Improving customer loyalty is a strategic imperative for many insurance company executives. Intense competition, commodity-driven product offerings and rising acquisition costs are driving new ways of thinking about - and executing against - a customer-centric business strategy. This case study profiles one of Ulysses Learning’s clients, 21st Century Insurance, and their approach to building a culture that is relentlessly focused on one thing: the customer experience.

Business Situation — With a strong base of operations on the West Coast, 21st Century Insurance Group is focused on growth through geographic expansion. The company entered the Midwest in 2004, Texas in 2005 and three Eastern states during 2006. With a core philosophy built around customer service, they have carved out a market niche by offering insurance directly to consumers, providing a wide array of insurance products and 24-hour telephone access to licensed insurance professionals.

As the company began to enter new areas of the country, they were quick to realize the game had changed. Accustomed to having strong name recognition and a good reputation, they were now faced with being the “new kid on the block” in a highly competitive industry. Also, their research showed that consumers were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with insurance providers in general. It was in these market conditions that they saw opportunity. By leveraging their customer service strengths, they could win over customers and build market share.

Strategic Approach — 21st Century’s vision was to build something unique. They set out to build a truly superior customer experience—one that was good enough to differentiate themselves from the competition, drive company growth and create a loyal base of customers.

Their approach was a delicate blend of art and science. The management team knew that, to achieve the results they were looking for, a customer-focused mindset needed to be built into the cultural fabric of the company. This could not –and would not—be a one-time event. They were in this business for the long haul and needed to build the cultural foundation and processes that could support and sustain a focus on delighting customers.

We asked Suzanne Agrios, Customer Care Manager at 21st Century, to speak with us about what made their customer experience initiative successful. What emerged were six critical success factors and a number of lessons learned, which are shared below.

Six Critical Success Factors from Suzanne Agrios, Customer Care Manager, 21st Century

#1 Create a crystal clear vision.

To build a performance culture focused on the customer, your people first have to “see it.” Everyone must share the same vision and buy in to what success looks like for your company. 21st Century’s philosophy was to treat every customer interaction as an opportunity to beat out the competition. “We set out to make the customer experience not good, but great,” explains Ms. Agrios.

Call center agents get this message from the moment they enter the 21st Century organization. Even the new hire training program is customer-centric. Immediately after they become licensed agents, call center representatives are introduced to the company’s customer-driven business model. This is done early on so that they see how every aspect of their job ties back to the customer. Even as they learn company policies and procedures, they see it from the customers’ viewpoint. New hires come to understand that the quality of their interactions with customers is what drives the company’s success.

It’s an old adage, but you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Further, people need to understand that the customer’s view is the central focus that drives your business priorities and investment decisions. The importance of the measurement system can’t be underestimated. It becomes the rallying point for your efforts and helps you understand if you are “moving the needle” on improving customer experience.

While there are many approaches, 21st Century chose the Net Promoter® score as the metric to gauge their overall customer effectiveness. The score is calculated by taking the percentage of customers who are promoters (those who are highly likely to recommend your company or products) and subtracting the percentage who are detractors (those who are less likely to recommend your company or products).

“For 21st Century, the measurement approach felt right, since it got to the heart of our overall philosophy of what drives customer loyalty—the interaction of the customer and the call center agent,” Agrios says. This measurement approach was incorporated into the company’s management routines, and people were held accountable for the results. Over time, it became clear to managers and agents that focusing on the customer experience was non-negotiable.

Process alignment is the backbone of any strategic initiative. The 21st Century management team took a hard look at their processes to be sure they aligned with their vision for an exceptional customer experience. They adopted Ulysses Learning’s Call Strategy™, which is part of the ServiceMentor® training system. The service model applies behavioral psychology to help representatives develop the skills to effectively navigate through customer conversations. The discrete steps in The Call Strategy are based on meeting the customer’s emotional needs throughout the interaction, thereby getting predictable responses that enable the agent to lead the conversation to a successful conclusion.

“The Call Strategy aligned beautifully with our goals and our measurement approach,” explains Ms. Agrios. “When we review the Net Promoter scores each month, we dig into what drove the score by listening to recordings of the actual customer call. We consistently see that calls with high Net Promoter scores follow the steps of The Call Strategy we put in place.

“It also provides us with a guidepost for process improvements or policy changes,” she says. “If we are truly focused on understanding and acknowledging a customer concern, it often causes us to step back and evaluate if there is a better way for us to do business with them.”

