Insurance Companies in Ireland Need to Focus on CX or Prepare to Face the Guillotine.

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Ireland’s insurance sector’s poor Customer Experience (CX) results are due to a number of factors. Continuous steep rises in insurance premiums have angered the Irish consumer, particularly around renewal quotes. The sectors continued focus on acquisition at the peril of retention gives it one of the highest churn rates. Marketing’s focus remains on price with little time spent on delivering high quality CX and there is no excuse for not offering it! The highest CX scorer on the planet is USAA (See below). This insurance and banking giant for the US army is breaking CX scoring records because of their integrity and high empathy scores.

CEXi’s Irish Customer Experience report revealed that the Irish Insurance sector scored 10% lower on average when compared to all other business sectors. It scored the worst in NPS – 18% lower than the top performing sector.

Out of the fourteen insurance companies represented in the survey only two, Laya Healthcare and Aviva made it into the top 100.

 

Top 5 Insurance Companies In Ireland As Stated In The CEXi Report

  1. Laya
  2. Aviva
  3. AA
  4. Vhi
  5. Irish Life

 

Dialogue Recommendations

  • The CEO and ‘C-suite’ team must be engaged in the CX process to ensure you do not get into silo arguments which have no respect for the customers interests needs.
  • The Insurance industry should consider customising their experiences by age segments, just as the UK are successfully doing. Specialist insurance companies have been able to drive significant profit by cherry picking the market. For example, Saga is focusing on the 50+ age group and has been able to create a highly personalised experience for them.
  • Insurance products are very similar and in recent years Ireland has seen the majority of insurance companies promote themselves on value alone. Using CX as a key message can create brand differentiation.
  • The insurance sector as a whole need to manage their expectations better. There is a huge problem with over promising and under delivering to customers and this has created trust issues.
  • If the insurance sector wants to get back on the customers side then their communications need to be clear and honest. If they take an over the fence, neighbourly and conversational approach to their comms then we should see a large climb in integrity next year.

World leaders In Insurance

 

RAC Tops The Insurance Sector In The UK For CX   Rac_logo.svg

The RAC have personalised their customer experience with help from NewVoiceMedia.

RAC provides customer services, such as product and test-drive information, to consumers with new car warranties on behalf of car manufacturers and have been able to offer their customer base a great personalised experience.

The company now benefits from access to a customer’s entire history of interactions from one screen and real-time reporting and analytics, offering visibility of contact volumes, advisor performance and customer experience – enabling RAC to improve business processes and the performance of individual advisors. Its regular mystery shopper programme reveals that customer satisfaction has reached 93% .RAC ensures all calls are answered within 20 seconds. They have also boosted First Call Resolution to 80% and reduced call abandonment rates – from 7% in 2013 to less than 3% in 2014.

 

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USAA Top All Sectors In The US For CX Excellence

With 8 million military members and their families as their customer base, USAA demonstrate empathy by understanding how their customers feel. A large proportion of USAA employees are ex-military, and if they’ve not served in the military, training is steeped in military experience, from dining on “meals ready to eat,” to receiving a bona fide deployment letter to make them really think about the financial decisions their customers face and what it is like to be in their customers’ shoes.

USAA also achieve record scores for acting with integrity, considering the customer’s needs before the company’s profits: USAA shared that “we practice down selling; ensuring the customer only gets exactly what they need”.

As the number 1 brand in 2015 for CX excellence, USAA are heralded as customer experience champions. Across each of the 6 pillars, USAA do something extraordinary.  Their commitment to their customers is second to none and it clearly shows. This is recognised in the scores they achieved in four pillars: Expectations, Integrity, resolution, and empathy.

USAA are world leaders in CX excellence and living proof that a financial company can use CX to be successful. Looking at what they have done over the years means there is no excuse for the Irish insurance sector to treat their customer base the way they have.

 

What Dialogue Can Do For You?

Dialogue are Europe’s first customer experience design agency and are founders of CEXi.org, which launched Ireland’s first CX league table in Sept 2015. Dialogue recognises that most clients are buried under customer insight and we can take that insight and turn it into a great Customer Experience.

Dialogue will design and deliver remarkable CX that will differentiate your brand and get your customers to sell on your behalf. See www.dialogue.ie for more info.

 Dialogue Cust Ex ORANGE dot_Big Strapline-01

 

The 5 essential CX online commandments

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After speaking with CEXi consultant and online expert Julian Douglas, we give you the 5 essentials on how to give your customer a great online experience.

 

  1. Under  promise and over deliver. Keep it simple but do the simple things well.

In general, brands that have a simple focus and clear vision tend to deliver what their customers expect. With an excellence in Integrity and Time & Effort, RaboDirect have adopted a simple customer-centric approach to savings which has ranked them highest in the financial sector in CX.

RaboDirect have created a humanised, online service without a high street presence and killed the complex financial lingo.

 

  1. Make sure your website loads fast! – the ‘back’ button is your biggest enemy123

How fast or slow your website loads is determined by a combination of factors that span design, development and the end-user’s connection speed. Many of these, especially the last, will be out of your control. But one of the biggest and most easily preventable causes of a slow-loading website is uncompressed images. These images have to be downloaded every time a user visits your site, taking valuable time. According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds.

 

 

  1. Only acquire a customers personalized data once you have earned the customer’s respect. Then segment it carefully to personalize future interactions.

Don’t hassle your potential customers to share info with you as soon as they land on your site. Asking for personal information or asking them to take a survey should only come after you have built a relationship with them. If somebody clicks onto a site and is immediately prompted to sign up for a newsletter or weekly blog they will feel hassled and may abandon. Wait until someone interacts with a call to action and shows interest in your product before asking personal questions.

You wouldn’t be able to ask someone for their number without them getting to know you first!

 

  1. Great mobile and tablet experiences are now as important as desktop.1234

Some people feel they are more important and they may be right!  With so many of us in possession of a smartphone and a tablet, a great mobile experience is expected by your customers with nothing less accepted.

Something as simple as an SMS or text notifications can be a very useful tool to contact your customers and can be used for time sensitive information. UPC – now Virgin Media, use Dynamic Parcel Distribution who send out a text message to their customers with a reminder that their order will be delivered on the day. This allows the customer to schedule their day around the time their package will arrive

 

Hailo (the highest ranking app-only company in the CEXi top 100) are known for their great mobile experience with on demand and up to date information about the available taxis in a user’s area. The whole idea of ‘hailing’ a taxi without having to see one or make a call saves customers a huge amount of time and effort.

 

  1. Make it easy and obvious for your customers to contact you and always include a street address.

If you want your customers to trust your business, especially if you have an eCommerce website, you need a legitimate address and business space. A business that can be physically found will always be chosen over a website with no address. With so many fake businesses and scams circulating the web it is increasingly unusual to trust a business with nothing but a webpage to their name.

 

You can find 5 more CX online commandments in the CEXi report – here.

 

Image source: bartcop.com

Will rolling the red carpet transform UPC?

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Last week UPC/Virgin Media opened up its Facebook page to get feedback from Irish consumers.

The response was quite damming.

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The Virgin brand has been a leader in the delivery of amazing Customer Experiences. They were one of the first customer champions on the planet. ‘Making Red Magic’ is a requirement of every staff member.

Virgin go to great efforts to make sure customers are clear on exactly what to expect and consistently deliver it. They under promise and over deliver. In the first CEXi.org report, a key insight was that Irish companies have been caught out over promising and under delivering across all sectors. Given time, we expect that Virgin Media will help transform UPC’s expectations pillar. While it won’t happen overnight, we expect to see a significant rise up the Customer Experience table for next year’s report.