvan, a very experienced Gjensidige actuary, during a series of design workshops. He suggested that it was possible to think about the company’s offerings in a dramatically different way. He had been working on this idea for five years, but had not been able to get people to see his point. He had no way of expressing his view in terms of what it would mean as an experience for customers, but he knew the financial algorithms could be modeled differently. The design team sat down with him and went through how such a service could be put together. It would require hard-core mathematical engineering in a huge spreadsheet running in the background to make it happen.
Experience Prototyping the Service
Anders Kjeseth Valdersnes, the design team’s Microsoft Excel maestro, built a prototype of the product in Excel, which had all the tools required to handle the actuarial tables and live information visualization. Rather than spending a week or two designing and coding a Web prototype with a functioning back-end database, Anders did it in two days and designed it to look like a website so that it could be tested with customers (Figure 1.4).