#4 Invest in your call center agents.

When service is your competitive advantage, you need to invest appropriately in the people interacting with your customers. In the insurance industry, the call center agent is often the primary customer touch point. 21st Century saw the strategic value of their call center agents and viewed them as the mechanism for delivering the brand promise— day in and day out. With more than 300,000 monthly calls coming through the 21st Century call center network, there was little margin for error. Every interaction was looked at as an opportunity to improve or detract from the quality of the customer experience.

Using Ulysses’ ServiceMentor Learning and Performance Improvement System, 21st Century rolled out training from the Senior Vice President level on down. “We put a stake in the ground and made sure that people had the tools needed to deliver on our customer promise,” says Ms. Agrios. “The system prepares people to excel in every customer conversation by adhering to the steps in The Call Strategy, which we know results in a world-class customer experience.”

The training develops Judgment@Work™ skills—decision-making and advanced customer interaction skills needed to consistently excel in every customer conversation. The staff learned to take control of the call regardless of the customer’s situation or level of emotion. This can be essential when dealing with customers on insurance matters, which can often bring a lot of personal frustration that presents itself early on in the phone call. An insurance representative that is not equipped to deal with the complexities and intensity of that situation is at risk of losing a valuable customer.

#5 Live and breathe a performance culture.

To sustain success, you must build your performance culture every day. In most 24/7 contact centers, managers and supervisors are often pulled in many directions solving customer problems or dealing with employee concerns. It becomes easy to get caught up in urgent immediate needs and lose sight of the more mission critical elements that are driving your business. Managers who are developing the skill set of frontline employees can easily fall prey to this trap, which can sub-optimize the customer experience initiative.

The 21st Century organization is passionate about the value of coaching and makes it a top priority. According to Ms. Agrios, “It is essential to improving your representative’s performance as well as the quality of the customer experience. Without effective coaching, you just won’t reap the benefits of any skills training your have provided your team.

“My advice on coaching is to be realistic about what you are asking people to do,” she explains. “It would be nice if we had the luxury to listen to calls and spend 30 minutes with each representative, but that is just not reality. Ulysses’ Focused Feedback™ coaching model is perfect for a busy contact center. In just 60 seconds, a call center manager can make a real impact on performance. It’s quick and effective.”

It’s interesting to note that 21st Century took the issue of time management head on. By performing a time and motion study, they were able to illustrate there was indeed time in a manager’s day for coaching. Once people understood the value and were given the right tools, the momentum shift began.

This was further accelerated by the daily example set by the leadership team. If a manager is walking through the center and hears a great call, they stop and take the 60 seconds to give that agent some positive reinforcement—modeling the same behavior they ask of their coaches. With that type of leadership example, the coaching process becomes easy. It’s not hard to get drawn into the enthusiasm, as evidenced by 21st Century agents bringing call examples to their supervisor’s attention—wanting to get coached.

#6 Build support up, down and across the organization.

Don’t underestimate the importance of communication to your change initiative. Once you launch the initial elements of your performance culture, it’s easy to get lulled into a false sense of security that has you believing the initiative will sustain itself. Nothing could be further from the truth. It isn’t that people deliberately want the effort to fail. To the contrary, most employees want to work for an organization that is focused on the customer. “As organizational goals change and evolve, you’ve got to keep tying it back to the customer experience. Without this, people will interpret that it is no longer important and that your priorities have changed,” states Ms. Agrios.

To ensure consistent results were achieved, 21st Century identified champions in each call center location. Each is a certified master coach that is intimate with The Call Strategy service model and the approach to providing Focused Feedback. Each champion is held accountable for ensuring that the coaching process works effectively and consistently in the call center. This infrastructure has brought a degree of camaraderie and creativity into the process. For example, 21 Century has developed a call library that showcases examples of quality customer interaction. Supervisors and agents can access this learning tool as a way to get some fresh approaches to common customer situations.

Results

Delivering an exceptional customer experience has become a way of life at 21st Century. With the right cultural foundations and training in place, they are seeing significant signs of improvement. Agents and their coaches report a higher comfort level with solving customer concerns and successfully navigating complex service situations. What’s more, they seem to be hitting the mark with customers. Net Promoter scores are trending upward, indicating higher levels of customer loyalty are being achieved. As an organization, they continue to look for ways to differentiate themselves from the competition. With a daily focus on delighting customers, they are sure to succeed.

If you want to learn more details about this and other client implementations, please contact us.