The deployment of emerging, advanced, and innovative capabilities is very much a function of business transaction volumes, switching costs for customers, and the length of liability tails. As a result, banking operates about half a decade ahead of property/casualty insurers, who lead life/annuity carriers by a similar margin.
Annoyed bank customers can “leave” almost immediately in response to egregious customer-service experiences. For a life insurance customer, switching, if even possible, can come at a very real economic cost. Because of this, banks view the world from the outside looking in, while insurers do the reverse. Banks are also voracious consumers of secret shopper and customer focus group data, assets largely ignored by insurance carriers.
One of the insurer panelists at Novarica’s recent Special Interest Group meeting described the problem this way: Many senior executives and managers do not own the products or experience servicing challenges firsthand in their own company. As a result, they tend to manage things using metrics but have no practical understanding of how the metrics align with desired outcomes. Said another way, they “never eat the home cooking.”
The Problem With Service Metrics
Ironically, this discussion transpired around the time of my own recent, frustrating dealing with an insurer. In an effort to improve its customer portal, this insurance carrier got the technology right but broke my access. My only option for fixing the digital experience was to call the help desk. To verify my identity, I shared my address of almost 14 years. They told me I was wrong. I asked them to look at a different relationship I had with them; they confirmed that the address there was “correct,” as was my SSN, but they still would not restore my access until I fixed my address with their customer service center, to which I was transferred.
Once on the phone with that office in Manila, the Philippines, the CSR apologized but explained they were having difficulties with both phone and computer systems. He would have to call me back, which did not happen. So, the next day, I tried again. At about the two-hour mark of accumulated call and hold time, the CSR dutifully notified me that my address, where I am billed routinely, is indeed correct. Nothing to fix.
A call back to the help desk confirmed that they would not fix the online access until I fixed my address. Which was already correct. So impossible to do. Could we escalate to management? “No,” I was told. Would they stay on a call with Manila to sort out their data issues? “No,” their service model did not allow for time to be wasted addressing issues like this; there were more important tasks to be handled.
Next, I called the main corporate line to register a customer complaint, having given up on my original task. The policy will lapse in four years anyway. I am sure my new carrier relationship will be better.
At the corporate line, I was told they have no ability to express concerns in person. However, if I wanted to write a letter, they would give me an address. Having now spent more than three hours in this amazing Catch-22, I declined the opportunity, but I did offer to contact my Department of Insurance to address the issue. The corporate phone minder offered this insight, “That sounds like a good idea.”
The Importance of Customer Experience
One can imagine that at every step along the way, insurer employees did exactly what they were supposed to in meeting their SLAs. Once I got through on a call, they dispatched me quickly. They never resolved any issues, but that was not the objective. The actual problem? Somehow the carrier had associated my 1997 address with a policy issued in 2014. A “bad data” problem took a good, new digital experience and made it horrendous.
While this could be chalked up to an unfortunate anomaly, it was not. A few years ago, with the same carrier, I had the exact same experience when trying to move money from life contracts to annuities. The insurer could never figure out how to move money from its left pocket to its right, so I gave up in frustration and moved the funds to Fidelity Investments, which very much understands how to deliver high-quality customer experiences. The company thinks like a bank.
While I did eventually sort out my current carrier problem by appealing to a personal contact in the C-suite, that is not a sustainable model. The difference in digital service experience between banks and insurers that has been highlighted during the pandemic should be an object lesson for everyone. Journey mapping is a powerful capability that can help teams understand what can or should happen.
I offered to sit down with my insurer’s management to provide a “secret shopper” experience at no charge. This type of personal insight can be far more actionable than an internal group huddled around a whiteboard trying to solve a problem they do not understand and have never experienced. If they are not going to bother eating their home cooking, they should at least get a good critic’s take on the menu before it is too late.
I make it even money they do not take me up on the offer. User/customer experiences are more important now than ever, as the Special Interest Group panel discussion proved. For insurers, in a time of rapid demographic changes, altered customer expectations, and increased competition, this could simply be one more example of “death by a thousand cuts.”
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